Wax Oval 34, Boulevard Saint-Germain

Diptyque offers refillable candles and refillable body and hair care, and produces in France.

In 1961 three friends — a painter, an interior designer, a theater set designer — opened a shop on the boulevard Saint-Germain selling their own fabrics and all manner of beautiful things. It soon became the house that lifted the scented candle from useful object to art (the first three, in 1963: hawthorn, cinnamon, tea). The oval label with its “dancing letters” was hand-drawn by the painter Desmond Knox-Leet — a former Bletchley Park codebreaker who poured his love of ciphers into the lettering. To this day Diptyque smells of bookishness and faraway places: Baies, Philosykos, Tam Dao, Do Son. Made in France.