Officine Universelle Buly has made a scented ballpoint pen: guilloché-engraved aluminium, a replaceable 10ml vial, three double-concentrated oils to lay on the wrist or the nape
Officine Universelle Buly has put on sale a perfume holder shaped like a ballpoint pen. The body is aluminium, engraved with a guilloché pattern. Inside sits a 10ml vial that unscrews and can be swapped. The ball at the tip does not write: it lays perfumed oil on the skin, at the wrist, the nape, the centre of the décolleté.
Three scents are available: Amber of Madagascar, Tuberose of Mexico, Iris of Malta. The object measures 126.87 by 22.78 millimetres.
Buly’s perfume roll-on dressed as a pen
The mechanism is the roll-on, the format perfumed oils have used for decades. Buly changes the casing: in place of the pocket vial comes an object with the proportions and weight of a pen.
The change of casing changes the use. A roll-on stays in a bag, a pen stays in a jacket or on a table. The company insists on the discreet gesture and on changing scent with the occasion. In practice, the object is built to sit in plain sight without declaring what it holds.
Double-concentrated perfume oil, not an eau de parfum
The content is an oil, not an alcohol solution. Alcohol evaporates and carries the volatile notes with it; an oil stays on the skin and releases them slowly, for a hold the company puts at up to eight hours. The formula combines concentrated essences with emollients, the substances that hold moisture in the skin.
It follows the rest of the house. Buly built its recognition on alcohol-free perfumes, the eaux triples, formulated in water.
Guilloché engraving: from watchmaking to a perfume pen
The aluminium body carries a guilloché pattern, a mechanical engraving that produces repeated geometric motifs — waves, rays, crossed grids. The technique comes from goldsmithing and watchmaking, where it decorates dials and cases, and it passed from there to fountain pens and silverware. The drawing is cut by working the piece against a tool guided by a template: the motif repeats, and the work needs a dedicated machine.
On a perfume holder the reference is explicit. Guilloché and pens belong to the same imagery, the desk instrument of the early twentieth century.
Buly perfume pen refill: €140 for the pen, €60 for a vial
The vials are sold separately and change inside the body of the pen. This is where the commercial argument sits: one container, three contents, interchangeable.
The arithmetic is quick. The €140 pen includes one vial, and every further refill costs €60 for 10 millilitres, or €6 per millilitre. Keeping all three scents means buying two refills on top of the pen, €260 in total, unless the buyer wants three pens. The company advises against swapping the balls between vials, since the ball holds a residue of the oil it has worked with.
Officine Universelle Buly, from Jean-Vincent Bully to LVMH
The house has a history in two parts. Jean-Vincent Bully opened his perfumery on rue Saint-Honoré in Paris in 1803 and built his name on an aromatic vinegar, patented in 1809 and 1814 and awarded at the Expositions Universelles of 1867 and 1878. The figure entered literature: the perfumer at the centre of César Birotteau, the novel Balzac published in 1837, is held to be modelled on him.
The second part begins in 2014, when Victoire de Taillac and Ramdane Touhami took the name back and opened at 6 rue Bonaparte, in the sixth arrondissement. The shops follow a nineteenth-century pharmacy scheme, with marble counters, walnut cabinets and alembics, and the products are wrapped by hand. In October 2021 LVMH acquired the company.
The scented pen sits in that line: an object that takes the shape of an old instrument and puts a current function inside.
