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Crown Rose Crown Perfumery 1873

6.8 / 10 21 Ratings

A perfume by Crown Perfumery for women, released in 1873. The scent is floral-spicy. The longevity is above-average. The production was apparently discontinued.
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Main accords

Floral

Spicy

Woody

Earthy

Green

Fragrance Notes

Rose

Spices

Woods

Perfumer

William Thomson

Ratings

Scent

6.821 Ratings

Longevity

8.115 Ratings

Sillage

7.015 Ratings

Bottle

7.817 Ratings

Submitted by Kankuro, last update on 05/16/2024.

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Reviews

5 in-depth fragrance descriptions

04/04/2013

7Scent 7.5Longevity 7.5Sillage

Sherapop
1240 Reviews

Sherapop

5

I love the smell of dried roses in the morning...

Crown Perfumery is basically my only experience of vintage perfumes acquired as vintage perfumes--rather than perfumes which become vintage because they joined my collection before having being reformulated (which automatically turns them into vintage perfumes!). No, the bottles from Crown were discontinued a while back, when the house shuttered its stores, but they are lingering about in some dark warehouses here and there. Because no one cares about them, apparently, they are invariably inexpensive, so blind buys are not too much of a risk.

CROWN ROSE intrigued me because its description explicitly stated that one of the notes was "old roses"! What? I thought to myself, as I added it to my shopping cart. Turns out that the description is right: old roses, as in dried rose petals, are in abundance in this composition!

The perfume opens a bit discordantly, but I write that off to what all of the vintage lovers say about their treasures: that the top notes "have burned off". I never really understand what that means, to be honest, but I'll take it on faith that the short-lived jarring opening of CROWN ROSE is simply the price which one must pay when one opts to don an "old" perfume. This one could be more than twenty years old--who really knows????

The drydown, on the other hand, is quite nice and even reminds me of Creed FLEURS DE BULGARIE. I am nearly certain that there is ambergris in the base, and it's likely to be the real deal, given how old this perfume is. My bottle obviously was not produced in 1873, when the formula was created, but it also was not produced in the twenty-first century...

The scent of dried roses is decidedly vintage, which I distinguish from the scent of dowager roses (which I dislike). Nor is this a tea rose. CROWN ROSE reminds me of the spirit of vintage clothing shops, where I once bought a Vogue design purple wool jacket. This perfume, too, is sophisticated in a retro way.

I consider this to have been an excellent score--true vintage lovers, this one's for you!

06/19/2014

jtd
484 Reviews

jtd

3

tea rose plus

Crown Perfumery’s Crown Rose (1873) is a pretty tea-rose perfume. Tea-rose perfumes tend to fall on the quaint side of pretty rather than the stunning side of gorgeousness. Crown Rose messes with you a bit, though, and subverts your expectation. The top-notes tell you that it will be a simple, sundress of a rose soliflor. Your first hint that your first impression might have been wrong is a rising tartness, almost a sourness that quickly dispenses with the dewiness of the simple rose top-note.

Crown Perfumery is not longer. Clive Cristian closed the line kit and caboodle not long after he bought it in 1999. I’ve tried two others in the line, Malabar and Eau de Russe. I never imagined that Crown Rose would be the most intriguing of the bunch.

The odd thing about Crown Rose, the wonderful thing about Crown Rose, is that where it seems that it will be a simple tea-rose perfume (Roze-Lite ™) it’s in fact a meditation on sandalwood. I don’t know the exact vintage of my bottle of Crown Rose, but it’s old enough to have been made with a large helping of sandalwood. Sandalwood easily passes the jolie-laide test. Yes, it’s creamy, rosy, sweet, thick. But it’s also curdled, sour, sweatband at times even foul-smelling. I can see both why it was a perfumer’s dream and why so many perfumes, like Samsara, let the sandalwood speak for itself. The sandalwood here is particularly tart, possibly due to age and a diminishment of the top-nots of the sandalwood itself. But I think there’s more to it. There’s a cleverness to this perfume that gets hidden by our assumption that the tea rose is like the dumb blonde and that we’ve fallen for the Marilyn Monroe screen image. If we accept that Monroe was the characters she played, if we accept that Crown Rose is for the ditzy, the joke is on us.

We tend to look at classic perfume houses with excessive reverence. Add to this case British class consciousness and it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing the the bottle and the story: the Creed Syndrome. Crown Perfumery is just fucking with us. Bravo! Crown Rose takes a particularly pungent, acidulated sandalwood, one with more yogurt and sweat than candied sweetness, and then to use it to underline a rose note that 50% of people, on smelling, would simply say, “oh, how pretty!”

I very well might be falling for Crown Perfumery’s hidden shallows. But there’s nothing that smells ‘off’ in this perfume and sandalwood, especially in quantity, is a famously long-lasting fixative. Crown Rose skirts another inherent problem in tea-rose. Tea-rose soliflor perfumes tend to make up for the directness of their intention with sillage and a volume that can make them tiring even with brief exposure. In Crown Rose, the rose that had seemed like an over-flattering portrait very quickly starts to become sinister, as if, though the portrait was finished years ago, just now the proportion is starting to change, to warp.

Jadedness is not often cited as a virtue, but there is something wonderful about the loss of illusion. Seen from 2014, this perfume is like a mash-up of Doris Day’s version of “I feel Pretty” and Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You.”

Splendid.

09/19/2011

4Scent 7.5Longevity 2.5Sillage

Florblanca
1168 Reviews

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Florblanca

Helpful Review 11

We practice rose, as it should be. On three: one, two...

and three.
It would be nice if it were that simple. Basically, the English can do roses too, but this rose from "The Crown Perfumery," as the brand is correctly called, is no longer contemporary for our time.

