Les Flacons De Parfum

The Perfume Flacons · A Thirty-Nine Poster Collection
Thirty-nine flacons, thirty-nine worlds.
In September 2026 we spent an afternoon at the Sanfilippo Estate Foundation’s Place de la Musique in
Barrington Hills, Illinois – one of the great private collections in America, and home to the Perfume
Passage Foundation, whose mission is preserving the history, beauty, and artistry of perfume bottles,
compacts, and vanity items. Among the music machines and magic lithos, the vitrines of antique
perfume bottles stopped us cold. Each flacon photographed that day has been reimagined here as a
vintage French perfume poster, treated in the artistic language of its own era: Art Deco sunbursts, Art
Nouveau whiplash lines, Rococo gilt, Surrealist dreams, Mid-Century color.

Some bottles announce their pedigree – Lalique doves and lilies, Guerlain’s imperial bees, Paloma
Picasso’s amber jewel, Kenzo’s leaf. Others arrived nameless, and we gave them names worthy of the
glass: L’Étoile d’Or, Le Baiser Doré, La Rose Bleue. Together they trace a century of perfume artistry,
from a Paris kitchen in 1817 to a Manhattan skyline gag.

Beauty is everywhere – even on a dressing table, caught in crystal, gold and light.