I was pleasantly surprised by how nice Houbigant QUELQUES FLEURS is. I certainly had no doubts that once upon a time a perfume by this name smelled wonderful, but I feared the worst from Dana in some sort of disastrous reformulation. In fact, my worries were for naught. Perhaps I should have known that the splendid perfume pal who sent a bottle of QUELQUES FLEURS to me as a part of a multiswap would only send me creations which she knew that I'd want to wear!
QUELQUES FLEURS reminds me a lot of the creations of the house of Parfums de Rosine, which may have something to do with the fact that both houses thrived in the early twentieth century. Rosine apparently went bankrupt and ceased altogether to exist for decades, while Houbigant was eventually acquired by Dana. But QUELQUES FLEURS, like the recently re-launched Rosine perfumes, captures a moment of history and is both extremely feminine and a pleasure to wear.
The cheap-o spray nozzle on my bottle for some reason has a delayed effect, so that one ends up with twice the perfume on that one intended to spray, and my initial reaction upon applying this composition was that it smelled dirty. I definitely smelled the civet, no question about that. However, then the flowers arrived by the truckloads, eventually drowning out all of the animalic quality of the opening and somehow morphing into a very appealing soapiness by the drydown. This perfume is floral from start to finish but it changes from slightly indolic-skanky smelling to soapy and clean. The transformative effect of 15,000 flowers!
To put QUELQUES FLEURS in perspective, it reminds me also of Jean-Charles Brousseau L'OMBRE ROSE. Very vintage-feeling and unapologetically feminine. My bottle is of the eau de toilette, which I imagine is some specific reformulation from a specific time. In any case, it still smells good.
