# Lubin ## Facts | | | |---|---| | Founded | 1798 | | Origin | France | | Headquarters | Paris | | Status | Active | | Manufacturing | Loire Valley, France | | Distribution | Multi-channel | | Website | https://www.lubin.eu/en/ | Lubin is a French perfume house based in Paris. It traces its beginnings to 1798, when the perfumer Pierre-François Lubin opened a boutique in the city, and it is often counted among the oldest perfume houses in the world [15]. Its early clientele read like a guide to the courts of nineteenth-century Europe: Napoleon's family, the restored Bourbon monarchy, the King of England and the Tsar of Russia. The company still presents itself under the line "Perfume maker since 1798". Over more than two centuries the house passed through the hands of its founder's chosen successor, four generations of the Prot family, a French perfume house, a German fragrance company and a haircare group, before a former head of creation at Guerlain took it back into private, independent ownership around the turn of the millennium. Today Lubin makes fragrances in small quantities in France, revives formulas from its own archive and releases new compositions by a small group of perfumers. ## Origin & founders Pierre-François Lubin was born in 1774, and the company calls him "the founder of modern perfumery". Accounts of his training differ. According to the house's own history, his parents lived near the Paris workshop of Jean-Louis Fargeon, supplier to Queen Marie-Antoinette, who took on the ten-year-old boy in 1784 [2]. In that telling, Lubin was gradually trusted with the beauty recipes of the royal court and, after the Revolution began, carried parcels from Fargeon to the Queen while the royal family was confined at the Tuileries from the autumn of 1789. In 1792, aged 18, he left Paris and the unrest of the Revolution for Grasse and the workshop of another master perfumer, Tombarelli, who taught him what the company calls the "Italian method", brought to France from Florence by Catherine de Medici two centuries earlier. An interview-based history published by Fragrantica gives the sequence the other way round: Lubin learned perfumery in Grasse from the age of ten and moved to Paris at sixteen to complete his training under Fargeon [13]. Both versions agree on the two teachers and on the link to Marie-Antoinette's perfumer; they differ on the order and the dates. In 1798, after the Revolution, Lubin opened his own boutique in Paris [2]. He called it "Au Bouquet de Roses". The company describes the name as a discreet tribute to the executed Queen, who had been fond of the rose perfume Fargeon extracted for her; Fragrantica says it honoured Marie-Antoinette's favourite flowers and perfume. His first customers were the fashionable young Parisians who emerged after the Terror, known as the Incroyables, and their companions, the Merveilleuses. According to the company, their extravagant style soon came to stand for a new kind of Parisian savoir-vivre, and Lubin's scents went with it. Empress Joséphine, the wife of Napoleon I, had him supply her perfume, and, according to the house, Napoleon's sister Pauline Bonaparte, later Princess Borghese, lent her name to one of his creations. ## History & milestones ### Perfumer to the courts of Europe When the Bourbon dynasty returned to power in 1815, Lubin claimed the title of "holder of the Beauty Secrets of the French Court", the legacy he said Fargeon had left him. Under the patronage of the Duke of Angoulême, whose wife Marie-Thérèse was the only child of Marie-Antoinette to survive the Revolution, he renamed his boutique "Aux Armes de France", after the royal coat of arms. Royal appointments followed. According to the company, Lubin became official supplier to George IV of England in 1821 and to Tsar Alexander I of Russia in 1823. Wikipedia records that he created "Eau de Chypre" for the Russian emperor in 1821. During the reign of Louis-Philippe and his queen, Maria Amelia, which began in 1830, the house finally obtained the title of Official Perfumer of the French Royal Court. ### The Prot family and the factory age In 1844 the house passed to Félix Prot, who had trained under Lubin and whom the company describes as the founder's spiritual heir [2]. Prot began to take the business abroad. He also built what Lubin calls Europe's first modern perfume factory, in Cannes on the Côte d'Azur, which opened in 1873. Steam machines were used there to produce perfumes and to extract essential oils. His son Paul Prot took over in 1885. The