The structure of the Higgs sector is a major issue in the quest of a detailed description of the electroweak interactions. Most of the effort is devoted to the study of the standard model--like Higgs boson at 126 GeV; however, the experimental collaborations at the LHC are also searching for extra scalar particles whose presence may hint at an extended Higgs sector, typical of many extensions of the standard model. We study a model-independent parametrization of a scalar particle lighter than the 126 GeV Higgs boson, which may be easily implemented in the ongoing searches by ATLAS and CMS. Indeed, many effective Lagrangians and parametrizations used at present for the description of the Higgs sector implicitly assume that no light particles other than the standard model ones are present in the spectrum. We therefore introduce a parametrization of a model with two scalars, one corresponding to the 126 GeV Higgs boson and the other to a lighter scalar. After the introduction of this parametrization, we consider two typical examples falling in this category: the two-Higgs-doublet model and the next-to-minimal supersymmetric standard model. We do this for two purposes: to illustrate the use of our parametrization and also show that some well-motivated models giving such a situation can be probed at LHC, advocating for such a search. Our results agree with the specific studies performed for these models. Furthermore, employing such a generic parametrization allows us to translate the bounds to any model beyond the standard model falling into this class.