Farouche

I have read all these reviews and comments and feel inspired to add my own very personal love letter to this fragrance. I first discovered it when my Dad gifted his 2nd wife (who I loved), with the spray perfume, in Jan. 1976 (for her 50th birthday). It was love at 1st sniff and I resolved to get my own bottle as soon as I got a job & my own apt., which happened 1 month later, and I purchased the edt in the classic glass bottle (the spray). I wore it very frequently that Winter into Spring and have so many fond memories connected with this beautiful and unique fragrance, mostly associated with music; like swooning to Ravel at the symphony, and listening to Joni Mitchell's "Hejira". So I treasure those memories all these years later, and am so happy to be able to relive them, every time I wear my vintage Farouche, in the same classic bottle (God Bless eBay!). This is truly a most memorable, life enhancing fragrance. I had previously loved and worn L'air du Temps, and that, relationship continues, to this day. It would be impossible to say which one is my favorite, I love them both. And I recently rediscovered Capricci, which is also full of delights. My vintage Bigarade is a uniquely refreshing and alluring herbal/citrus scent. Although I'm primarily a Guerlain person (& Dior; vintage Miss Dior & Dioressence), I love & need these classic Ricci fragrances which all share a certain timeless and comforting quality, at least to this "child of the 60s & 70s"!

(My review is for the EDT vintage, housed in the white plqstic casing. ) The word Farouche means both 'Wild' and 'Shy' in English and French language. This fragrance is most certainly both of those things. After spraying my vintage bottle I am transported back in time... at first, this one is very wild, feral and untamed. I was worried I had an error with my curiosity anf lack of impulsivity in this blind buying of a 70s classic. However, after I patiently waited things calmed down, the scent tamed itself and then became a much more beautiful, softer, delicate and pretty little thing. This is romantic, soft focus in the haze of a warm summers day, eating peaches and sponge cake in white colured cotton petticoats, picking wild flowers along river banks and sunbathing on top of golden haybales. It is fluffy white kittens that have the scent of baby powder in their fur and the embrace of your mother after a long absence when she finally comes home. Somehow it remains extremely feminine whilst having such an aromatic, spicy and bitter profile going on. Great stuff! I need to try the perfume version now, as I adore this. (Edit - I am overjoyed to read the other reviews after writing this and to see that this perfume really evokes similar sentiments and imagery in others minds and hearts. What a wonderful and shared connection throughout time this perfume has gifted the world).

This is a madeleine-fragrance to me...in the sense it brings back childhood memories. It was the perfume my mummy wore back in the Seventies, i was then a small child but i have very distinct memories of my mother proudly wearing Farouche on special occasions and cherishing her bottle. I remember she loved the bottle (at the time it was housed in a brown box with a red stripe and "Farouche" printed in gold on the red stripe; the bottle is not what is being pictured here on this page ) as much as the fragrance. The fragrance is a peachy aldheidic floral, very strong, sweet but bitter, next of kin to First (First is colder and classier in my opinion) and Rive Gauche. A typical perfume of the Seventies, and good God those were perfumes.... I was not extremely fond of it, but you know, it was my mummy's fragrance and I did respect it as I do today. It smelled good on her. I already had started my own collection of mini bottles - still own it to date- and had already a very defined taste. My mum gave me the mini bottles of Farouche and Capricci -the perfumeries gave plenty of minis as samples at the time -for my collection. I never wore Farouche -but did wear other frags of my collection- and still have the mini bottles (boxed!). Good memories....

Seek this out (perfume, not EdT) while ebay stock lasts if you like the idea of Venetian lace dried on a line in a sun-drenched field near a hey barn. It smells of sun, dry hey and wormwood. No sweetness, apart from dry sweetness of the air in wild flower meadows. In my mind music has scent and Farouche is La Carpinese (L'arpeggiata and Marco Beasley). It's so beautiful it hurts. I blame fashion that tells malleable 16-year olds that a cool thing now to blow their first earned bucks on is sugar-chocolate-strawberry-cherry coke-smelling stuff (stuff, you know who you are) and the likes of Farouche and Mystere are grandma scents. 40 years ago (when I could walk under a table without bending my knees) raving 20-year olds were wearing Farouche as a rite of passage. There is something fundamentally wrong in the world if eternal masterpieces like Farouche are discontinued (did it really just drop in sales? Do tell if you know) and Black Opiums that never even shared the same planet with Opium are a huge success. Stop the world then, please, I want to get off.