company portrays him as an outward-looking manager who spoke fluent English and German, travelled widely and built an international network over a career of more than fifty years. In 1900 he opened a production site in Courbevoie, on the edge of Paris, which the house says was the largest perfume factory in France at the time. His sons Marcel and Pierre ran the business through the 1920s. ### The American market Lubin describes the United States as the scene of its greatest commercial success. The sources disagree slightly on when that began. Wikipedia says Lubin's perfumes were imported to America in 1830 [12]; the company dates its US expansion to the late 1830s, when Theo Studley was appointed its first American representative in New York [2]. Lubin also set up premises in New Orleans and St. Louis. Studley represented the house for more than sixty years. When he retired in 1898, Lubin created its own subsidiary in New York. That subsidiary had to close in 1930, after the 1929 crash, but an agent kept distribution going in the United States. The house continued to launch new perfumes through the difficult decade. Nuit de Longchamp, released in 1937, became according to the company a major success in the United States. ### Post-war revival At the end of the Second World War, in 1945, the cousins André and Paul Prot, sons of Marcel and Pierre, took charge. In 1955 they launched Gin Fizz, composed by the perfumer Henri Giboulet. Fragrantica reports that it was created as a tribute to Grace Kelly in the year she won an Oscar for The Country Girl. L'Eau Neuve followed in 1968, which the company describes as another success for the family's final generation in charge. ## Ownership The Prot family's era ended in 1969, when the family decided to sell the company [12]. What followed was a series of corporate owners. By the 1970s the house belonged to the French perfume house Roger&Gallet. In 1984 it was bought by Mülhens, one of the oldest German perfume houses, based in Cologne, and Lubin's production moved to the Mülhens factory in Bickendorf near Cologne. Ten years later, in 1994, Mülhens was itself taken over by the German haircare company Wella, which decided to part with Lubin at the end of the twentieth century. The new owner was Gilles Thévenin, a former head of creation at Guerlain. The date of his takeover is given differently depending on the source. The company's own history places it simply "at the end of the 20th century", when Thévenin and two of Paul Prot's sons "decided to take over the brand's destiny" [2]. Fragrantica dates the rescue to 1998, describing a house on the brink of bankruptcy that Thévenin saved with the support of former owners and of perfumers who reworked old formulas [13]. Wikipedia places the takeover in the early 2000s [12]. Under Thévenin, Lubin became independent again. Wikipedia describes the house as still in private hands, with a subsidiary in New York and another in London. The company's registered office is at 3 rue du Roule in Paris. CaFleureBon described Thévenin in 2015 as the house's creative director and president. ## Philosophy & positioning Lubin presents itself as a Paris house that continues the ideals of its 1798 founder. It describes itself as having made perfume "for more than 220 years", and its stated aim is to keep creating perfumes of the highest quality "that will enchant generations to come". In practice that heritage works in two directions: the house revives formulas from its archive, and it commissions new perfumes that borrow names, places or stories from its past. The revival work is the most distinctive part of that approach. According to the company and to Fragrantica, perfumers who had worked for Lubin in earlier decades helped the new management reconstruct forgotten formulas, which allowed it to bring back Nuit de Longchamp and Gin Fizz among others. Modern safety rules set limits on how close such reconstructions can come. When the house tried to revive the vintage Daïmo for a new collection, it found that the original formula could not meet current IFRA fragrance regulations, so only the name was kept. Thévenin has also used interviews to describe a commercial philosophy. Speaking to Fragrantica in 2019, he said that the premium perfume market had been disrupted by online discounting, and that Lubin had never set its prices high only to cut them heavily later. He described the house's regular collection as "not expensive" for its category. On sustainability, the company says its fragrance formulas use plant-based