Courant by Helena Rubinstein, 1972

100% Positive Reviews

Rated #3858 in Fragrances

Champagne tastes on a beer budget. It was the seventies. I was poor. All the vintage bottles were empty and rolling around in my undies drawer. (My Mother worked at an International Hotel and when the odd bottle got left behind we adopted them. Sadly she left her job and the perfume supply dwindled) I discovered Courant when I ran out of Cachet. It didn't catch on the way that Charlie did and I think I had it to myself. Believe me, in New Zealand, that is quite plausible. Of the drug store perfumes everyone else liked Blue Grass, White Musk and L'Aimant. I was the Courant girl and I don't cringe at the the thought.

Review by tourmaline

Posted 2/13/12

By tourmaline

Courant is a lovely 70s chypre, in the tradition of Intimate by Revlon (Courant is less animalic) or Timeless by Avon (Courant dries down less sweet). I had been curious about Courant for a long time because I have developed an obsession with 70s drugstore scents...so I bought an old spray bottle on Ebay. When it arrived, I couldn't believe how gross and musty it smelled. No wonder they discontinued it, I thought. This smells like hundred year old, musty vanilla baby powder. Who on earth would want to smell this stale and musty? Were 70s girls really that liberated that they'd wear something which would repel everyone within a 10 foot radius? Was this really what Courant smelled like? NO! The answer is a resounding No. You see, I recently came across a small splash bottle of Courant EDP, and it thankfully does NOT smell like my spray bottle, whose top and middle notes had most definitely dissipated. The juice in my new splash bottle featured warm, mossy florals - the key element in the composition that my "bad" bottle had been lacking. This newer bottle was a chypre that I could really get excited about. The mossy florals were undergirded by the same mossy/vanillic basenotes as my "bad" bottle, but the fragrance was whole and complete with the uppermost notes intact. It was harmonious and beautiful, and the reason that Courant was such a significant, albeit fleeting, 70s drugstore success. Lovely stuff, if you can locate a decent bottle.