Fragrance Specialist Michal Gizinski gives us his views on Fougere Royale by Houbigant. Link to The Osmotheque perfume museum in Versailles France. www.osmotheque....
Merci bouccoup! Well, I was a VERY bad boy and dropped the Amex on not only Fougiere Royale but also Cologne Intense today. What can I say? I can't stop smelling my arm! every time I do, something more beautiful comes up. I think I've found a new favorite fougiere!
Dear Lanier! Such a great review and Michal is super hot with his determination, style and voice! Of course, also with his knowledge! Great vision and passion! Loved this video! xoxo
Der Lanier, i love Michal! He is so passionate and such a kind man. We really enjoyed meeting him and where is my notepad when i am with him!?!?!? I love his pronunciation as well. Wow the people we bumped into in NM were so fabulous, him and Julie ... i have such a fond memory. We must do it again!
Mr Gizinski made it seem like there was no need for a shower for a week. I wish I could have heard him say "Casino Royal". Sorry...I know this is serious, but I was focused on his voice and charisma. He definitely made me curious to see what "the most important fragrance" smells like.
Oh yeah! one gorgeous fragrance and a personal favourite. So this Michal bloke? Will his channel be a fragrance channel? I hope so, should be good. Nice jacket also.
Lovely review, oui, but what I don't understand is if the original scents were so striking, why not come back with that instead of putting out a less inferior dupe? Jeanette
Jeannette this is how I feel about it. It is only my opinion. This is a lost fragrance, has not been made for years. The Houbigant company along with perfumers Roja Dove and the perfumer who's name is on it, Rodrigo Flores-Roux studied the original and did their very best to recreate it a close as possible. This is a restoration. there are many buildings in Europe for example that were leveled during World War II and have been painstakingly recreated, restored, with great love and attention to detail. They are not the original buildings, those are lost. But they are no less beautiful, no less worth of our admiration for what they represent, a recreation of the past. To me that is exactly what Fouger Royale (2010) is.
I've had the pleasure of meeting this wonderfuly interesting gentleman. Very nice and knowledge is like reading a book in a great accent. Hope you get a chance to share some more gems of your favorite fragrances Michal!
You can find it at Nieman Marcus and at Neiman Marcus online. Both the Eau de Parfum and the Parfum www.neimanmarcus.com/Houbigant-Paris-Cologne-Intense-Eau-de-Parfum-3-4-oz/prod189330178/p.prod?eVar4=You%20May%20Also%20Like&RST=CategorySiloedViewCP
Wonderful and passionate review! Please forward kudos to Michal, Lanier :) Also, please tell him again what a pleasure it was to meet him in person! :D Will re-watch your vid on the fragrance to compare thoughts. Thank you for sharing. coco coco coco
My Fougere Royale EDP came through the post today, What an amazing scent and coincidence?! Michal's enthusiasm is uplifting and he would garner a lot of followers should he set up his own RUclips channel, best wishes to all :)
Thank you for this wonderful treat Lanier! I own this thanks to you, and also Cologne Intense. I love them both. Fougere Royale is the Champion of masculine fragrances....
Interesting timing. This is what I wore yesterday. It really is amazing. If shopping for fragrance in SF you must go talk to Michal. Great video Mr. S. Thanks for doing this!
Sounds like a great scent. Thank you for enlightening me. We lost our one Niemen Marcus store a number of years ago, now. I am very tempted to check out the interlink for a sample:) Again, thank you, Lanier.
This is a nice one! I somehow scored several 2ml samples of the contemporary reformulation sometime ago, and am obsessively using them selectively to make them last. But how I wish I could put my nose on a truly vintage sample from years ago. What a history! Thanks much for this presentation. See ya!
Thanks for the great comment Jon! I would love to go to The Osmothèque in Versailles and smell the original just like Michal did. What an experience that would be. Cheers!
