2010 Release of Houbigant Fougère Royale, A Review

The tester of Houbigant's long-awaited re-release of Fougère Royale

arrived in San Francisco on Sunday, but my commitments over my
birthday weekend made impossible for me to get a couple of small vials
until this afternoon (Tuesday, October 12).

Well, I'll begin by describing the bottle. It is a square, solid design with a
fretwork basket-weave motif of clear and frosted glass. The juice's pale
green peeks through the glass in subtle variation of tone across the
pattern of frosted and clear glass. The cap is a silver-toned affair of solid,
square proportions, echoing the shape of the bottle, and reminiscent of the
flat-topped caps of Amouage fragrances, only broader and more massive.

Enough about the bottle. The Juice:

Fougère from the first, the triad of Houbigant's invention (lavender,

oakmoss, and tonka bean) shines forth as itself, not detectable as any of
its components, but as a quartum quid, a fourth thing, being all of the other
three, but at the same time none of them — a totally new olfactory
impression, unique, and utterly a being unto itself. To this add a definite
green note of depth and vibrancy, backed by vetiver and woods, with
perhaps a hint of the oriental about it. Throughout, the resinous bitter note
of oakmoss seems to be slightly pulled out of the fougère strand by the
reinforcement of vetiver, and perhaps a touch of geranium.

I haven't seen the full notes pyramid yet, though the Houbigant rep who
shared this with me promises to email it to me soon. At that time, I may
have more to say, or have to amend my earlier suppositions. In any case,
it's still too soon after initial application to say anything with much precision
about base notes and any persistence of notes from upper layers.

The overall impression? The best I can say is that Patou pour Homme
Privé, my previous standard of judgment for the fougère genre, has
nothing on Fougère Royale. Coming from me, that's high and mighty
praise, because until I smelled this, I thought the Patou Privé to be the
pinnacle of green-woody fougères. Fougère Royale is infinitesimally
sharper, but somehow slightly less herbal, and more grounded in the base
note.

One caveat about this: This is not an aromatic fougère of the type of the
late 70's through 80's, like Azzaro pour Homme and others of its type.
They came nearly a hundred years after Houbigant's first Fougère Royale,
and introduced spicy aromaticity to the notion of fougère. This was a
natural and well-received variation on the genre; yet I feel that the new
Houbigant may hark back to an earlier style of more herbal-green and
woody fougère, an age-of-innocence version of fougère now (or perhaps
until now) largely lost to time. The original 1882 Houbigant Fougère
Royale, if by some miracle there were one left that had not gone off one
bit from its day of manufacture, I imagine, would have been very much like
this.

It's for Houbigant to say whether they found and exactly duplicated the
original formula from some deep and closely-guarded vault. I can only
imagine that it might well have been like this. I don't know what materials
went into the re-release or how they were sourced, though I am told that
the process of perfecting this was long and went through many iterations. I
would like to imagine that I am not smelling any note that was not
available to perfumers in 1882, whether from a natural or reconstructed
synthetic source. Somehow, to me, that is believable.

One more thing: What I am wearing on my right hand is the eau de

parfum. There is a more intense version available in very limited edition
which I recall being told was a parfum concentration. That's a treat that I
have yet to experience.