The Two Faces of Vintage Impudent Parfum de Charieres

The Dolly Sisters circa 1905; image vintage-spirit-blog

Impudent parfum was made by Charieres Parfums. Charieres, or Charrier Parfums is a French perfumery house operating from 1946 to about 1965. The adderss on my 1960s box set is 06220 Vallauris. Charrier specialized in producing various box sets of miniature perfumes. They gave the boxes titles like 'Parfums de France' implying these were assembled collections of popular French perfumes.

Above one of the Parfums De France box sets from Charrier. These were imported to USA via Ben Rickert Inc, a drugstore type chain that was sold to Azurel back in 1970. Ben Rickert Inc distributed these sets to American retailers in the 1950s - 1960s.
Below you can see one of the boxed sets that Charrier was duplicating:

Known as Les Meilleurs Parfums de Paris, you can see how closely Charrier copied the design of these box sets. Charrier's designs look almost identical but for one big difference- in Les Meilleurs, the perfumes are "real" names that you will recognize. The above set includes Jolie Madame, Antilope de Weil, Givenchy and more. I have a slightly newer Les Meilleurs Parfums de Paris box set that includes Carven's Ma Griffe, Caron's Fleurs de Rocaille, Balenciaga's Cialenga and seven other popular 1960s French perfumes.

Charrier actually made all of the perfumes featured in their boxed sets themselves. They further confused things by creating 'faux' perfume houses and printing the names on their bottle labels. Charieres appears to be the first name used by this company but they used many others including: Charles the Fifth, Charles V, St Sauveur, Bonnet and more. So for years as these perfumes leave their box sets, people find them as little orphans. Over time we seem to have forgotten that all of them came from but a single source.

Charrier/Charieres churned out a great number of fragrances to fill up all their boxes, many rather directly inspired by the best-selling perfumes of the day. In further attempt to dress up of their humble roots, the scents were packaged in bottles reminiscent of other popular perfumes. It made for a winning formula with many Americans who perhaps had only a vague idea of the real French perfumes and were easily duped. After all, the price was right and the packaging looked good. So we continue to find many vintage sets and even more of those orphaned minis in perfume collections and for sale in thrift and pawn shops all across America today.  These perfumes all date 1946 through ~ 1965 and my list is by no means complete:

Africa

Air de France

Ardent Love

Ballade Royal

Bavargade

C’est la Vie!

Cachucha

Capitou

Cheval bleu

Clandestine

Cordon d’Or

Cordon d'Argent

Cordon Rouge

Croyance

Devil Moon

Douce Faute

Entendu

Eternal Fire

Fausse Audace

Gerine

Impudent

Jasmin

J'Attends 

Jolie Valse

Loliette

Malica

Orient

Pamyr

Pardon

Parfum 1800

Parfum Alma

Parfum Anita

Parfum Clandestin

Parfum Pirouette

Parfum Versart

Porte Fermée

Sarine

Tempora

Tender Veil

Très Bien

Treve

Vagabond

Wagon-Lits

White Lilac

Wizzy

Even though pretenders, Charrier's perfumes smell delicious and seem to 'keep' well. For today's fan of vintage scents that means many of them are worth smelling. They are reasonably well made, not great art but good copies of great art and lots of fun to try and wear. I was even more impressed when I discovered that Charieres might even have a few secrets tucked up it's sleeves- like this 1940's 'full sized' bottle of Impudent, shown below. It was sealed tight when I received it, but of course I opened it straight away. 

Cleopatra from Cleopatra's Boudoir mentions on her blog that she'd never seen a full size bottle of any of these little perfumes made by Charieres/Charles V and until I found this ~ 0.33 ounce bottle of Impudent de Charieres, neither had I. You might note if you do Internet searches on this house, that many people call it by 'Charles V', one of the more prominent of the faux names Charieres used. 

The packaging for this Impudent parfum is of good quality, you can see there is a pretty patterned fabric wrapped box tied up with a red suede ribbon that fits over a nested base. The bottle is simple but of nice quality, made in France, with a solid black crystal stopper. Even before I opened it, I ferreted out my little mini Impudent from a 1960s Parfums de France box set and prepared to do a side by side comparison: vintage and vintage-er. 

The vintage 1960s Impudent has a simple yellow oval label on a plain little bottle. It smells of a symphony of sweet flowers including orange, rose de mai, juicy jasmine, green violet leaves, velvety ylang-ylang, topped with candied amber on a pale sandalwood/vetiver/vanilla base. There is something a little rubbery smelling, too.

Vintage Impudent is soft yet saucy and not at all powdery. Really pretty, girly and flirty stuff but with a little wink of green and a hint of something frisky in the mix. Besides the rubbery bit, initially it seems to have little in common with the vintage-er 1940s Impudent. The younger perfume smells perfectly divine, a sweet lush green floral scent that reminds me of a relaxed, restrained predecessor of the 1980s classic by YSL, Paris.
But the original Impudent is a whole 'nother thing altogether...