ingredients "as much as is practically possible", and that it is gradually simplifying its packaging to reduce paper and plastic. No third-party certifications are documented. ## Products & innovation Lubin's perfumes are organised into several named collections. The Classique collection includes Gin Fizz alongside Black Jade, Grisette, Kismet, Epidor, Princesses de Malabar, Upper Ten for Her and Kigriz. The Evocations collection includes L'Eau Neuve, Itasca, Vetiris, Attique, Jardin Rouge, Mandarino and Brittany Breeze. The Talismania collection groups Idole de Lubin, Upper Ten, Akkad and Korrigan, while a series called Portraits de femmes consists of three scents named Anna, Eva and Magda. The house credits a small circle of collaborators on its "Talents" page: the perfumers Delphine Thierry, Olivia Giacobetti and Thomas Fontaine, and the glass artist Serge Mansau, who designed bottles for the brand. ### Historical creations Of the house's early perfumes, Eau de Chypre, made for Tsar Alexander I in 1821, is the best documented. Nuit de Longchamp (1937), Gin Fizz (1955) and L'Eau Neuve (1968) are the twentieth-century perfumes most closely tied to the brand today, and the first two have been reconstructed from their original formulas. A 2005 review on the fragrance blog Bois de Jasmin put the total number of fragrances created over the house's history at about 466, and noted that its prominence faded during the twentieth century [16]. ### Idole de Lubin Idole de Lubin was the first perfume created under the new owners. It was composed by Olivia Giacobetti and shares its name with a Lubin fragrance from the early 1960s, though it is a new composition rather than a remake. Its launch date is given two ways in the same Fragrantica article: Thévenin said Idole was presented in 2004, in a pre-series of 300 bottles, while the article dates its official launch to 2005 [13]. Giacobetti built the perfume around the maritime spice routes. Its notes include rum, saffron, bitter orange, black cumin, sugar cane, leather and red sandalwood. Reviewing it in November 2005, Bois de Jasmin gave it four stars, called it one of the perfumer's darkest and most voluptuous works, and suggested that it suited men as well as women because it has no heavy floral heart. ### Upper Ten Upper Ten, released in 2015 and composed by Thomas Fontaine, takes its name from a phrase coined around 1850 by the American poet Nathaniel Parker Willis for the self-made elite of the Industrial Age. The company's launch text described it as the scent of a New York or Chicago gentlemen's club in 1880, built on cedar, sandalwood and leather with a floral touch of geranium, cardamom and cinnamon over an amber and musk base. ### Aristia In 2019 Lubin introduced Aristia, a collection it describes as "Haute Parfumerie". In an interview at the Esxence fragrance fair in May 2019, Thévenin described it as the house's equivalent of haute couture: six extraits de parfum, produced in very small quantities and reserved for a limited number of high-end retailers, which he estimated at no more than about 100 worldwide [14]. Thomas Fontaine and Delphine Thierry each created three of the six perfumes, after a development period of more than three years. The name comes from the Greek word for excellence, which Thévenin linked to Homer's descriptions of heroic warriors. Each perfume honours a figure from a different civilisation: Gajah Mada, a fourteenth-century Javanese general; Daïmo, a Japanese daimyo; Condottiere, a mercenary captain of the Italian Renaissance; Galaor, a wandering Spanish knight of the twelfth century; Sinbad, the legendary sailor from Basra; and Sarmate, inspired by warriors of the late Roman Empire. Thévenin described the collection as a statement that Lubin could produce high-level perfumery "without cheating and marketing tricks". ## Recognition No awards are documented for the house. Its history and revival have, however, drawn sustained attention from the fragrance press. Fragrantica published a long interview with Thévenin on the history of the house and the reconstruction of its old formulas, and a second interview in 2019 about the Aristia collection. CaFleureBon covered the launch of Upper Ten in 2015, and Bois de Jasmin reviewed Idole de Lubin in 2005. The house's place in the cultural history of perfume rests largely on its clientele. Its early history is tied to the high society of the Napoleonic era, and its documented clients and dedicatees include Empress Joséphine, Pauline Bonaparte, George IV