9 April 2026 |
We traveled to the South of France to see how the maison updated its signature object, without touching what made it a mainstay.
“It’s a construction,” Alexandra Carlin-Barbry tells us, turning the candle in her hands. “The Rhubarbe is 100 percent created by my brain.”
We are at Fondation Maeght in the hills above Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the South of France, surrounded by Miró sculptures and Giacometti bronzes. It’s the kind of place where the line between art and nature is blurred—which, it turns out, is exactly the kind of place to talk to a perfumer about creating a scent from nothing.
Carlin-Barbry is one of two perfumers behind the five new fragrances joining Diptyque’s herbarium of scents in 2026. The candle itself has also been subtly redesigned. Franco-Swiss designer Julie Richoz has reworked the glass vessel, adding a ridge that frames the label and sharpens the instantly-recognizable black-and-white oval. And for the first time, 10 of the maison’s scents will be available as refills.
The new Rhubarbe candle is passed around the group. I bring it to my nose expecting something sweet—the way most of us register rhubarb as something baked into a sugary tart. Instead, it’s crisp and green; it smells almost like the fields surrounding us. Rhubarb has no extractable essence; you cannot distill it the way you can a rose or cedar. So Carlin-Barbry built it instead, using carrot for its earthiness, and celery for what she calls “a bit of unease, a naturality.” Neither ingredient is detectable in the finished candle. “When you get stuck on a scent,” she says, “just go back to nature.”
For Diptyque’s founders, three artists who fell in love with the Mediterranean landscape, scent became their method of finding their way back.
Yves Coueslant, Christiane Montadre-Gautrot, and Desmont Knox-Leet.
SELLERS OF EVERYTHING, MAKERS OF NOTHING
Desmond Knox-Leet, an Englishman who was raised in the South of France, came to Paris as a young man to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. He was a talented artist who worked across mediums, and had a deep love of the Mediterranean and Greece, which were the subjects of many of his works. In 1949, he met Christiane Montadre-Gautrot, who grew up in an ivy-covered house near Paris and studied design at the École des Arts Décoratifs. Together, the duo designed and sold wallpapers to retailers like Liberty in London. Ten years later, Desmond met Yves Coueslant, a former banker turned set designer, theater manager, and actor—and, eventually, Desmond’s partner in life as well as work.
United by their common love for travel and the arts, Desmond, Yves, and Christiane opened Diptyque in 1961—named after the Greek diptychos and Renaissance diptych paintings—in the bohemian fifth arrondissement of Paris. The building on boulevard Saint-Germain formerly housed a bar and a jazz club; the bar’s hours and ‘No Smoking’ sign are still posted on the front door.
At the start, the boutique was something of a concept store. The maison’s eclectic founders sold antiques, objects collected from their travels, and necklaces and fabrics designed by Christiane. In 1964, the Gault-Millau guide called them “purveyors of trifles.” Diptyque was what the French called a mercerie—described in 18th century Paris as sellers of everything, makers of nothing. It wasn’t long before they began adding candles and fragrances to their offerings.
The original Diptyque boutique on boulevard Saint-Germain.
LETTERS IN MOTION
Upstairs above the Saint-Germain boutique, where the founders once kept their office and workshop, Desmond’s work is hung on the walls and displayed in cases: pencil drawings, stencils, and multiple iterations of the black-and-white india ink drawings that would become Diptyque’s signature.
The artist was the creative mind behind the maison’s visual identity, hand-drawing the lettering, the label design, and the landscapes and mythological scenes that still appear across the packaging today.
He was passionate about calligraphy, taking inspiration from early Gaelic alphabets in developing Diptyque’s typography. The recognizable ‘dancing letters’ function as calligrams, a visual in which the letters take the shape of a word’s meaning, arranging themselves into a silhouette. The influence of his wartime service is visible in their logic: Desmond worked with the Enigma machine during WWII, decoding German communications for the British army.
Standing in that archive, what strikes you is how contemporary everything looks. The candles themselves have hardly changed since Desmond designed the labels for them over 50 years ago. This year’s update is subtle, more tactile than it is visual. The glass vessel retains its weight, but a ridge frames the label and the black lettering is glossier and slightly raised to the touch, engaging even more of the senses.
Drawings by Desmond Knox-Leet in the Diptyque archives above the boutique.
THE HERBARIUM
At the time of Diptyque’s founding, candles were mostly used to get rid of the smell of smoke and cooking, but in 1963, Desmond saw an opportunity to turn the quotidian into something decorative and fragrant. The first three Diptyque scents—Thé (tea), Aubépine (hawthorn), and Cannelle (cinnamon)—were all nods to his English origins. Over the decades, Desmond would come to a perfumer with a collection of herbs and flowers picked from the garden, fruits, vegetables, and other fragrant objects, and ask for a scent to be made.
Now, Diptyque’s herbarium has more than 50 candle scents. It’s an “imaginary garden where you have all of nature flourishing at once… it’s part anchored in reality and part fantasy,” says Cecile de Buyer, the maison’s International Home Fragrances and Brand Animations Director. “The scents always encapsulate something, but it’s also kind of atypical, enigmatic, maybe a bit edgy. The founders loved scents that were wrong in some way. That’s the fine line the perfumer is always finding.”
Like Rhubarbe, Sésame Noir subverts expectations: it’s creamy rather than toasted, with a roasted note coming not from sesame itself but from coffee. And Shiso—perhaps the most technically demanding of the five new scents—arrives the way the herb itself does when you tear a leaf: aromatic and spicy, with an unexpected hint of almond and vanilla underneath.
THE PROCESS OF SCENT
At fragrance school, perfumers like Carlin-Barbry are taught everything from bottled fragrance to cosmetics to household products, but often not candles. Partly because the melting wax is challenging to handle in a school environment, partly because it’s a difficult art to teach.
“Gaining experience with candles will require you to learn every day of your life as a perfumer,” she says, paraphrasing what one of Diptyque’s original perfumers told her when she once asked him for advice early in her career. “There is no data or books that can teach you all the aspects of perfuming a candle. You have to experience each ingredient for yourself.”
When we visit Diptyque’s lab and factory in Provence, fragrance fills the air. Through windows, we can see candles coming off the line being burned for testing. Candles are being artificially aged in machines that simulate different temperatures and humidity to test their lifespan, and formulas are tested for their cold throw, wax pooling, and smoke.
The production process itself is unhurried. Wax and fragrance are melted together slowly overnight — too fast and the scent burns off. The wax is poured, cooled, reheated, and corrected three times before a candle is finished. Anything wider than 11 centimeters, or any candle with multiple wicks, is done entirely by hand, and takes two full days.
The head of the lab has been working with wax for 35 years. He can tell you why mineral wax releases fragrance more reliably than plant or animal alternatives, how the type of wick changes how a scent travels, and why ceramic and glass vessels produce entirely different results. Like Carlin-Barbry, he speaks about his work as something that can’t be learned, only accumulated over the years, through iteration, and through paying attention to what burns and what doesn’t.
It happens to be a Sésame Noir production day in the factory. The scent of it is everywhere—creamy, a bit roasted. Between Carlin-Barbry’s notebook and this production line, what started as an idea became something you hold in your hands.