Great video . Wow Michal brings a lot of passion for this fragrance which is great to see... I am looking for a green fragrance and this one has been strongly recommended.. I'm sold!
I've never tried this fragrance nor was I aware of its impressive history. Enjoyed Michal's review and enthusiastic presentation. I'm gonna try it, for sure! Well-done!
Egads, it's like Lloyd Bridges had a dapper younger brother, and that brother was bestowed with the voice, and ability to convince, and command armies...but instead the brother took the sensible option, and became an enthusiastic servant to the greater cause of deliberate odour. Cool potatoes.
There are darknesses and lights. On a quest searching for the ultimate you should ask yourself one thing. Do you believe in destiny? That even the powers of time can be altered for a single purpose? That the luckiest man who walks on this earth is the one who finds… true love. This is maybe one of the royal true lights of lights.
Mr. Lanier Smith: As a recent subscriber, I very much enjoy your channel and respect your opinions. I also appreciate your presentation style because everything you do is clearly motivated by a genuine passion for perfume. I find your delivery to be fun, unobtrusive, and unpretentious. I take a professional interest in perfumery; as a token of my esteem for your work I wish to provide some small measure of service to your viewers by dispelling certain claims concerning ‘Fougere Royale’ made by your ‘expert’ guest in this video. I don’t know the man and of course intend no unkindness, but what he says is utter rubbish. The 2010 “re”-release of ‘Fougere Royale’ has NOTHING whatever to do with the original. The authentic ‘Fougere Royale’ (1882) together with its several iterations over the years (until the 1970s) was indeed a monumental work, a veritable benchmark in the history of modern perfumery- habitually referenced, often imitated, never equaled in its genre. I have had occasion to sample various versions of the original over the years ranging from 1930s to 1970s formulations. It was never a firm favourite of mine ( I much prefer Guerlain’s Mouchoir de Monsieur, Jicky, even Chanel’s Pour Monsieur, Monsieur de Givenchy, and Dior’s Eau Sauvage’) but FR was undeniably a gem of a scent.The old formula was an inspired masterpiece: original, bold, gentlemanly, natural, and most of all, unpretentious. For most of its long tenure on the market it was a great favourite among a certain class of professional men-barristers, statesmen, diplomats, senior military officers-everywhere on the Continent, in Britain, and in America. ‘Fougere Royale’ was never wildly popular the way say, ‘Old Spice’ was. It was decidedly un-plebeian, and always enjoyed a certain social cachet; it was definitely ‘upmarket’ though never really regarded as an ultra-luxury product. It was available in a wide array of toiletries and grooming requisites; it was never prohibitively priced, exclusive, unattainable, or, to use an industry anachronism, a ‘niche’ perfume. A man never needed to take out a mortgage to purchase it, and in its heyday it was widely available for sale in the better gentlemen’s outfitters, haberdasheries and department stores. It was a versatile, elegant, unfussy scent for active gentlemen, equally at home in open air sporting pursuits as at the opera and the baccarat table. There was nothing stuffy or snobbishly aristocratic about it (though the House of Houbigant itself was regarded as such) but it was considered solidly patrician in character; to use a quaintly fashionable contemporary turn of phrase, it was eminently “comme il faut”. FR wasn’t very extravagant either-though that’s always a relative term. To give some idea, in the 1950s it was priced in the upper mid-range about double that of typical middle class barbershop colognes like ‘Old Spice’, and about the same price as Caron but not as expensive as Guerlain or anything that carried an aristocratic association or a Royal Warrant. Let’s say that it could be had for about the equivalent price of a solid designer fragrance today (but remember, fifty or more years ago consumer sensibilities were generally much more modest, at least when it came to perfume, and even the very well-to-do would not readily drop the kind of outrageous sums some ‘fragheads’ dish out for perfume today). Having worn ‘original’ FR many times, I wish to unequivocally and unapologetically state that in my opinion the current fragrance masquerading as FR is