We study the jet activity that accompanies the production by gluon fusion of a new physics scalar particle decaying into photons at the LHC. In the considered scenarios, both the production and decay mechanisms are governed by loop-induced interactions involving a heavy colored state. We show that the presence of large new physics contributions to the inclusive diphoton invariant-mass spectrum always implies a significant production rate of non-standard diphoton events containing extra hard jets. We investigate the existence of possible handles that could provide a way to obtain information on the underlying physics behind the scalar resonance, and this in a wide mass window.