What Is Bond No. 9?

Bond No. 9 is an American perfume house founded in New York in 2003 by Laurice Rahmé and named after its first boutique at 9 Bond Street, in the NoHo district of Manhattan. Instead of one signature scent, the house built its identity out of the city itself: its fragrances are named for New York neighbourhoods, streets and landmarks — Bleecker Street, Nuits de Noho, Brooklyn, Park Avenue, Chinatown, The Scent of Peace, Perfumista Avenue — and each bottle is built to be refilled rather than replaced. The line’s tagline says it plainly: Making Scents of New York.

Rahmé is Paris-born and came to fragrance through the business side — senior roles at Lancôme, then building the American operations of Annick Goutal and Creed before she launched her own house. Bond No. 9 opened in 2003 with sixteen “neighborhood fragrances”, at a moment when almost every prestige brand was still selling a single flagship signature. The city-as-collection idea, the coin-like token on the bottle and the refill counter at the boutique are what made the house collectible; the scents themselves made it last. Fragrantica’s database now lists more than 170 Bond No. 9 releases, from the 2003 debuts to new launches this year.

The house also runs a serious collector’s side: a licensing partnership with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts that ran from 2007 to 2013, a 2011 capsule made with New York State, custom blending at the boutique, and limited flacons finished with Swarovski crystals. That history is exactly why early Bond No. 9 bottles circulate as vintage stock today rather than as ordinary retail products.

Frequently Asked Questions About Bond No. 9 Perfume

Who founded Bond No. 9?

Laurice Rahmé, a Paris-born fragrance executive, founded Bond No. 9 in New York in 2003. Before launching the house she held senior roles at Lancôme and developed the American businesses of Annick Goutal and Creed — which is why the brand arrived with both a niche sensibility and department-store distribution from day one.

Why is it called Bond No. 9?

The name is literally an address: the house’s first boutique opened at 9 Bond Street in NoHo, Manhattan, and the company still keeps its main shop there. The bottle cap is shaped like a heavy coin — Bond No. 9’s signature “token” — a nod to the same idea, a small object of exchange you bring back to the counter for a refill.

Is Bond No. 9 perfume discontinued?

Bond No. 9 itself is still an active house, and core scents such as Park Avenue remain in production. What is discontinued is a large share of the collector catalogue. The Andy Warhol-labelled bottles ended when that licence closed in 2013 — the house kept the scents but renamed and repackaged them, so every bottle still printed with the Warhol name is a closed edition. The Swarovski-crystal holiday flacons, the Saks Fifth Avenue and Harrods co-branded exclusives, and most single-season limited editions are likewise gone from retail and now trade as discontinued stock.

What does Bond No. 9 Park Avenue smell like?

Park Avenue (2003) is a floral eau de parfum created for the house by Laurent Le Guernec. It opens with mimosa, lemon and chamomile, opens out into paperwhite and rose, and settles on musk, ebonywood and vanilla. It is a polished, powdery white floral — the house described it as “the light floral scent of infuriatingly discreet good taste”, and that is a fair summary: quiet, expensive-smelling and deliberately understated.

What does Bond No. 9 Brooklyn smell like?

Brooklyn (2008) was composed by Laurice Rahmé herself and is worn by both men and women. Cardamom and grapefruit open it, cypress, gin, juniper and geranium form the heart, and cedar, guaiac wood and leather close it — a dry, green-woody amber that reads more like a bottling of the borough’s industrial waterfront than the sweet gourmands the house is sometimes reduced to.

How the House Works: Concentration, Refills and Custom Blends

Most Bond No. 9 eaux de parfum are mixed at 18–22% pure perfume oil — high for the category, and the reason the scents tend to wear long and loud. The house’s “pure perfume” concentrations, including Bond No. 9 Signature, go up to 30%. Bottles are designed to be refilled at a Bond No. 9 boutique rather than thrown away, and the house offers custom blending by staff it calls “Bond Perfumistas” — a consultation in which a customer composes and bottles a personalised metro-fragrance.

Beyond its own five New York boutiques the line has been stocked at Saks Fifth Avenue, Harrods, Bloomingdale’s, Hudson’s Bay, Isetan, Sephora and De Bijenkorf. In 2013 the house even released what it billed as the first “digital scent” — a bottle printed with a scannable QR code — and marked its tenth anniversary with Perfumista Avenue, a fragrance named for a fantasy neighbourhood rather than a real one.