a complete figment of Roja Dove’s imagination. I am also of the opinion that the celebrated “nez” himself is a vastly overrated perfumer. The general consensus among industry insiders, foe and ally alike, is that Dove is competent in his work though nowhere approaching the cult status he has acquired in recent years (worse, the word is that he is even more pretentious than the counter clerk featured in the present video). In my estimation, the scenario behind the creation of Roja Dove’s nouveau FR is something like this: Houbigant had fallen on hard times; the once great French House had been sold several time over to a successive series of ‘bargain basement’ hucksters whose business strategy was to hideously cheapen the beautiful old formulas and rely solely on the cachet of the Houbigant name. Fast forward a few decades, and the brand became a byword for vulgarity in the perfume world. With the passing of the older generation of faithful devotees, the aristocratic pedigree was forgotten. Apart from its name, the company had lost all links to its illustrious history (like the prodigal scion of some ancient noble line who had squandered his legacy and now resorted to selling life insurance and opening for second-string comedy routines in Vegas on the side). The company had to reinvent itself and recapture something of its old lustre, so they thought: “how do we make a comeback from producing cheap, mass market synthetics that are collecting dust in drug store shelves next to the ‘Skin Bracer’? How do we best go about reaffirming our heritage and reclaiming our position as a venerable luxury House? After all, didn’t ‘we’ start it all by authoring the very first modern masculine, an institution of French perfumery?” They thought and thought, and then some marketing ‘genius’ with a thin veneer of management theory hit gold: “Of course!”, he exclaimed, “eureka!”.The answer to the resurrection of the Houbigant brand from the ashes was the defunct and legendary ‘Fougere Royale’ itself. It had once made Houbigant’s fortune- why not again? Solution: enter RD to spin off the new (excuse me, grand ‘old’) masterpiece. God forbid that they should have faithfully ‘reverse engineered’ the original (they could, by way of Gas Chromatography, Mass Spectrometry, and a host of other methods found in the arsenal of a modern organic chemistry laboratory). But no, that would never do: the mainstream ‘douchebags’- the ones with the cash-would never buy a scent so chronologically remote; they wouldn’t be interested in anything that restrained and civilized. Besides, their women would also have to like it-especially the women-and that was a tall order. It would have to be thoroughly modernized; they would call it a “modern interpretation” of a great classic; they would market it as not the original but at the same time, miraculously, it would be the original itself, and it would also emanate from the original. The marketing strategists and Dove’s team would rework FR into a new Article of Faith for the resurrected Houbigant-a sort of Trinitarian olfactory Filioque- and Roja would be its Prophet and Apostle.Judged on its own merit, without any of the fake associations to its illustrious hypothetical ancestor, the 2010 FR is a decent enough perfume. Indeed, compared with the abysmal launches cluttering the contemporary fragrance ‘manscape’ one could even call it great; it makes use of good raw materials and the synthetics are skilfully blended together to produce an urbane, predictably well-mannered fougere brimming with bonhomie. The modern FR was in fact created very much in the image of stalwart mid-twentieth century classics by respectable Parisian Maisons (Guerlain, Caron, Lanvin, Chanel, Dior, Givenchy, Rochas, Balmain, etc.) which targeted the haute-bourgeois aesthetic aspired to by a newly ascendant postwar professional middle class with money to spend. The masters who worked these creations were themselves personally committed to that aesthetic; more importantly, for the most part they were given free rein to do their magic as they saw fit. That was ‘back in the day’ before effete nonentities, MBAs, Chartered Accountants, Human Resource Managers, and EU policy makers had taken over the perfume industry. Getting back to the main issue, to claim to have experienced the original FR- at the ‘Osmotheque’, in Versailles, no less- and still extoll the virtues of the current juice is... what I can I say, ‘un peu tro(^)p’!
He's a cool and knowledgeable guy!!
