Plassard Tabac vintage perfume & new blog discovery...

What: Tabac parfum

Who: Plassard Parfums

When: 1815 to late 1940s ??

Where: Paris, France

Cost: $50-200 plus

Rarity: 6/10 (10 = rarest)

(image: parisapartment)

(image: hprints)

Today, I'm wearing vintage Tabac parfum by Plassard. According to Cleopatra's Boutique online Ebay guide to obscure French houses, Plassard is an old French perfume company born 1815. It was reportedly re-named L. Plassard in 1894 and continued producing fragrances through the 1930s-1940s before finally fading away. She gives us a short perfumography:

1911 Une Femme Passa
1927 De Fleur En Fleur
1928 Dyne
Avrilleé
Bagatelle

There are many more compositions attributed to L. Plassard; my reasons for highlighting these few below is that they all existed up through 1948 and so they are some of the best to search for (if you want to look)...

Bouquet de Paris (?- 1948?)
Matsi (?- 1948?)
Tabac (1900- post 1948?)
Oeillet Noir (? - 1948?, and so a new lemming is born...)
Conclusion (?- 1948?)

Above you can see the colorful magazine advertisements for Bouquet de Paris and Matsi; both date from late 1940s publications. Imagery for Tabac is more elusive (of course!). I find a 1900 date for it's release from one source but no print ads.

(Plassard Tabac image copywrite http://www.ventesuroffres.com/)

Tabac is held within a moulded glass bottle, embossed PLASSARD FRANCE on the bottom and closed with a brass washed screw top lid. The label is gold foil, marked Plassard/ Paris/ France. My bottle is identical to the one you see pictured above. As for contents, the juice is a rich orange honey and mine has a trace of honey tone crystals (precipitated amber?). As advertised in a 1948 column emtitled Esquire's What to Give Your Leading Lady, "Maybe Plassard knows why his Tabac can bring in a woman's breath in little tight gasps..." Sounds promising! The article also recommends another "exclusive" Plassard scent, Bouquet de Paris. For those of you wondering about it, Tabac features tobacco flowers over amber rather than smelling of the smoked product (at least to my nose), as Caron's Tabac blond does.  Plassard's Tabac is indeed a pleasurable scent and one my husband noticed and commented on immediately. It starts off rich and thick but turns from big/sweet to resinous/dry fairly quickly. It's a good thing or it could almost become too, too much. The tobacco flower as rendered here is opaque and powdery and is fairly true to a tobacco flower oil that I have. The amber is quite sweet. Tabac is an oriental with notes of vanilla, rum, incense and hay which dries down very soft and very, well, ambery. Ah well, off to google Oeillet Noir:)

And while we're not on the subject, I also want to pay compliments to my fellow bloggers.... There are some really outstanding blogs I've discovered out there and many mavericks who create awesome, mind expanding visual/verbal content. To these folks, I'd like to give a hearty thanks (and I mean to include all of the bloggers on my blogroll list). And since you, dear reader, are here already... You might as well check some of the blogs on my blogroll, too.

I won't go back over any of those already included up to this point (btw, they're all spectacular). But yesterday (and maybe I'm slow, b/c his blog has been up for several years), I stumbled upon Ed Schepp's Scent Spectacular... and it's another great blog to seek out, particularly if you are interested in discovering more about raw perfume materials and how they smell, but he also keeps an eye towards commercial perfume releases. It's become a fast new fav of mine!

And for no reason other than general interest, please enjoy these tourist photos of the Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella monestary and perfume/pharmacy museum in Florence Italy. Mind-blowingly, this pharmacy was founded in the 13th century and has compounded scented elixirs for many, many luminaries throughout the ages.

(flickr: images of herbs and antique scent bottles from  the Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella )

 (image: flickr; antique poster for the Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella)

The Vintage Perfume Vault, where the scent of yesterday's vogue lives.