Perfume Before Perfume
Perfume is the rare luxury whose entire history is still open for business. You can buy a scent formulated for a Medici queen and one compounded to order last Tuesday, and the road between the two passes through a handful of doors worth walking in sequence.
Begin in Florence, before perfumery was an industry. The Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella descends from Dominican friars who grew medicinal herbs from the thirteenth century; the pharmacy has traded with the public since 1612, which makes it arguably the oldest apothecary still operating anywhere. Its Acqua della Regina — the citrus cologne created for Catherine de' Medici before she left for France — is four centuries of continuous perfumery in one bottle, sold in frescoed rooms that are half museum, half shop.
The gentleman's cologne era comes next, in two accents. Acqua di Parma bottled Italian sunlight in 1916 — the Colonia, citrus-first and dressed in yellow, a barbershop elegance that became a global house without losing the register. And in Vienna, Knize — imperial-court tailors since 1858, trading from an Adolf Loos-designed salon that is itself a modernist landmark — put Knize Ten on the counter in the 1920s: one of the first great masculine fragrances, still sold beside the suits.
Then Paris made scent literary. Diptyque began in 1961 as three artistic friends' bazaar on Boulevard Saint-Germain; the candles came in 1963, the first eau de toilette in 1968, and the oval label became the mark of a house that names scents like short stories. The niche revolution followed from unexpected capitals: Byredo, founded in Stockholm in 2006 by a former basketball player with no formal training, built fragrances as translated memories — Gypsy Water, Bal d'Afrique — in austere bottles that made minimalism the genre's uniform. And Le Labo, opening the same year in Manhattan, turned the counter into a laboratory: Santal 33 and its siblings compounded when ordered, hand-labeled with the buyer's name and date.
The sequence is the point: monastery, barbershop, salon, bazaar, memory, lab. Four hundred years and the product is unchanged — a bottle of invisible identity. Buy one from each era and the history sits on your shelf.
Article references
The houses in this story
- Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella Via della Scala 16, Florence / Online
The world’s oldest pharmacy — Dominican friars’ herb garden, 1221; Caterina de’ Medici’s Acqua della Regina still on the shelf; frescoed sales rooms that outrank most museums. Established 1612. store page → · open in the atlas → - Knize Graben 13, Vienna
Tailors of the k.u.k. court since 1858 behind Adolf Loos’s 1913 portal — the most beautiful small shopfront in retail; Marlene Dietrich’s tailcoats cut upstairs. store page → · open in the atlas → - Acqua di Parma Parma / Online
Italian Eau de Cologne house founded in 1916, centered on Colonia’s signature bergamot-citrus profile and the brand’s distinctive Parma-yellow presentation. store page → · open in the atlas → - Diptyque Boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris / Online
The Boulevard Saint-Germain oval — Baies, Feu de Bois and the literary candle trinity since 1961. Shop name taken from two equal street windows (boulevard Saint-Germain and rue de Pontoise) that read as an opened diptych. store page → · open in the atlas → - Byredo Stockholm / Online
Stockholm fragrance house founded 2006 by Ben Gorham with perfumer Jerome Epinette. Known for minimalist bottles and memory-driven scents such as Gypsy Water and Bal d'Afrique, built around understated compositions from high-quality raw materials. store page → · open in the atlas → - Le Labo New York / Online
A New York perfumery founded in 2006 by Fabrice Penot and Eddie Roschi; each fragrance is hand-blended and freshly labeled in-store. Its Santal 33, developed by perfumer Frank Voelkl, launched in 2011 after debuting as a 2006 candle and room spray. store page → · open in the atlas →