Artifact Spotlight: Evening in Paris

Visitors often comment on the perfume found on Dr. Brown’s vanity in her bedroom. Evening in Paris, a perfume by French cosmetics company Bourjois, was once one of the most celebrated and recognized perfumes in the world. Does the cobalt blue bottle or familiar scent remind you of a person or a time?

Ernest Beaux, a legendary Russian-born perfume designer for the French company Bourjois Inc., designed the fragrance in the late 1920s — he had also concocted Chanel №5 in honor of Coco Chanel. It became an instant success and was perhaps the favorite fragrance during the World War II era.

Bottles of Evening in Paris perfume were sold between the 1920s and the 1960s, and they can be fairly easily dated by the shape of the bottle, packaging and associated advertising. The bottle inside Canary Cottage dates to the 1940s.