Smelling Great Fragrance Reviews the 2 times we met he has taught me so my much. Great guy
Wonderfully informative video. Love this gentleman's accent! Seriously tempted to buy this scent now.
Thank you MrSmelly...It is a beauty indeed. I hope you can test it. Cheers!
Merci bouccoup! Well, I was a VERY bad boy and dropped the Amex on not only Fougiere Royale but also Cologne Intense today. What can I say? I can't stop smelling my arm! every time I do, something more beautiful comes up. I think I've found a new favorite fougiere!
Wow that is wonderful!! So happy you like them both. Cheers !
omg. I could listen to that fella tell stories forever haha :-D
Me too! Cheers!!
What a great presentation of this fragrance by this gentleman...superb!
Wow great review!! I want to go get a bottle right now. I didn't know the great history about this one. Thanks for the great video. :)
Oh Ryan this is a MUST for your magnificent collection. I hope you get it and review it. Cheers!
Dear Lanier! Such a great review and Michal is super hot with his determination, style and voice! Of course, also with his knowledge! Great vision and passion! Loved this video! xoxo
Excellent presentation
He's good! Too bad the Parfum is so expensive. I want to smell it. EDP is doable though.
His energy and knowledge is amazing! Well done.
Ciao mia l'amico
Der Lanier, i love Michal! He is so passionate and such a kind man. We really enjoyed meeting him and where is my notepad when i am with him!?!?!? I love his pronunciation as well. Wow the people we bumped into in NM were so fabulous, him and Julie ... i have such a fond memory. We must do it again!
Yes we must do it again! cheers ChanelLV and BIG HUGS!! coco coco coco
Mr Gizinski made it seem like there was no need for a shower for a week. I wish I could have heard him say "Casino Royal". Sorry...I know this is serious, but I was focused on his voice and charisma. He definitely made me curious to see what "the most important fragrance" smells like.
We will go smell it on our lunch date!! xoxo
Oh yeah! one gorgeous fragrance and a personal favourite. So this Michal bloke? Will his channel be a fragrance channel? I hope so, should be good. Nice jacket also.
We shall have to wait and see what Michal wants to do with his channel. Cheers Neil!
Wasn't he an actor in Poland? I think I saw him in Jazda an Łyzwach (Skiing)
YES Michal was an actor in Poland!!
Lovely review, oui, but what I don't understand is if the original scents were so striking, why not come back with that instead of putting out a less inferior dupe? Jeanette
Jeannette this is how I feel about it. It is only my opinion. This is a lost fragrance, has not been made for years. The Houbigant company along with perfumers Roja Dove and the perfumer who's name is on it, Rodrigo Flores-Roux studied the original and did their very best to recreate it a close as possible. This is a restoration. there are many buildings in Europe for example that were leveled during World War II and have been painstakingly recreated, restored, with great love and attention to detail. They are not the original buildings, those are lost. But they are no less beautiful, no less worth of our admiration for what they represent, a recreation of the past. To me that is exactly what Fouger Royale (2010) is.
Thank you Lanier, what a shame though that it wasn't written down, but I understand and sometimes the recreation can even surpass the original.
thank YOu Janette and a big HUG to you. :)
I think he could have sold anyone a pack of sausages if he invested the same enthusiasm and charisma.
That is so true! Cheers
This guy amazing wow
please make more reviews with him in future
bob bob thanks! I will see what Michal has to say about that. It is a GREAT idea! Cheers!
Can't wait to try houbigant fragrances !
There are so many amazing fragrances from this house. Cheers han sam!!
Michal is the Man!!! Saw him today at Neiman Marcus at Garden State Plaza in New Jersey! GREAT guy
Just ordered this Yesterday from All Beauty should be here by end of the week.Great Review.
I've had the pleasure of meeting this wonderfuly interesting gentleman. Very nice and knowledge is like reading a book in a great accent. Hope you get a chance to share some more gems of your favorite fragrances Michal!