and Alexander I. Gin Fizz added a twentieth-century name to that list through its tribute to Grace Kelly. ## Current status Lubin is an active, privately held perfume house. Production returned to France in 2004, and the perfumes are now made in small quantities in the Loire Valley [12]. According to Wikipedia, the house sells through a network of several hundred high-end retailers in about 30 countries. It also runs an online shop and a boutique in Paris, at 21 rue des Canettes. ## Timeline {#belagg-timeline} | Year | Event | Source | |---|---|---| | 1798 | Pierre-François Lubin opens his Paris boutique 'Au Bouquet de Roses' | https://www.lubin.eu/en/history/ | | 1815 | After the Bourbon restoration the boutique is renamed 'Aux Armes de France' | https://www.lubin.eu/en/history/ | | 1821 | Official supplier to George IV of England (and to Tsar Alexander I in 1823) | https://www.lubin.eu/en/history/ | | 1821 | Eau de Chypre created for Russian Emperor Alexander I | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parfums_Lubin | | 1830 | Title of Official Perfumer of the French Royal Court under Louis-Philippe and Maria Amelia | https://www.lubin.eu/en/history/ | | 1844 | House passes to Félix Prot, trained by Lubin | https://www.lubin.eu/en/history/ | | 1844 | Ownership passes from founder Pierre-François Lubin to Félix Prot (Prot family ownership until 1969) | https://www.lubin.eu/en/history/ | | 1873 | Perfume factory in Cannes opens, using steam machines | https://www.lubin.eu/en/history/ | | 1885 | Paul Prot takes over | https://www.lubin.eu/en/history/ | | 1898 | Lubin-owned subsidiary created in New York | https://www.lubin.eu/en/history/ | | 1900 | Production facility opened in Courbevoie near Paris | https://www.lubin.eu/en/history/ | | 1930 | American subsidiary closes after the 1929 crash; US distribution continues via an agent | https://www.lubin.eu/en/history/ | | 1937 | Nuit de Longchamp launched | https://www.lubin.eu/en/history/ | | 1945 | André and Paul Prot take over | https://www.lubin.eu/en/history/ | ## Signature products {#belagg-products} - **Gin Fizz (1955)** — The new team launched Gin Fizz in 1955, a creation of celebrated perfumer Henri Giboulet. — https://www.lubin.eu/en/history/ - **Nuit de Longchamp (1937)** — Nuit de Longchamp met an incredible success in the USA — https://www.lubin.eu/en/history/ - **L'Eau Neuve (1968)** — launching L’Eau Neuve with great success in 1968 — https://www.lubin.eu/en/history/ - **Idole de Lubin (2005)** — Idole was the first perfume by Lubin under the new owners. It was officially launched in 2005. — https://www.fragrantica.com/news/History-of-Lubin-Interview-with-Gilles-Thevenin-2030.html - **Eau de Chypre (1821, historical)** — In 1821, Pierre François Lubin created «Eau de Chypre» for the Russian Emperor Alexander I. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parfums_Lubin ## Mentioned in {#belagg-press} - **Fragrantica** — Interview by Elena Knezevic with owner Gilles Thevenin on the history of Lubin and the revival of old formulas (Gin Fizz, Nuit de Longchamp, L'Eau Neuve, L de Lubin); publication year not shown in fetched text — https://www.fragrantica.com/news/History-of-Lubin-Interview-with-Gilles-Thevenin-2030.html - **Fragrantica** (2019) — Sergey Borisov interviews Gilles Thevenin at Esxence (May 16, 2019) about the Aristia collection: extraits de parfum, no more than about 100 doors worldwide, EUR 250 per 100 ml — https://www.fragrantica.com/news/Gilles-Thevenin-About-Aristia-a-New-Exclusive-Collection-By-Lubin-12252.html - **CaFleureBon** (2015) — Launch announcement of Upper Ten (perfumer Thomas Fontaine), November 15, 2015 — http://www.cafleurebon.com/new-fragrance-lubin-paris-upper-ten-the-scent-of-success/ - **Bois de Jasmin** (2005) — Review of Idole de Lubin by Olivia Giacobetti, 4 stars (November 25, 2005; saved as tool summary only, not verbatim) — https://boisdejasmin.com/2005/11/fragrance_revie_17-2.html ## Sources 2. (T1) https://www.lubin.eu/en/history/ 12. (T3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parfums_Lubin 13. (T3) https://www.fragrantica.com/news/History-of-Lubin-Interview-with-Gilles-Thevenin-2030.html 14. (T3) https://www.fragrantica.com/news/Gilles-Thevenin-About-Aristia-a-New-Exclusive-Collection-By-Lubin-12252.html 15. (T3) http://www.cafleurebon.com/new-fragrance-lubin-paris-upper-ten-the-scent-of-success/ 16. (T3) https://boisdejasmin.com/2005/11/fragrance_revie_17-2.html --- Glowpedia · · Published 2026-10-13 Please cite with a link to the article URL.