TOBBA PARFUMS: The Hong Kong Perfume Brand Built by a Painter and a Fashion Buyer

“The visual principles I once used on canvas, layering, contrast, and changes in color temperature, now shape my approach to scent.”

— Jasper Li (co-founder and perfumer)

A painter who once layered paint began to layer fragrance materials. Beside him is a buyer who has discovered new brands in the fashion world and brought them to customers. TOBBA PARFUMS is a Hong Kong perfume brand born from these two different experiences.

Layers within a picture, differences in the warmth of colors, familiar smells, and the relationships depicted in music all provide creative starting points. Following the brand’s path reveals how making perfume continues Jasper Li’s work as a painter.

Essential Information
The Founders and the Brand’s Origins
The Brand’s Commitments
Incidentally…
References

Essential Information

Founded: 2021
Founders: Jasper Li and Adrian Yu
Place of origin: Hong Kong
Official website: TOBBA PARFUMS

Li handles perfumery and artistic and visual direction, while Yu handles communication, operations, and sales. Their structure connects creativity nurtured in Hong Kong with manufacturing in France.

The Founders and the Brand’s Origins

A Brand Name Inherited from His Father’s Studio

Li’s father was also a painter. As a child, Li visited his father’s studio to play and learned to paint there. His father also worked in a tobacco shop and is said to have brought tobacco samples home from the shop to smoke in the studio.

His father named the space “TOBBA,” combining “tobacco” and “art.” Li passed the name of his father’s studio on to his perfume brand. The name preserves both the place where he learned to paint and the smell that belonged to it.

From Painting to Perfumery, Learning Fragrance Materials Independently

Before making perfume, Li worked as a painter. Around the time he completed a solo exhibition, he wanted to explore a new form of expression and decided to take a break from painting. At just that time, another artist in the same studio was making work using plants from Hong Kong.

While that plant-based work continued, different smells drifted through the studio each day. They awakened Li’s interest in creating with the sense of smell. He sensed expressive possibilities akin to painting in smells that have no visible image.

“I began ordering fragrance materials online because I couldn’t buy them here.”

— Jasper Li

At first, it began with the pleasure of mixing fragrance materials in his own studio. Li ordered raw materials online, asked questions in Facebook groups, and had family and friends try his scents. He continued teaching himself this way for about five years.

During this period, Li did not begin with a set curriculum at a perfumery school: he smelled materials himself, combined them, and shared them with those around him. Learning to connect the aesthetic sensibility he had cultivated through painting with scent was part of these experiments.

Broadening His Experience at a Perfumery Course in Bangkok

In time, he wanted to study perfumery more technically and systematically. He chose a two-month course held in Bangkok by a fragrance-material supplier. He studied Monday to Friday, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

He met people from different countries on the course. Fellow students from the Middle East were particularly inspiring. Learning about their food cultures, the custom of burning incense at home, and their use of fragrance brought Li into contact with scent cultures different from his own everyday life. Experiences from other places joined his self-directed learning in Hong Kong.

Meeting a Fashion Buyer and Founding the Brand in 2021

Yu worked on introducing new brands at the department store Lane Crawford. Through fashion buying, he had gained experience in brand operations and the market.

The two met before the COVID-19 pandemic through mutual acquaintances spanning art and fashion. Yu became interested in the creative direction of Li, who had returned to Hong Kong after completing his perfumery course. A scent maker and someone who could communicate that creativity as a brand were to join forces.

Through his fashion work, Yu had seen how customers respond not only to products but also to a brand’s story and overall experience. Li, meanwhile, brought years of experimentation and a form of expression he wanted to transfer from painting to scent. Their roles took shape along the lines of their respective experience.

The pandemic, when more time was spent at home, also offered an opportunity to nurture the concept. Yu felt that people wanted to travel somewhere else through scent, at least in their imaginations. In 2021, the two founded TOBBA PARFUMS.

Manufacturing in France and Introducing the Brand in Europe

Bringing their creations into the world as perfumes required more than completing the scents. One major early challenge was finding a factory in France to which they could entrust production. They were in Hong Kong, and order volumes were still small. They needed a partner who could maintain quality while accommodating small production runs.

The turning point came through an introduction by a friend. Collaboration with the factory they found allowed production to proceed. They then put practical arrangements in place one by one, including warehousing, logistics, French tax registration, and inspection certificates. Turning a painter’s creations into a brand also involved this work.

In 2022, TOBBA PARFUMS exhibited for the first time at Esxence, the perfume exhibition in Milan, presenting six fragrances. This created a point of contact in Europe with visitors experiencing the scents.

