Fleurs de Bulgarie (new)
Creed (1980)

Complete and resplendent. A completely relatable but delightfully exotic looking vision with long dark, tousled hair, flashing doe eyes and a smidgen of black eyeliner under her eyes. In private she moves in silence. Not drawing attention to herself in a way that screams " im here". Because she is a secure and a validated person in life and she knows who she is...

Lovely rich rose indeed! It is very much a rose-centered perfume, but somehow it does not seem grandmotherly, or better suited for a lingerie drawer. This is a 'quite' soapy, reliable, happy to exist rose! That's why - I think - it is so contagious. Like it or not but the good quality of the ingredients here employed is as usual.

An invasion of rose joined to those of spices to underline its royalty. Something about the clean green notes moderates the rose while still allowing it to retain its beautiful identity. After a few minutes, I detect a certain darkness. The drydown is my least favorite part of the development, But still the rose manages to persevere with some integrity. Really lasting (my skin confirms!), great sillage but keep the quantity you spray under controll.

I'm not sure what's wrong with me, why I like Creed's Fleurs de Bulgarie, despite it's somewhat chemical and simplistic makeup. I smell both sexy and cheap, gothic and gaudy, rich and fey, masculine and decorous while wearing this perfume, crafted from one supposedly prized ingredient to the next, even if the base, Creed's infamous ambergris, reads thin and like I've ultimately not doused myself in flowers but in a libation, a spell, a liquid.

The musk is gorgeous. So is the rose. I want to be in jeans and a t-shirt in the heat of summer. I smell clean, like I've just gotten a haircut. It wasn't a barber or a barbershop that did me good but my grandmother who leaned over me, her pearl necklace jangly, as she snipped away and impressed upon me her own perfume in the process.

How I relate this story in the same breath as talking about sexiness is beyond me, unless what I'm really trying to talk about is soap. I would buy this as a soap and invite my lover to bathe with me.

This makes total sense for 1980. Yes, it's rose, but it's built on a very late-70's sour green chypre skeleton, complete with plasticky hairspray aldehydes. There's also clearly saffron in here, extending the plastic feel of the topnotes while combining with the rose in a traditional Middle Eastern attar-influenced way. It's also quite soapy, which goes a long way to mute the plastic and the sourness and the sharpness of the saffron.

Like some other Creed's, this smells much better from a distance than up close. In its sillage, it's a beautiful green rose, without the sourness and plastic elements that make it less pleasant up close.

All things considered, I think I'm voting neutral, because I like the sillage but not the smell on skin, and I can't shake the feeling that this smells like something I should be able to find much cheaper. It's not bad, but not that good either.

It's pretty well-known among folks who interact with me that I'm none too kind to Creed for their retro-continuity historical revisions and "wear our fragrances because you want the world to know how successful/important you are" advertising, and although I'm not going to wage class warfare in my review, I will simply say that we each should be able to play with our own toys in peace, without being constantly reminded of what we have (or don't have) by the other kids on the playground. I've always felt that the classiest brands are the ones who let the luxury of their products speak for themselves, without the need for fancy Fleur-De-Lis patterns, gilded bottles, and smarmy verbatim etched all over bottles, boxes, booklets, and advertisement inserts. With that having been said, Creed Fleurs de Bulgarie (1980) is a very unassuming fragrance, back-to-basics, and elegant without needing to exclaim that it is with a paper insert. There was claimed to be an older version of this scent made in 1845 by Henry Creed, and that version was said to be animalic and imposing, which would be befitting of the Victorian age, whether it was made for Queen Victoria or not. However, today's Fleurs de Bulgarie is not that scent, and actually takes many of it's cues from Tea Rose by The Perfumer's Workshop (1972). In fact, one may actually think that Olivier Creed smelled Tea Rose and drew his inspiration from it when he made Fleurs de Bulgarie, as the similarities are striking. Tea Rose was a favorite of Gracy Kelly (then princess of Monaco), and wouldn't you know it? Creed claimed to have been commissioned to make her Fleurrisimo (1970) by her husband-to-be Prince Rainier, so maybe the signals got crossed in the historical claptrap depeartment.