Top 5 Bond No. 9 Perfumes Every Collector Should Know

1. Nuits de Noho (2003) — the original NoHo night-out scent, and one of the sixteen fragrances that opened the house. Pineapple leaf, mandarin and bergamot sit over jasmine and Brazilian rosewood, drying down to patchouli, vanilla and musk. It remains the reference point for Bond No. 9’s fruit-and-musk register.
2. Park Avenue (2003) — the uptown floral, by Laurent Le Guernec: mimosa, lemon and chamomile over paperwhite and rose, with musk, ebonywood and vanilla underneath. Twenty-plus years on it is still the house’s most quoted example of restraint.
3. Bleecker Street (2005) — David Apel’s unisex woody: violet leaf, blueberry, cassis and thyme, a heart of cedar, jasmine and cinnamon, and a base of oakmoss, suede, patchouli, amber, vanilla and caramel. It is the Bond No. 9 that converted a generation of gourmand-woody buyers.
4. The Scent of Peace (2006) — Michel Almairac’s floral woody musk: grapefruit and black currant, a lily-of-the-valley heart, musk and Virginia cedar. Its bottle carries a peace sign and it is still one of the two or three names people say first when they say “Bond No. 9”.
5. Brooklyn (2008) — cardamom and grapefruit over cypress, gin, juniper and geranium, closing on cedar, guaiac wood and leather. The star-shaped clear bottle is painted with Brooklyn graffiti lettering, which makes it the most graphic design in the line — and one of the most counterfeited.

The Warhol Years and the I LOVE NY Capsule

From 2007 the house held a licensing partnership with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, producing fragrances whose bottles were decorated with Warhol’s work: Andy Warhol Silver Factory (2007), Union Square (2008), Lexington Avenue (2008), Success is a Job in New York (2009), Montauk (2010) and Andy Warhol by Bond No. 9 (2011). When the licence came to a close in 2013 the scents stayed in the catalogue but lost the Warhol name and packaging — which is precisely why the Warhol-labelled bottles, still sealed, are among the most searched-for Bond No. 9 objects today.

In 2011 the house launched a smaller I LOVE NY capsule celebrating the whole state of New York, in partnership with the State of New York; those bottles carry Milton Glaser’s original I♥NY logo, another design detail that makes them instantly identifiable in a listing photo.

Park Avenue vs Brooklyn: Which Bond No. 9 Is for You?

	Park Avenue (2003)	Brooklyn (2008)
Scent family	Floral, fresh and powdery	Amber spicy, woody and green
Perfumer	Laurent Le Guernec	Laurice Rahmé
Key notes	Mimosa, lemon, chamomile, paperwhite, rose, musk, ebonywood, vanilla	Cardamom, grapefruit, cypress, gin, juniper, geranium, cedar, guaiac wood, leather
Wear it	Daytime, office, spring and summer	Year-round, day into evening; unisex
Bottle	Classic Bond silhouette; white and gold sunburst box with the pink N.Y.C. seal	Clear star-shaped glass painted with Brooklyn graffiti lettering

How to Spot a Genuine Bond No. 9 Bottle

Bond No. 9 is counterfeited often enough that the packaging itself is the fastest check. These are the details we verify on every bottle we list:

• The box front. A genuine white box carries the gold sunburst pattern with the pink N.Y.C. seal at its centre, and the words Eau de Parfum / Natural Spray / Vaporisateur printed around it. The house logotype — cursive Bond no.9 above a smaller NEW YORK — sits below the seal.
• The volume marking. Sizes are printed exactly, e.g. 3.3 FL.OZ / 100ML. Vague or missing volume text is a warning sign.
• The box back. Genuine boxes print the manufacturer as Laurice & Co., Ltd, New York, NY 10012, the site www.bondno9.com, an ingredients line reading SD Alcohol 40-B, Fragrance, Deionized Water and a flammability warning — and they carry a barcode label printed with the actual scent name and size, for example PARK AVENUE 100ML. A box with no named barcode label is not right.
• The bottle. Heavy, thick-walled glass with crisp screen-printing, a properly aligned cap, and the circular BOND NYC No. 9 token. On Brooklyn specifically, the graffiti lettering should be sharp, multi-coloured and consistent — fakes print it flat, blurry and in fewer colours.
• The concentration. Bond No. 9 eaux de parfum run 18–22% oil. If a bottle smells thin and watery within twenty minutes, treat it with suspicion regardless of how the box looks.

Where to Buy Bond No. 9 Perfume Today

Bond No. 9 rotates its catalogue constantly, retires flankers and reissues packaging, so sealed older bottles stay in demand. These are the Bond No. 9 bottles currently in stock at TrendyGround — authentic, photographed as the exact unit you receive:

• Bond No. 9 Park Avenue Eau de Parfum 100 ml / 3.3 fl oz — $399: the 2003 uptown floral, full-size, with the original white-and-gold box and the pink N.Y.C. seal. View the bottle →
• Bond No. 9 Brooklyn Eau de Parfum 50 ml / 1.7 fl oz — $193: the 2008 unisex amber-woody in the graffiti-painted star bottle, supplied with its white box. See the Brooklyn bottle →

Because the house renames and repackages so often, stock moves quickly — if the specific scent you are chasing is not listed today, ask us: we source discontinued Bond No. 9 bottles year-round.

TrendyGround is a Hong Kong-based vintage and discontinued perfume specialist with 15+ years of trading history on eBay. All fragrances are authentic; bottle photographs show the actual unit for sale. Bond No. 9 is a trademark of its respective owner, used here for identification only.