Discovery Set

A house named for a father.

Jean Robert is Justin Charles's perfume house, named for his father — a French teacher, former Haitian national team soccer player, and owner of an Italian menswear shop called Justin's, who always smelled of citrus, spice, and wood from the tray of bottles he kept on his dresser. Justin picked up perfumery decades after his father's death, eventually training at the Institute of Art and Olfaction.

The name was never really in question — his love of fragrance started with that tray of bottles.

Jean Robert takes its name from Jean Robert Charles, a Haitian-born high school French teacher who played for Haiti's national team and ran a men's clothing store called Justin's. Tennis was for recreation, and taken very seriously all the same. What the son remembers is a father who always smelled good, of citrus, spice and wood, and who kept a tray of bottles a child could hold and spray.

Justin Charles came to making fragrances from online media, design, technology, academia and political organising, after ordering an introduction kit online out of curiosity, with a five-month-old daughter at the time. Blending accords came first. Everything is hand-crafted in small batches and filtered several times, with sediment or cloudiness sometimes showing for the natural material in it.