A purring feline jumps out the bottle straight away. It smells of a leather-banded kitty whose slept on a thatch of smokey grass after rolling in oakmoss and padding through a forest of patchouli leaves before coming home to nestle with you. There's a trace of kitty's litter box, too, while the flowers smell faded, indistinct. A rubbery jasmine or could that be tuberose? and possibly some spicy smooth ylang-ylang and heliotrope come trailing along.

Time may have played some tricks, amplifying or forgetting certain flowers but there's been little evaporation, if any, in the past 70 years. At first I wanted to compare this Impudent to Cabochard. It has a similar nearly harsh structure but it isn't nearly so green. Spicy, leathery with a bitter-dry edge, something a girl in the mood for a cigarette and a cocktail would wear; the younger Impudent smells to me of a girl whose in the mood for champagne and a cupcake.

At first I thought the old school Impudent smelled nothing like it's nearly candy coated newer self. Everything seemed wrong for the two perfumes to be related; the one, bubbly yet shy and innocently flirtatious; the other serious, sensuous and full of mystery...

Until I smelled them farther into the wearing. Suddenly there was a common thread, a detectable similarity in the scent DNA. The older Impudent inherited every speck of sinewy stern chypre blood from her ancestors, while the younger had been gifted with a rounder, fruitier nature. But in the end they merge indicating their common point of origin. Both bottles were sealed, new old stock, so the differences whether due to age, condition or perhaps reformulation by their maker, are genuine enough. Maybe it all comes down to a mere roll of the dice.

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

images of boxed perfume sets from Worthpoint, EBay
images of the Redgraves from google image searches

Pardon by Royal Luxury Perfumes

Today I'm wearing an old favorite of mine, PARDON by ROYAL LUXURY. This perfume (parfum) is nearly always found in little micro-mini or miniature size bottles. It's made by a company called Royal Luxury Perfumes, a common-but-obscure name from USA in the 1950s. If you've ever seen one of the popular and fairly common vintage box sets called Les Grands Parfums De France, then you've probably seen micro minis or miniatures of Royal Luxury perfume before since they're often featured in these presentations along with perfumes made by Charles V Parfumeur. Some Royal Luxury perfume labels indicate they were made in Paris, others only that they were distributed in New York. The Charles V perfume lables I've seen, as well as text on the box sets states specifically that the Charles V perfumes were created and bottled in France... One supposes some of the Royal Luxury perfumes could have been made in USA, but who really knows? My own 1/4 ounce bottle of Pardon is marked as a "Parfum" on the label- but again it only indicates that it was "Dist in N.Y.". The cap is bakelite and the bottle was made in USA, but you can draw your own conclusions about the origin of the juice inside.

The perfumes of Royal Luxury Perfumes includes:

C'EST


Entude

Nanette


Pardon

Vie

...All were released probably around 1950 or shortly thereafter. The bottles come in a variety of shapes with different color foil paper labels. I believe they were produced for a few years only, in several different combinations in box sets, sometimes in larger sets along with the perfumes attributed to Charles V (aka Charles the Fifth) and sometimes smaller sets featuring only Royal Luxury perfumes. As a side note, I've found a few little gems among the Charles V perfumes. The dates for Charles V perfumes spans the late 1940s to the mid-1960s.

Nannette by Royal Luxury

Pardon by Royal Luxury

Entude by Royal Luxury

But when I smell Pardon, that's why I love it. There is a tangy musky quality in the base that makes it almost mouth-watering and as it dries down, the musk softens and radiates to a buttery like richness that suites me to a tee. There is an almost watery quality to it as well, something similar to some lotus oil scents. It has a cassis, berry vibe to it as well, similar to tart fresh cherries. There are some sweet floral touches that create almost sugary vanilla and spice notes as well, giving what could be callled a cherry pie effect (maybe one of the best examples of that type I've smelled). Of course it is a vintage scent so the fruit is not neon-brite nor literally edible; it is done in a rather perfumey style if that makes sense.

The print on the label of my bottle of Pardon is badly deteriorated and in a twist of perfume misfate, I'd always assumed "Garden" for Pardon and "Real" for Royal until recently, when I saw a better example. I still considered it a gem of my collection for smell alone- which is saying a lot since I do not attach nearly as much value to perfumes without names/houses, histories or stories behind them. But in this case the juice is a thing of beauty, a clear olive-amber color and the scent is rich and persistent, creating a gentle, feminine sillage that wears and wears. This is not a house that advertised at all, so I think the sets were made for travel, holiday displays in lower tier department stores and sold probably thousands and thousands of units at each location.

The happy news for you is that unlike some of the ultra-rare stuff, you can actually find small affordable bottles of Royal Luxury perfumes at many on-line auction sites (Bing, EBay or Google it). Many vintage perfume dealers tend to split the sets up (which can be irritating if you want an entire set), but which also keeps the cost-per-try affordable. If you're willing to spend $10-$20 you should be able to find a single, 3 to 5 ml or 1/8, 1/6 fl oz bottle. The "Les Grands" sets typically run $50-$150 range in as new, complete or mostly complete condition.

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

(image of Les Grands Parfums De France, 1finetreasure at ecrater)
(images of Royal Luxury perfumes from the miniature perfume shoppe)
(image of Vie from shopvintage4u at ebay)
(image of the Heliotrope fairy by Cicley Mary Barker)