Fascinating! I'm keen to try the new Cologne Intense version of this.
weird...this is my SOTD. Cheers Lanier.
Serendipity Manny!
$70 on Amazon - great fragrance & excellent price!
I have the edp Im a fougère man Love azzaro pour homme too
Yes Azzaro Pour Homme is classic. Cheers Barry Lindon.
Great video. I really enjoy the passion that he shows. I have to try this one. Where can I find this fragrance.
Cheers. . .
You can find it at Nieman Marcus and at Neiman Marcus online. Both the Eau de Parfum and the Parfum www.neimanmarcus.com/Houbigant-Paris-Cologne-Intense-Eau-de-Parfum-3-4-oz/prod189330178/p.prod?eVar4=You%20May%20Also%20Like&RST=CategorySiloedViewCP
+Lanier Smith Great, thank you
Wonderful and passionate review! Please forward kudos to Michal, Lanier :) Also, please tell him again what a pleasure it was to meet him in person! :D Will re-watch your vid on the fragrance to compare thoughts. Thank you for sharing. coco coco coco
I will pass on your message to Michal! He is a great reviewer ...YES!
Great video thank you both for your time.
Wow. Just wow. :-)
I know...right??
Wow.. Excellent review 👍
Wow! This is how the pro does it. Instead of listing fragrantica top notes. He takes you through a journey...
Isn't that marvelous? Cheers Benfica.
My Fougere Royale EDP came through the post today, What an amazing scent and coincidence?! Michal's enthusiasm is uplifting and he would garner a lot of followers should he set up his own RUclips channel, best wishes to all :)
I know what you are saying. Michal is a natural!!
Thank you for this wonderful treat Lanier! I own this thanks to you, and also Cologne Intense. I love them both. Fougere Royale is the Champion of masculine fragrances....
Aren't they both beautiful? Thanks for your kind words Cologniano D!
Interesting timing. This is what I wore yesterday. It really is amazing. If shopping for fragrance in SF you must go talk to Michal. Great video Mr. S. Thanks for doing this!
So happy you enjoyed it Jeff! Yes gang, when in SF go see Michal at Nieman Marcus and tell him Lanier Smith sent you. Cheers!
Sounds like a great scent. Thank you for enlightening me. We lost our one Niemen Marcus store a number of years ago, now. I am very tempted to check out the interlink for a sample:) Again, thank you, Lanier.
I do hope you can get a sample...it is amazing .
what an incredable review. this gentleman, clearly is impassioned fragrance lover of the highest degree. Reminds me of chris from Scent land.
thanks Doubl3 Trouble3! Michal is indeed an expert in the field of perfume. Cheers!
This is a nice one! I somehow scored several 2ml samples of the contemporary reformulation sometime ago, and am obsessively using them selectively to make them last. But how I wish I could put my nose on a truly vintage sample from years ago. What a history! Thanks much for this presentation. See ya!
Thanks for the great comment Jon! I would love to go to The Osmothèque in Versailles and smell the original just like Michal did. What an experience that would be. Cheers!
Great video . Wow Michal brings a lot of passion for this fragrance which is great to see... I am looking for a green fragrance and this one has been strongly recommended.. I'm sold!
Yes Zazenh, Michal is very passionate about fragrance. He is the BEST. Cheers.
Wow, how nice and inspiring video, I'm Polish too:) kisses from Rome!
Baci Baci KajaRoma e grazie.
This guy is brilliant! Thanks for introducing us to him Lanier.
Neo I am so happy you appreciated Michal's review. Cheers!
I'm a believer! That's all I can say. Thank you and as always hugs to you! Karen
Oh thank you Karen!! Big HUG
A VERY INSPIRED DESCRIPTION...I FEEL MOTIVATED TO TRY!!!
Yes it is worth trying it out. Cheers Michael!
Great video , I really enjoyed it. Thank you Sir
Muhamed you are very welcome, I am happy you enjoyed it.
