A Trip Inside the World’s Largest Collection of Jumbo Perfume Bottles

24.06.2026, 16:40 allure.com

On a nondescript street in Hackensack, New Jersey, inside a low-slung, former industrial complex, there’s a place that will—literally—change your perspective on perfume. Not only is this a space filled floor-to-ceiling with fragrance bottles, but the bottles are all enormous. For one giddy, bewildered moment, you’ll feel like Alice in Wonderland. Did you become smaller? Or did the scale of the world around you suddenly change?

Welcome to the Facticerie, recognized by Guinness World Records as the planet’s largest collection of oversized perfume bottles. This is the passion project of Sudhir Gupta and his wife Mercedes Acosta, who have assembled nearly 4,000 jumbo bottles, or “factices,” spanning more than 100 years of perfume history. Factices began to be produced in the late 19th century when perfume sales shifted from pharmacies to department stores. The attention-grabbing bottles could be anywhere from 12 inches (for a countertop) to over 24 inches (for a display window) tall and acted as de facto advertisements enticing customers to smell the scents their smaller bottles contained. (The term “factice” comes from the French word factice, which means artificial or imitation.)

Facticerie owner Sudhir Gupta with a colossal bottle of Tom Ford For Men, which launched in 2007.

Until the middle of the 20th century, factices were often crafted by luxury glassmakers including Baccarat and Lalique to be exact replicas of their regular-sized counterparts, filled with colored water or alcohol to mimic the look of actual perfume. They grew bigger and bolder through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, but by the early 2000s, their production had begun to peter out. Not only were they prohibitively expensive to produce, but the whole culture of retail had begun to shift.

Gupta’s obsession with factices began like something from a fairy tale. When he immigrated to the United States from India in the early 1990s, he took a job at a perfume wholesaler on Canal Street in New York City, hoping to earn enough money to save for a master’s degree in engineering. One fateful day, he was sent to the basement to clean—and that’s where he saw his first factice. “It was sitting on a shelf, covered in dust,” he says. “I had no idea what it was, but it felt as though it was calling to me.”

Gupta asked his boss if he could buy the bottle, and the man laughed at him: “He told me it was none of my business. But I kept asking, until finally he said he would take $2,000 for it.” It took Gupta a year to save the money on his meager salary, visiting the basement every day to gaze upon the treasure. “I didn’t know why I wanted the bottle or what I was going to do with it. I just loved it. That was the start of my journey,” he says. “Thirty-three years ago.”

The first factice that Gupta acquired, in the early 1990s: Nina Ricci L’Air Du Temps.

A two-foot-tall Lanvin Arpège, towering over vanity-appropriate versions.

The bottle in question was a supersized Nina Ricci L’Air Du Temps, now mounted on a slab of Lucite and displayed in a place of honor in the Facticerie. It’s easy to understand why it transfixed Gupta when he first encountered it. Designed by Marc Lalique in 1951, the bottle is fashioned from twisted glass, with a stopper in the shape of two soaring doves. It is probably one of the most famous perfume bottles of all time, but seeing it in this extra-large format is very rare. Gupta places a hand on it reverentially. “I still get goosebumps every time I look at it,” he says.

Hooked, Gupta began scouring flea markets looking for more factices, and making friends at department stores who would quietly sell him bottles they found in storage. “It was difficult,” he says, “because they were not supposed to be sold.” When he learned that nearly 40 factices had been trashed during a renovation of a Neiman Marcus in White Plains, his hobby took on new meaning. “I grew fearful that these bottles were going to be lost completely,” he says. “They were made to glorify beauty. But once their purpose was served or a new launch came along, they were discarded. No one thought to preserve them.”

Gupta never did get a master's in engineering. Instead, he started a business selling discontinued fragrances from home. He went on to establish his own perfume wholesale and distribution business, Eau De Luxe Ltd. (for regular-sized bottles). But he also made it his mission to rescue as many factices as he could, expanding his search nationally and then internationally, establishing a network of contacts that could help him liberate these large-scale flacons from dusty basements around the world. “My name, Gupta, means ‘guardian,’” he says. “I think I was destined to be a guardian, but didn’t realize what I was meant to protect until I discovered factices.”

A toddler-sized L’Or de Torrente factice, made for French fashion house Torrente in the early 2000s.

A very royal Prince Matchabelli factice (the brand was founded in 1926 in New York by a Georgian prince).

