Colle Cléopâtre P'tit Pot

The P'tit Pot is a small cylindrical pot of white plastic with a ribbed orange cap, holding thirty-five grams of a soft white paste made from starch and water. The label carries the brand's cartoon queen and the words 'odeur d'amande', for the paste smells unmistakably of almonds. A flexible applicator set in the cap is used to spread it on paper, and it washes off with water once dry.

It was first made in 1930 by Pierre Chamson, in a flat in the rue Chapon in the Marais, in round aluminium tins of potato-starch paste. It was named after Cleopatra and sold as 'la reine des colles', the queen of glues, to offices, photographers, drapers and schools. Around 1935 a brush was added to the pot and, crucially, a scent of almonds.

That scent is the reason the pot is remembered. Generations of French schoolchildren spread it with a spatula, smelled it, and sometimes tasted it, which did them no harm: the paste is made of natural materials, and in 2016 it was still being made from potato starch, as the first tins had been. After 1954 the tins gave way to plastic, and in 1963 the pot was reshaped around a central well, with the spatula held in the orange lid that became, with the smell, the brand's signature.

The firm left Paris for Ballan-Miré, near Tours, in 1971, where it went on to make glue sticks, paints and craft materials, and where the firm is still based. The firm marked its ninetieth year in 2020 with a collector's edition of the white pot, still sold beside the everyday one. The latest redesign, of 2025, gave the P'tit Pot a screw lid and an applicator like a brush, returning, by a long road, to the brush of the 1930s, around the same almond-scented paste.