Jovoy Paris

Jovoy Paris is a Parisian perfume house with two beginnings. The first was in 1923, when Blanche Arvoy founded Jovoy as a perfume and cosmetics maison on rue de Longchamp; the house then went quiet for more than eighty years. The second came when François Hénin — who had spent years chasing raw materials through the forests of Vietnam before a spell in Grasse — brought the name back to life. Jovoy dates that relaunch to 2010, and Hénin remains the house’s creator and artistic director.

What makes Jovoy unusual is that it works like a publishing house rather than a laboratory. Hénin writes the brief and then commissions an independent nose to answer it, so the catalogue is a set of distinct authorial voices rather than a single studio signature. Cécile Zarokian built the dry, papyrus-and-vetiver austerity of Private Label and then the milky citrus-tea of Remember Me. Jacques Flori delivered the patchouli-and-labdanum weight of Psychédélique. Vanina Muracciole is behind the brown-sugar vanilla of Fire at Will and the clementine of Aqua Memorabilis, and Véronique Nyberg composed the mango-and-leather Ha Long Bay.

The house also runs one of the most important perfume shops in the world. Jovoy Parfums Rares at 4 rue de Castiglione, a step from the Place Vendôme, stocks hundreds of independent houses alongside its own, and calls itself the embassy of rare perfumes. That double role — retailer and maker — is why the collection is so unsentimental about trends: Hénin sells everyone else’s work all day, and only publishes his own when there is a gap worth filling.

Shop Jovoy Paris at Redolia Perfumery: full bottles only, authentic and sourced through authorised channels.