There are perfumes you wear alone, and perfumes you wear as a mirror. With Les Toupies, Henry Jacques chooses the second path: three olfactory duos, each nestled in a crystal flacon cut like a precious stone, designed to answer one another rather than to be self-sufficient.
The house, a discreet specialist in bespoke haute perfumery, is presenting here not a simple collection of fragrances but a collection of objects: mouth-blown, hand-shaped flacons whose complexity of flat faces and angles evokes, as they put it at Henry Jacques, the many facets of a precious stone. Three years of development were needed to arrive at this form, imagined by Christophe Tollemer, the house’s artistic director, in collaboration with glassmaking artisans. The wager is a risky one: at a time when the niche perfume market multiplies identical flacons the better to concentrate attention on the juice, Henry Jacques does the opposite and claims the container as a work in its own right, inseparable from the perfume it shelters.
A dialogue in three acts
What distinguishes Les Toupies from a classic collection is its grammar: each duo is first discovered separately, then brought together to reveal a third presence, the one born of the encounter. Mr. H & Mrs. Y opens the ball as a direct tribute to the founders of the house, Henry Cremona and his wife Yvette. Mr. H articulates cedar leaf, geranium, sandalwood, tobacco and amber, a dark, woody signature. Mrs. Y counters with a luminous bouquet of ylang-ylang, Damask rose and jasmine, softened by iris and lily of the valley. The duo works as a portrait of a couple: two temperaments that do not resemble each other but which, in a shared story, complete one another.
Fanfan & Galileo takes a more instinctive turn. Galileo blends patchouli, lavender and Italian mandarin before revealing tobacco, myrrh and amber; Fanfan answers with saffron and Damask rose, linked by a touch of lavender that serves as a common thread between the two flacons. The third duo, N°16 & N°81, opts for abstraction: two contemporary expressions that meet in the tension between precision and nuance. N°81 combines bergamot, grapefruit and smoky, woody and spicy notes; N°16 reveals a delicate, luminous, honeyed May rose. Here there is no biographical anecdote, only the formal play of two materials seeking each other.
A rare piece, not a unique one
Produced in a limited edition, these creations remain accessible to a few hundred perfume enthusiasts, the house specifies, who can then rediscover them in daily life through the different forms offered by Henry Jacques, a way of keeping a collector’s piece alive without freezing it under glass. This is the collection’s acknowledged paradox: it is conceived as an olfactory sculpture, in which perfume and flacon are inseparable, but it does not renounce use. The crystal is not a case you look at once before putting it away; it is made to be handled, emptied, refilled.
This tension between rarity and use ties in with a broader question that haute perfumery faces today: how to go on making the exceptional in a market saturated with novelties? Henry Jacques’s answer lies neither in a one-upmanship of raw materials nor in the usual heritage storytelling, but in a simple formal constraint, the duo. By obliging each fragrance to exist as the mirror of another, the house invents a way of telling a story of a couple, of lineage or of aesthetic tension, without ever needing to spell it out in a marketing text.
It remains to be seen how this principle of the duo will withstand the test of commercial time: a collection conceived to be discovered in twos structurally imposes a rhythm of purchase and discovery different from that of the solitary flacon. Henry Jacques seems to be betting that its customers, too, have learned to love things that can only be told by several.
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