People exalt this for being the romantic perfume that every girl wanted way back then. Those were the times when Nina Ricci produced lived-in scents: the smell of flaxen hair under the warm sun, intertwined with dried flowers. This is one meant to be enjoyed by a lover during a tryst. Smelled intimately, like how laced undergarments smell of soap and slight sweat. It is beautiful and fleeting. Fragile, feminine in the most pretty sense, hazy and romantic. This one is all at the same time metallic, balsamic, spicy, somewhat herbal but ultimately feminine. The parfum brings me to tears. Equally beautiful with Capricci. I even wonder why Luca Turin didn't bother examining this art piece. Edit: Perfumer is Michel Hy.

I am wearing Farouche EDT today.......I like it right now because I live on the north Pacific coast and it is a bit cool and foggy, even though it is summer and hot elsewhere in the West. The opening notes, a bit bright, green incense, soon shade into a gentle palette of floral, woodsy scents. Lurking deep under these I detect a little vetiver, a note that makes me feel warm. This is a very subtle EDT; I appreciate that it "moves" through time and the temperature of my skin.

One of those fragrances that my mom used to put on me when I was a young child. Makes me think of a time of innocence. I still have what's left in the old vintage bottle (not the heart-shaped one). It had been a gift from my mom's brother in France many years ago. It smells light and carefree. Definitely aldehydic, very green, with a touch of florals. Love it.

I love this perfume! Maybe I'm a sucker for galbanum, or maybe it's the oakmoss/vetiver that does it, layered so beautifully with so many lovely flowers, maybe it's just I'm delighted with any perfume that has LOV and iris. This one is a true classic and worthy of a try. And Anomie et Ivoire - I LOVED your review!

Farouche is like that distant woman who's so intriguing and classy - sexy sexy vintage beauty of a scent. Vintage parfum edition is cloying in the best way possible.

I have two perfumes in atomizers from the 80's. The bottle is quite volatilized and the juice color is darker, so it may not be the original scent. When I first squirted this on my skin, I found it to smell quite aggressive and thought I didn't like it at all or maybe the juice was mutating. Perhaps oakmoss and vetiver, hand in hand, pushing flowers and fruit aside to make a statement from the start. It smells like straw piled up in an old barn. However, after waiting for about 15 minutes, the scent gradually changed. Well I am familiar with this smell.... This smells like a medicinal bath. The medicinal bath is made by putting a lot of Chinese herbal mixes in a cloth bag and floating it in the bath. It is often found in public baths and I have loved it since I was a child. I love the scent of medicinal baths, but if I wear it as a perfume and make it my own scent, that's another matter. As I waited longer, the flowers remembered their role, and the medicated bath turned into a green, aromatic perfume. I still can't get rid of my medicinal bath image, but this refreshing green scent has its own place in my collection without overlapping with other perfumes I own. Smells like an old-fashioned granny? no not at all. It is one of the new scents for me who have never smelled this scent from old ladies. The green scent after the middle note is something that will be accepted as a modern perfume.

This is a genuinely nice older-style scent. It's not a modern fume, nor something I would personally wear, but I'd have no trouble at all cuddling up to a mum or nanna in her 70s or 80s who smelled like this. It's quite a comforting powdery, classy, yet cuddly scent. By contrast, I have many other vintage samples that smell stale or just 'old' and harsh. Farouche is rather like that for the first 40mins, but then settles into something softer. I'm especially surprised, as an aldehydes-hater, that these notes are not objectionable to me. My nasopharyngeal lining remains intact :). Farouche seems to have retained its freshness over the years, or is just a more delicate and wearable traditional fragrance.

I'm confused by all the glowing reviews. One would think this is one of the greatest fragrances in history. Well, it is not. The fact that it's old and "classy" and nostalgic for some doesn't make it great. Frankly, it's quite boring. Opening is very sharp and resembles paint thinner. And in 10 minutes it just gets extremely soapy, and that's about it.