I've never tried this fragrance nor was I aware of its impressive history. Enjoyed Michal's review and enthusiastic presentation. I'm gonna try it, for sure! Well-done!
It is a classic everyone should at least smell. Cheers Jim!
That's exactly what I tell the ladies about my pheromones...LOL!
OMG LOL
Egads, it's like Lloyd Bridges had a dapper younger brother, and that brother was bestowed with the voice, and ability to convince, and command armies...but instead the brother took the sensible option, and became an enthusiastic servant to the greater cause of deliberate odour. Cool potatoes.
Now that Merino is a fabulous comment! And you are so right! Cheers!
There are darknesses and lights. On a quest searching for the ultimate you should ask yourself one thing. Do you believe in destiny? That even the powers of time can be altered for a single purpose? That the luckiest man who walks on this earth is the one who finds… true love. This is maybe one of the royal true lights of lights.
Mr. Lanier Smith: As a recent subscriber, I very much enjoy your channel and respect your opinions. I also appreciate your presentation style because everything you do is clearly motivated by a genuine passion for perfume. I find your delivery to be fun, unobtrusive, and unpretentious.
I take a professional interest in perfumery; as a token of my esteem for your work I wish to provide some small measure of service to your viewers by dispelling certain claims concerning ‘Fougere Royale’ made by your ‘expert’ guest in this video. I don’t know the man and of course intend no unkindness, but what he says is utter rubbish. The 2010 “re”-release of ‘Fougere Royale’ has NOTHING whatever to do with the original. The authentic ‘Fougere Royale’ (1882) together with its several iterations over the years (until the 1970s) was indeed a monumental work, a veritable benchmark in the history of modern perfumery- habitually referenced, often imitated, never equaled in its genre. I have had occasion to sample various versions of the original over the years ranging from 1930s to 1970s formulations. It was never a firm favourite of mine ( I much prefer Guerlain’s Mouchoir de Monsieur, Jicky, even Chanel’s Pour Monsieur, Monsieur de Givenchy, and Dior’s Eau Sauvage’) but FR was undeniably a gem of a scent.The old formula was an inspired masterpiece: original, bold, gentlemanly, natural, and most of all, unpretentious. For most of its long tenure on the market it was a great favourite among a certain class of professional men-barristers, statesmen, diplomats, senior military officers-everywhere on the Continent, in Britain, and in America. ‘Fougere Royale’ was never wildly popular the way say, ‘Old Spice’ was. It was decidedly un-plebeian, and always enjoyed a certain social cachet; it was definitely ‘upmarket’ though never really regarded as an ultra-luxury product. It was available in a wide array of toiletries and grooming requisites; it was never prohibitively priced, exclusive, unattainable, or, to use an industry anachronism, a ‘niche’ perfume. A man never needed to take out a mortgage to purchase it, and in its heyday it was widely available for sale in the better gentlemen’s outfitters, haberdasheries and department stores. It was a versatile, elegant, unfussy scent for active gentlemen, equally at home in open air sporting pursuits as at the opera and the baccarat table. There was nothing stuffy or snobbishly aristocratic about it (though the House of Houbigant itself was regarded as such) but it was considered solidly patrician in character; to use a quaintly fashionable contemporary turn of phrase, it was eminently “comme il faut”. FR wasn’t very extravagant either-though that’s always a relative term. To give some idea, in the 1950s it was priced in the upper mid-range about double that of typical middle class barbershop colognes like ‘Old Spice’, and about the same price as Caron but not as expensive as Guerlain or anything that carried an aristocratic association or a Royal Warrant. Let’s say that it could be had for about the equivalent price of a solid designer fragrance today (but remember, fifty or more years ago consumer sensibilities were generally much more modest, at least when it came to perfume, and even the very well-to-do would not readily drop the kind of outrageous sums some ‘fragheads’ dish out for perfume today). Having worn ‘original’ FR many times, I wish to unequivocally and unapologetically state that in my opinion the current