Established in 1720 by Fargeon Aîné, perfumer and distiller to the French court, Maison Oriza is a firm favourite on the list of best perfumer shops in Paris. It spent the next two centuries supplying fragrances to well-perfumed European royals, from the Bourbons to the Romanovs. Even the demise of the ancien régime didn’t spell the end for the house – Napoleon Bonaparte and kin remained dedicated patrons until the French empire’s end.
It was the Great Depression that ultimately caused Oriza L. Legrand to shut its doors, but in 2012 the house was revived by Hugo Lambert and Franck Belaiche, two noses looking for ‘a way of conceiving perfume as narrative, often evocative and at times bold’. The two trawled through antique market places and second-hand sites for vestiges of the house’s history, rediscovering original Oriza bottles, labels and ephemera as they went.
Oriza L. Legrand is no longer housed in the Louvre Palace, but on Rue Vignon, in a tidy ninth-arrondissement boutique that its owners conceived as a sort of time machine. Lambert and Belaiche have brought back the heady scents that perfumed the Belle Epoque and the Second Empire, and it’s not all camphor and cosmetic vinegar. Oriza’s menu regales with operatic gourmands, and fougères for self-described dandys.
34 Bis Rue Vignon, 75009 Paris (00 33 1 71 93 02 34; orizaparfums.com). Nearest Métro: Havre-Caumartin. Visit Instagram @orizalegrand
Once the star of successive Paris world fairs, Jean-Vincent Bully was the ill-fated impresario who lost his budding perfume empire at the hands of the capricious real-estate markets. Bully was forever immortalised as the inspiration behind the protagonist of Balzac’s César Birotteau, and his name was given yet another lease of life when it was bought by creative all-rounder and Balzac enthusiast Ramdane Touhami in 2014.
Touhami and his partner, the aristocrat Victoire de Taillac, took it upon themselves to reconstruct the bygone world of ‘La Comédie Humaine’, bringing the archetypal fin-de-siècle apothecary into the present-day with expert cabinetry and period fittings that include a sink wrested from a Saint Petersburg palace. Their four Paris boutiques serve up all kinds of self-care for the design-conscious, from their signature Mexican tuberose and Lebanese cedar ‘Eau Triple’ to badger-hair and silk toothbrushes.
For more information visit buly1803.com. Visit Instagram @officine_universelle_buly
In an Haussmannian block on the corner of Rue de Thorigny and Rue du Roi-Doré – just a few doors down from Balzac’s former digs in the Marais – is contemporary niche perfumer Histoires de Parfums. The brand was founded by maverick nose Gérald Ghislain, who envisaged an ‘olfactory library’ shelved with never-before-smelled aromas. Ghislain’s description may invoke images of hushed reservation, but Histoires’ collection is anything but well-mannered; ‘1740’ is inspired by the infamous libertine and sexual deviant Marquis de Sade, while ‘1969’ – the house’s signature scent – is said to capture the ‘spirit of freedom and the eroticism of that legendary year’. Ghislain’s series ‘This is Not a Blue Bottle’, with its Magritte-inspired surrealist moniker, delivers an olfactory polemic, and comes dressed in a lightly tweaked, copyright-safe variation of International Klein Blue.
11 Rue du Roi-Doré, 75003 Paris, France (00 33 1 40 13 87 57; histoiresdeparfums.com). Nearest Métro: Saint-Sébastien-Froissart. Visit Instagram @histoiresdeparfums
Before Jean-François Laporte founded L’Artisan Parfumeur in 1976, there was no such thing as a niche perfumery. Fragrance was the domain of couturiers such as Paul Poiret and Jacques Fath until, rumour would have it, Laporte burst on to the scene with a banana-themed scent developed to accompany a fancy-dress costume of the same variety. Laporte would eventually leave L’Artisan to make perfumed leather gloves (a common 17th-century accessory), but not before achieving another first with the marriage of white musk and berries in the cult classic ‘Mûre et Musc’.
L’Artisan Parfumeur’s boutiques resemble Renaissance cabinets of curiosities, and are filled with accordant oddities. Notable is ‘Dzing!’, a circus-inspired scent developed through first-hand field research sniffing big cats at the zoo. L’Artisan’s noses have noted that black panthers are far and away the cleanest of the feline family.
19 Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, 75004 Paris (artisanparfumeur.com). Nearest Métro: Saint-Paul/Chemin Vert. Visit Instagram @lartisanparfumeur
Founded in 1990 by renowned nose Jean Kerléo, Osmothèque is not a perfume vendor, per se. In fact, it sells only one scent: a faithful reconstruction of the fragrance worn by Napoleon during his exile in Saint Helena, the recipe for which was found 4,000 miles away from the remote Atlantic island, stashed away in an unassuming antique desk in Versailles that belonged to his second manservant.
The institution’s raison d’être is conservation, with more than 6,000 scents housed within its perfectly calibrated vaults, their bottles sealed with a layer of argon gas. At Osmothèque you can sniff a royal Roman perfume based on a first-century AD inscription by Pliny the Elder, or perfectly preserved original formulations by Coty, Houbigant and Fragonard. Presiding over operations is Patricia de Nicolaï, niche perfume star and the great-granddaughter of Pierre-François Pascal Guerlain.
The Osmothèque’s researchers are also in the business of bringing disappeared (disparu) perfumes back to life – under the strict condition that original formulations are followed. Perfumes that contain now banned or ethically dubious ingredients such as civet are not recreated with their modern synthetic equivalents, but instead remain forever disparu. The Osmothèque is the sole custodian to some 800 of these lost fragrances.
8 Rue Saint-Simon, 78000 Versailles, France (00 33 1 39 55 46 99; osmotheque.fr). Nearest station: Versailles Château Rive Gauche. Visit Instagram @osmothequeparf
