Houbigant Perfumes & Colognes

Founded in 1775, which makes it older than the United States, and responsible for a perfume that changed how perfumes are built.

Paris, before the revolution

Jean-François Houbigant opened at the sign of the basket of flowers in Paris in 1775 and sold to the French court. The house survived the revolution, supplied Napoleon and later Queen Victoria, and became one of the grandest names of nineteenth-century perfumery.

Fougère Royale, 1882

This is the important part. Fougère Royale was the first perfume built around synthetic coumarin — the material that smells of hay and almond — and it created an entire family. Every fougère since, from Brut to Drakkar Noir, descends from it.

Quelques Fleurs followed in 1912 and did something equally new: a floral bouquet built as an abstraction rather than a copy of a single flower.

The house today

Houbigant went through the twentieth century badly — bankruptcy, sales, dilution — and was revived in the 2000s with the historic formulas reconstructed and reissued. What is sold now is a small, expensive, serious line rather than the mass-market name it briefly became.

For perfumery with comparable history on our shelves, see Caron and Creed.