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.)

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 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.”

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.”

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 of the materials, the artistry of the craftsmanship.

He has a special fondness for Guerlain bottles, and has an entire room dedicated to them. There are several, he says, that even Guerlain historians have never seen before, including a green-glass Shalimar flacon and a hand-painted porcelain vessel adorned with butterflies. These, like many of the Guerlains, are small bottles, sprinkled throughout his collection among the factices. He keeps a rare tortue bottle in the shape of a tortoise, made to commemorate the 1913 opening of the Champs-Élysées Guerlain boutique, stashed in a drawer. And he recently acquired the showstopping, feather-embellished Shalimar bottle made by Brazilian artist Janaïna Milheiro to mark the perfume’s centenary in 2025. “Guerlain has remained true to its identity across the generations. It has never been sold, and it has never lost touch with its history,” Gupta says. “For me, it’s not about my love for the fragrances, but about my love for the house itself.”

“Every year we unveil new, one-of-a-kind bottles, which Gupta has carefully followed and often collected. He has spent countless hours researching archives and documenting his findings,” says Maxime Poulin, director of client experience at Guerlain US. “His collection is a stunning representation of the perfume industry’s history in the flesh. Walking through his archive, you are reminded that fragrances are part of our lives and are the strongest trigger of emotional memories.”

Currently, the Facticerie can only be visited by private appointment, but Gupta and Acosta hope to secure a larger space in Manhattan that will be open to the public. “We get thousands of emails from people who want to come visit the Facticerie, but as it is, it is very hard to coordinate,” says Acosta. Gupta’s vision is grand. “I want it to be the Louvre or the Smithsonian of factices,” he says. “I grew up very poor, and I have spent my life building this. All of the money I have ever made has gone into the collection. It is my dream that the world will see it.”

Gupta’s already getting started on that dream. First up? A collaboration with New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), where a Facticerie exhibition dedicated to Guerlain was unveiled on June 9. Housed in the School of Graduate Studies Beauty Center, it will be the first in a rotating series of exhibitions, each dedicated to showcasing a different perfume house. Gupta is also planning to launch a Facticerie fragrance in 2028 (the scent is still TBD, but the bottle—of course—is already finalized); he hopes that it will draw even more attention to his precious bottles. “Factices are not simply display objects, but endangered artworks carrying memory, craftsmanship, and cultural history,” he says. “The perfumes may disappear, but these bottles will survive to tell their stories. We must make sure they are not lost.”

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