The Facticerie itself was the brainchild of Acosta, a Venezuelan-born creative director and former floral designer. When the couple first met, Gupta’s entire collection was hidden away in boxes. “He is a very private person,” Acosta says. “I told him, ‘People need to know what you are preserving. You have to show these bottles.’” They had a smaller display space in Queens, New York, but during the pandemic, Acosta transferred the collection to Hackensack. “She said, ‘Just give [me] the credit card. I don’t want you to see it until it’s done,’” Gupta recalls. But just as she was about to reveal the new space to him, Gupta fell severely ill with COVID and was hospitalized for 20 days. “I thought he might never see it,” Acosta says. “That makes the Facticerie a very meaningful place for me.”

The Facticerie contains several rooms lined with shelves laden with gargantuan bottles, culminating in what Gupta considers to be his “greatest rescue”: The complete interior of Lascoff Drugs, a beloved Upper East Side pharmacy that closed in 2012 after 113 years in business. Gupta saved the interior from demolition, and Acosta had it installed in Hackensack, complete with the original Tiffany pendant lamps, glass display cabinets, and wooden wall units with drawers still labeled with the herbs and medicinal potions they once contained. It’s like a museum within a museum. “Lascoff was a landmark,” Gupta says, “a piece of New York history. Salvador Dalí used to come in and buy leeches there.” He shrugs. “He was a weird guy.”

Mercedes Acosta and the transplanted interior of Lascoff Drugs, a New York City pharmacy that closed in 2012 after 113 years.

Speaking of that weird guy, every bottle in Salvador Dalí's perfume line is housed at the Facticerie—it's the only complete set in the world. Really everywhere you look in this space there are treasures. Several Schiaparelli Shocking bottles, modeled after actress Mae West’s bodice in 1937, are arranged in a glamorous huddle opposite the 1990s Jean Paul Gaultier bottle for Le Male that they inspired. There are factices of Andy Warhol perfume from the early 2000s, a monumental 1980s sculpted serpent bottle from artist Nikki de Saint Phalle, an assortment of vintage Prince Matchabelli bottles made to look like royal crowns (the brand was founded in 1926 in New York by a Georgian prince), and a Valentino Vendetta from the early 1990s in the shape of a fan designed by the legendary bottle designer Serge Manseau. The rarest items in Gupta’s collection include a red Chanel No. 5 factice from 2018, a bottle of Three Flowers by American perfume pioneer Richard Hudnut dating to about 1915, and an elegant flacon for the Spanish perfumery Parera from the 1920s with a stopper in the shape of a woman, believed to be one of only two in the world (the other is in the Museu del Perfum in Barcelona).

A duo of Andy Warhol factices from the early 2002 flank a bust of the artist.

Gupta meticulously logs all of his acquisitions in a database, but says he often can’t remember where a bottle came from or even how much it is worth. He believes the most valuable factice in his collection could be a cobalt blue Lalique bottle for the Worth fragrance Je Reviens from 1932, which, he says “might have a market value of around $25,000, but I really don’t know,” and a 1920s Caron urn, “Les Fontaines Baccarat,” which he purchased from the estate of dollmaker Madam Alexander and is estimated to be worth about $100,000. The money, in Gupta’s view, is immaterial. “These are historical artifacts,” he says. “I don’t see them as bottles. They are memories cast in glass.”

Visitors to the Facticerie, he says, almost always have an emotional response, catching sight of a bottle they remember from another time in their lives that they had forgotten. “Whether it was their aunt, their grandmother, their father, their sister,” Gupta says, “they see the bottle, and it takes them back.” We often think about the way that smelling a fragrance can transport us through time, but these bottles have the same impact; their distinctive silhouettes are embedded in our minds, especially if we first saw them on the vanity of a loved one. “I worry that the new generation doesn’t care about bottles,” says Gupta. “They smell something today, and tomorrow another fragrance is coming. I don’t think that the industry understands anymore that the bottle is as important as the perfume.”

A rare example of the Guerlain “flacon tortue,” designed by Jacques Guerlain in 1913 to commemorate the opening of the house’s flagship boutique at 68 Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris. (The turtle-shaped bottle was a reference to the slow progress of the store’s construction.)

As Gupta moves through the Facticerie, he pulls out some of his favorites, including a limited edition early 2000s piece from Caron for Nuit de Noel in which the perfume is cradled in the basket of a Limoges porcelain hot air balloon, pointing out the care with which they were made, the weight