fragrance masquerading as FR is a complete figment of Roja Dove’s imagination. I am also of the opinion that the celebrated “nez” himself is a vastly overrated perfumer. The general consensus among industry insiders, foe and ally alike, is that Dove is competent in his work though nowhere approaching the cult status he has acquired in recent years (worse, the word is that he is even more pretentious than the counter clerk featured in the present video). In my estimation, the scenario behind the creation of Roja Dove’s nouveau FR is something like this: Houbigant had fallen on hard times; the once great French House had been sold several time over to a successive series of ‘bargain basement’ hucksters whose business strategy was to hideously cheapen the beautiful old formulas and rely solely on the cachet of the Houbigant name. Fast forward a few decades, and the brand became a byword for vulgarity in the perfume world. With the passing of the older generation of faithful devotees, the aristocratic pedigree was forgotten. Apart from its name, the company had lost all links to its illustrious history (like the prodigal scion of some ancient noble line who had squandered his legacy and now resorted to selling life insurance and opening for second-string comedy routines in Vegas on the side). The company had to reinvent itself and recapture something of its old lustre, so they thought: “how do we make a comeback from producing cheap, mass market synthetics that are collecting dust in drug store shelves next to the ‘Skin Bracer’? How do we best go about reaffirming our heritage and reclaiming our position as a venerable luxury House? After all, didn’t ‘we’ start it all by authoring the very first modern masculine, an institution of French perfumery?”
They thought and thought, and then some marketing ‘genius’ with a thin veneer of management theory hit gold: “Of course!”, he exclaimed, “eureka!”.The answer to the resurrection of the Houbigant brand from the ashes was the defunct and legendary ‘Fougere Royale’ itself. It had once made Houbigant’s fortune- why not again? Solution: enter RD to spin off the new (excuse me, grand ‘old’) masterpiece. God forbid that they should have faithfully ‘reverse engineered’ the original (they could, by way of Gas Chromatography, Mass Spectrometry, and a host of other methods found in the arsenal of a modern organic chemistry laboratory). But no, that would never do: the mainstream ‘douchebags’- the ones with the cash-would never buy a scent so chronologically remote; they wouldn’t be interested in anything that restrained and civilized. Besides, their women would also have to like it-especially the women-and that was a tall order. It would have to be thoroughly modernized; they would call it a “modern interpretation” of a great classic; they would market it as not the original but at the same time, miraculously, it would be the original itself, and it would also emanate from the original. The marketing strategists and Dove’s team would rework FR into a new Article of Faith for the resurrected Houbigant-a sort of Trinitarian olfactory Filioque- and Roja would be its Prophet and Apostle.Judged on its own merit, without any of the fake associations to its illustrious hypothetical ancestor, the 2010 FR is a decent enough perfume. Indeed, compared with the abysmal launches cluttering the contemporary fragrance ‘manscape’ one could even call it great; it makes use of good raw materials and the synthetics are skilfully blended together to produce an urbane, predictably well-mannered fougere brimming with bonhomie. The modern FR was in fact created very much in the image of stalwart mid-twentieth century classics by respectable Parisian Maisons (Guerlain, Caron, Lanvin, Chanel, Dior, Givenchy, Rochas, Balmain, etc.) which targeted the haute-bourgeois aesthetic aspired to by a newly ascendant postwar professional middle class with money to spend. The masters who worked these creations were themselves personally committed to that aesthetic; more importantly, for the most part they were given free rein to do their magic as they saw fit. That was ‘back in the day’ before effete nonentities, MBAs, Chartered Accountants, Human Resource Managers, and EU policy makers had taken over the perfume industry.
Getting back to the main issue, to claim to have experienced the original FR- at the ‘Osmotheque’, in Versailles, no less- and still extoll the virtues of the current juice is... what I can I say, ‘un peu tro(^)p’!