Yes, this will be a critique. The critique of a fragrance that I own myself. And to get straight to the point, I will keep it, as a deterrent example, so to speak, and as a comparison object.

Right upon application, this rose presents itself in a state just before the absolute end of such a bloom. It smells dull and has long since surpassed its most beautiful scent time.

The spices and woods trying to assist the rose after a few minutes do not help anymore. Although the scent becomes spicier and no longer so dull, it remains in a somewhat, well, outdated status.

No fresh, bright, beautiful flowers are displayed here, but roses that have been sitting for quite some time in a dusty library in a vase on the little table and will be disposed of by tomorrow morning at the latest.

I find it a pity that Malabar will not be available in the foreseeable future, as this scent from The Crown Perfumery is truly very, very beautiful. However, the Crown Rose can disappear. It can no longer keep up with our time and our now completely different taste. It would rather fit in a Biedermeier boudoir, where things were similarly dusty.

Do I regret the purchase? No. Because this rose has shown me a piece of the past and, on the other hand, it is a great example of how rose perfume should not smell. At least rose perfume for me!

03/13/2023

9Scent 9Longevity 7Sillage

Minigolf
2517 Reviews

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Minigolf

3

Melancholic Willfulness!

YES, I really like this "old" scent a LOT! And YES, it IS old-fashioned! Just as old-fashioned as wooden dressers, secretaries, and cabinets with inlays and turned legs. They stand in antique shops, venerable libraries, and museums. They are secretly admired for their elaborate craftsmanship AND their nostalgic beauty. Officially, no one wants them, yet very high prices are paid to have them displayed somewhere: For the admiration!
And it is often similar with "outdated" fragrances, which, because they are "vintage," often have horrendous prices. The one described here is obviously NOT yet, as it is less known than all the "Creeds," "Guerlains," and other celebrities.
Yes, it is also somewhat "dusty," this rose scent. Dusty like the insides of the drawers of old secretaries and dressers. And just as variously woody as their artistic inlays!
"Turned" is the perfume as well. Just like those old spice cabinets that have narrow, turned rods between their glass drawers. And it smells like the collection of all the spices that were once stored in them by their owners.
And the roses seem to be made of paper. Still red or pink, but somewhat faded, the petals like crackling parchment, soaked in real rose oil, which may have been used in the past to scent stationery or potpourris. Or to scent paper or silk flowers.
Moss also plays a significant role in this fragrance! Decorated with oak moss. Like one of those old floral potpourris.
All of this is melancholy at its finest. Willful, unusual, and caught between the times. And that is exactly the main reason for the great fondness I have found for the scent. And what do I care about the (alleged, often "artificial") turned-up noses that secretly often like it. Similar to the antiques from the later 19th century ;-))

03/08/2023

8Scent 8Longevity 7Sillage

Anosmat3000
5 Reviews

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Anosmat3000

1

Lance Breaker

I had the bottle Crown Rose in my possession for half a year before I decided to put it up for adoption - today it will hopefully leave me for appreciative hands. In this half year, I did not leave a review for this fragrance, no statement, no critique. I wore it maybe five times during this entire period, which is why I am letting it go now.
However, I am by no means letting it go because I didn't like it. On the contrary, the average rating of 6.6 (as of 03/23) hurts - this gem truly does not deserve that. Therefore, I take this farewell from Crown Rose as an opportunity to champion this misunderstood gem. It was supposed to be a brief, appreciative statement - my need to communicate had other plans, and now the whole thing has become a bit more extensive.

Back to the average rating: While this cold-hearted "always trying" pains my soul, I can largely understand the substantive arguments behind the ratings of my predecessors. Antiquated, dull, out of touch, stale floral water... yes, definitely. This fragrance had its time, and that time has been over for roughly a century and a half. And while the women's fragrance charts here on Parfumo are dominated by retro styles, fashion is rediscovering the past century, and the solid wood dining table of my great-grandmother finds its way back from the shed to the dining room, this offspring from the blissful Crown Perfumery will likely experience as little of a renaissance as classic hat fashion. And it is precisely this circumstance that makes Crown Rose so fascinating for me.
A common thread that runs through the less objective reviews here on Parfumo is the transportability of perfumes. Good perfumes evoke memories, conjure images, ideas, connotations. This perfume stands out in this regard, especially due to its outdatedness - Crown Rose is time travel in a bottle. Where, if not here, do you find yourself in the long-gone London of venerable colonial gentlemen's clubs, tailors and hat makers, warm, soft, dim gas lanterns and their reflections on the worn, polished cobblestones? This must truly have been the scent of a lady of the world and standing back then. Clean, distinguished, attractively aloof - through the rose-romanticizing retro lens, of course. The London of the late nineteenth century must have been far more filled with soot, covered in grime, blessed with horse droppings, and generally a rather dismal melting pot, but that is another topic, for which there is surely another perfume.
That this fragrance is neither timeless nor in accordance with the times, unfortunately does not only allow the wearer to time travel but also inevitably forces their opinions into rather binary paths. I could not escape this either, only I somehow ended up at the other end of the spectrum.

To finally put the pitiful five times I wore this fragrance into the right context: Male, mid-twenties. In other words, before I am locked away in a rubber room - this fragrance is not worn out there among people - it is worn for oneself, allowed to work, and enjoyed in silence. In that sense, one last wistful spritz of time travel, then the bottle will go into the package.