Farouche is a gorgeous green floral aldehydic woody fragrance. One part Madame, one part Mademoiselle, this scent is a sleeper- it comes on exactly as the name suggests... Shy and difficult to know at first, yet given some time, you will find her to be full of grace, charm and intelligence. The open is green with a rush of aldehydes and sharpish florals. At first impression such a tactiturn beauty might not be worth the effort to get to know better. But as the green and bitter notes are joined by jasmine, rose, carnation, sandalwood, amber and musk, a very appealing, fully feminine heart is revealed. Farouche fits me well, fleshed out as it is with a medley of other favorite notes: cardamom, peach, clary sage, oakmoss, and vetiver. The fruit, herb and spice provide necessary verve and lift; the root and moss ground it. If you are looking to explore scents with similar feeling to Farouche, another wild 1970s French scent that falls along the same lines is Hermes Caleche- though Farouche represents the cleaned up, tidy-ish version, while Caleche is rather less refined, or at least less into showers!

My wild, beautiful Farouche... A tomboy fragrance of the long lost era. A child lost in the woods... The old house with high beams, harboring ghosts. The bitter plants that grew on ruins. I don`t see it as an old fashioned scent, though everything screams about it - aldehydes, complex ingredients, 1973. It is a scent of a woman who smokes cigars, rides wild horses and has no fear of the future, because she left all the fears in the past.She is down to earth and her hands are not manicured.Children run to her and animals trust her... That`s what is Farouche to me.

Why, oh why won't they bring this one back? Warm, classy, sophisticated and feminine but completely unpretentious - it was my signature fragrance many moons ago and oh, how I wish it still could be. And the beautiful heart-shaped bottles complemented it so beautifully. Many perfumes come and go but some touch you in a way that makes you LONG to bathe yourself in them again - Farouche is and, I suspect, always will be THAT perfume for me.

I would buy again in a minute if I could find this fragrance for nostalgic reasons. However when I look at the notes - they are among my favorites today,. With Oakmoss, vetiver, geranium, carnation it is no wonder I loved Farouche I wore it daily as a young high school teacher in the 1970's. The kids used to tell me they loved it. Now I would hesitate to be guided by the tastes of teenages - perhaps my loss ?

Summer morning, cloudless sky, fresh breeze, white crisp tank top, pale jeans, walking downtown with my husband and kids for coffee and croissants wearing Farouche. Casual but very elegant. They don't make such a scents these days. Just tutti frutti candy stuff which is so forgetable and has no statement at all. We definitely need some "perfume revolution" to come very soon.

I bought several miniatures from ebay and this is one of them, unfortunately it develops a nasty urine smell on my skin. It’s not the first time when this happpens with vintage miniatures, It’s either my skin chemistry that reacts badly with something (I think oakmoss) or they just went bad. Anyway, I still don’t know how this fragrance supposed to smell like 😩

Farouche means sullen and shy in company but with a wild cranky charm. It smells generically like the 1970's to me. It's not horrible, just very dated, cranky like it's wearing polyester and shy because it's older than everyone else at the party and it wants to go home, put comfy shoes on and be wild in the only way it knows how; dancing alone to Neil Diamond.

It's over two hours later and suddenly Farouche has let it's long seventies hair down. It actually has gone a bit wilder. Take my hand, walk through the long grass, into the trees near the river. Oops, now its something like a fougere and I'm not sure again. Interesting though. Worth hanging around after.

I loved this perfume and have tried for many years to either find it again or one almost the same. It a warm and sensual fragrance. And amazingly I have found Jesus del Pozo's Ambar, which in it's own right is a wonderful scent and amazingly is very similar in construction and smell. Wonderful!!!

Hi girls, Does anybody know the difference between the packages? Some packages have a brouwnish color and some a red color. Is there a difference between the two? On both of the packages is written EdP. Thank you for answering. Greetz Elizabeth

Farouche is a soft floral aldehyde that evokes memories of a forgotten time, when perfumeurs really made mysterious masterpices. Very beautifull creation. Anyone who know who made this masterpiece.?

Powdery, woody...I find some similarity with eau de Charlotte, specially in the dry down minus the vanilla. A pretty fragrance, humble, vintage, romantic...

delightful perfume, sweet and warm...as indeed is Fleur de Fleur by the same perfumier...plenty of both around and not expensive either...

Smells like a much simpler Hermes Calache without the "No 5" opening or a much drier, less floral and less powdery Madame Rochas.

just bought a vintage miniature (ebay) of this perfume based purely on the reviews in the brilliant group. Totally delightful

I did own some of this a few years ago, but alas, it was so light on me I could hardly smell it.

An ostrich tickle feather bottled — the dream lily