Continuing to Paint and Collaborating with an Outside Perfumer

Even after taking up perfumery, Li still paints occasionally and works on the brand’s photography and campaign visuals. He regards painting and perfume as a continuous creative practice. Although the materials have changed, his approach to expression through color and composition continues.

In 2025, Higher Self, composed by Li, joined the range alongside Lovers and Strangers, created with an outside perfumer. Deepening his own perfumery and broadening expression with another creator began to progress side by side.

The Brand’s Commitments

Creating Fragrance through the Layers and Contrasts of Painting

Li brought more than subject matter from painting into perfumery. He finds parallels in how a work itself is constructed: layering, contrasts between materials, and compositions suggesting warmth and coolness. He says he is drawn to complexity within simplicity and to the tension created by contrasting elements.

Force is one example. Li combined cooling spearmint with the sweetness of licorice and cacao and a deep leather element. The composition uses contrasts between different sensations: coolness, sweetness, and depth.

TOBBA PARFUMS says that it selects materials for the emotional weight they carry. At the same time, it values removing what is unnecessary. Selecting and subtracting materials brings it closer to the emotion it wants to express.

Drawing Perfume Inspiration from Everyday Hong Kong Smells

For Li, Hong Kong is more than skyscrapers and harbor views. Within the rapidly changing city are traditional cultures and the everyday smells he has known since childhood. Fading customs and memories also provide creative starting points.

One inspiration for Higher Self was the smell of Tiger Balm, familiar in Hong Kong. Li also associated memories with Two Girls’ Florida Water. Both were inspirations brought into perfume from local everyday life.

When Yu first heard the idea, he thought it sounded like a very unusual, medicinal smell. Yet when he received the finished trial, its uplifting, almost meditative impression led him to think of the name “Higher Self.” Yu participates in Li’s creative work not only through operations but also by evaluating trials.

The fragrance combines wintergreen, which recalls Tiger Balm, with citrus, floral, woody, and musky elements. Taking a familiar smell as its subject and transferring it into the structure of a perfume is the creative choice at work here.

Exploring the Distance between Lovers and Strangers with a Perfumer

Lovers and Strangers was created through the brand’s first collaboration with Maxime Exler of the fragrance company MANE (in Japanese). The name comes from a Hong Kong song. The creative starting point was a duality: when in love, everything about the other person seems perfect, yet that person also seems somehow like a stranger.

After meeting MANE, Li began a dialogue with Exler, who had taken an interest in the brand. They brought together the materials of their respective expression, considering a shared theme while drawing on each person’s interpretation.

“What I really wanted to express was a feeling of ambiguity and hesitation, that moment between intimacy and separation.”

— Maxime Exler (perfumer)

Exler layered coffee, a warm rose, and Madagascan vanilla with elements of rum, prune, and tobacco. The aim was to use the appeal of sweet materials while expressing the tension between drawing closer and moving apart.

This was also the first TOBBA PARFUMS creation to place gourmand (in Japanese) elements, evocative of food and sweets, at its center. Another perfumer’s handling and interpretation of materials added an expression different from Li’s own perfumery to the brand.

Bottle Design and Visuals through Photography and Painting

The Higher Self bottle combines clear glass with rounded corners, a black cap, and a white label. The brand name appears prominently on the label, with the fragrance name below it and ample empty space.

Rather than adding colors or decoration to the container, the design centers on the liquid visible through the glass and on the lettering. Meanwhile, the brand’s visuals include paintings and photographs by Li. Instead of merely adding another form of expression after a perfume is made, the same creator is involved in both scent and visuals.

Candles Depicting Spaces Held in Memory

The candles develop the idea of creating imaginary spaces through scent. In extending from perfume worn on skin into interiors, their subjects become the objects that were there and the time spent in those places.

Classroom, for example, takes as its theme a classroom with wooden furniture, ink, and the paper of old textbooks. Chenpi Pu’er draws on tea made by filling a hollowed-out citrus fruit with pu’er tea, combining the brightness of the peel with the tea’s earthy elements. These are attempts to translate memories of places and cultures into scents experienced indoors.

Incidentally…

Li’s mother carefully kept the perfumes his father brought back from overseas business trips in a small perfume cabinet. Among them, Li particularly remembers Chanel N°5. As a child, he strongly disliked it, but as he grew older he came to appreciate the skill of its construction. It was not only scents he loved from the beginning that shaped his path to becoming a perfumer.