Fleurs de Bulgarie opens much like Tea Rose, but dials back the galbanum way low, letting bergamot do most of the rose delivery; this fact alone instantly makes Fleurs de Bulgarie the superior scent over Tea Rose for people who think the stark green of galbanum is really outdated, or just never were really big fans of the note to begin with, and could appreciate less of it in their tea rose scents. Fleurs de Bulgarie is a rounder, softer, less "fresh cut rose stems" and more "roses already in a vase and smelled from far away" kind of a vibe. If you want to smell like fresh roses but not whack somebody in the face with an entire bush of them, thorns and all, this could be your answer. There is a bit of soapiness here not found in other rose scents of it's kind, plus a kindhearted base of ambergris and musk (real ambergris because this is Creed after all, but still a synthetic white musk because deer hunting is bad). Projection is fair, and longevity is nice since this is an eau de parfum. I feel Fleurs de Bulgarie sits closer to the skin than other rose scents, but is still pretty detectable because rose is one of the most recognizable flowers out there. Fleurs de Bulgarie is a nice lady sitting there with her hands in her lap, listening intently to your babbling, even though she reached her conclusion about you before you started talking. I also think Fleur de Bulgarie is more structured and office safe because of it's quiet composure, but if you're a guy wearing this, you'll still get some stares, especially in hetero-normative American corporate culture, so take my suggestions with a grain of salt.

I quite like Fleur de Bulgarie, and for a Creed scent, turns up quite often for far less than standard retail, telling me that it doesn't move like some other Creeds, as the company literally prices based on popularity; the more people like a scent, the more Creed gouges, which is another black mark against them from me for unscrupulous opportunism more befitting a shady eBay seller than a perfume house, but back on track. People who own the aforementioned Tea Rose, Diptyque L'Ombre dans L'Eau (1983), or the claimed older version of Creed Fleur de Thé Rose Bulgare (2000) might see the modern Fleurs de Bulgarie as redundant as all share a similar treatment of rose, just swap out citrus notes, add or take away galbanum completely, add or take out ambergris, and supporting complimentary floral or herbal notes. I love rose so this definitely feels worth the hunt at a good price to me, and it's a fragrance that stands alone on it's merits, so how you feel about Creed as a house comes little into play here, as this has none of the usual provenance or decorum that a lot of Creeds seem to factor in. There are better rose scents for less money, but if money is not an object, Fleurs de Bulgarie is a fresh juicy rose and musk scent you may want to sample if you are a fan of the flower. Thumbs up from me, but definitely not my first choice in this area, because it's also not a very complex or original scent either, since it's more or less citrus, raw florals, and musk, which just about anyone on any budget can compose these days, hence the existence of so many on the market. Still, there's beauty in simplicity if ingredients are high quality, and that's one area where I can't throw any cheap shots at the house. Thumbs up

Soapy/Floral/Musk

Sampled from vintage bottle (c. 1990s-early 2000s)

Fleurs de Bulgarie (not be confused with the tea version) is a rich and unctuous heady mix of Bulgarian rose absolute, sweet/soapy amber, and a bit of musk. The opening is a brief citrus quickly followed by the star of the show, the Bulgarian rose, loud but not obnoxious. The rose is superbly natural with all its defects including a slight metallic note.

The base quickly makes itself known in the form of a soapy/sweet amber. It is listed as ambergris, but most folks don't know the difference between ambergris (fermented whale vomit) and the trade name amber (here, an in house blend of tonka, vanilla, balsam woods, etc.).

Were it not for the base, the fragrance would be a beautiful rose soliflore, but the base keeps it antiquated and Victorian in style.

Overall, very good, very feminine, and very old-fashioned. Once again, golden age Creed quality ingredients.

I really quite enjoy this rose fragrance. It's not your normal rose. It's not very sweet, or powdery, or even to floral. Rather it is quite sharp, crisp, and green.

I like how heavy it is. Its lack of sweetness, at first turned me off. But the more I wore this the more I really enjoyed it. Took 6-8 times to really appreciate this fragrance, but now I love it.

It comes off very astringent, strong, and aggressive. But after its had time to dry down and really bloom on your skin. It transitions into a very bright and crisp rose. Almost more "thorns" then "rose". Overall I tend to like its abrasive character. But I can definitely appreciate why not everyone would be enraptured by this fragrance.

Great Sillage and Longevity.