The shop at 6 rue Bonaparte looks older than it is. That is the point of it. L’Officine Universelle Buly sells water-based perfume, plant oils, soap and hairbrushes from behind a hand-painted shopfront in the sixth arrondissement of Paris, in a room fitted out to look like a nineteenth-century pharmacy that never closed. It closed. It reopened in 2014.
The original was real. Jean-Vincent Bully was selling perfume on the rue Saint-Honoré in the early nineteenth century, and the house dates itself to 1803. What happened between then and now is what happens to a small Paris house: nothing. Then Ramdane Touhami and Victoire de Taillac-Touhami took the name and the date and rebuilt the business around them.
The reconstruction is unusually complete. There is no visible modern packaging anywhere in the range: labels are lithographed, bottles are turned, the typography is set as a nineteenth-century apothecary would have set it, and the shop assistant writes the customer’s name on the parcel in copperplate. It should be unbearable. It is not, because the products underneath the styling are specific.
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The catalogue now runs past 800 product variants: perfumes, scented candles, soaps, plant oils, other preparations for the body, the face and the hair, and the accessories that go with them. The house’s signature is the alcohol-free perfume, formulated on a water base rather than on ethanol. That is a different proposition on the skin, and it is not a distinction invented for the label.
That formulation is the one genuinely technical claim the house makes, and it is the one worth testing on the back of a hand before anything else in the shop. Everything else on the shelf is a nineteenth-century argument. The water base is a chemical one.
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The house is no longer independent. LVMH acquired L’Officine Universelle Buly in October 2021; Nathalie Elbaz is chief executive and the business now runs 59 locations worldwide, with its head office at 27-29 rue Guénégaud. That is a large number of nineteenth-century pharmacies to keep convincing, and the rue Bonaparte shop remains the one to see first.
Go in the morning, before the queue that the rue Bonaparte address collects, and ask to have something engraved or written out; the counter service is half of what you are buying. If you take one thing away, take a plant oil rather than a perfume. That is the shelf where the formulation talk earns its keep.
L’Officine Universelle Buly, 6 rue Bonaparte, 75006 Paris. Tel. +33 1 43 29 02 50. Open daily 10.00-18.00. www.buly1803.com