What Makes a Perfumer? An Invitation to Creation
People often come to me—students, perfumery hopefuls, artists halfway through a formula and a mild existential crisis. Inevitably, they arrive with this question:
What does it mean to be a perfumer? Am I allowed to call myself one if I’m self-taught? If I don’t have a professional lab?
Let’s be honest: this world can be a little obsessed with gatekeeping—as if the right to create scent were handed down from Mount Firmenich on stone tablets.
So let me offer this, not as doctrine, but as lived experience.
I trained as a perfumer at IFF. I’ve studied and worked with legends—Sophia Grojsman, Dominique Ropion, Maurice Roucel. I’ve created fragrances in labs that featured the rarest raw materials, surrounded by shelves of cutting-edge captives and supported by extraordinary teams. I know what it’s like to formulate with everything at your fingertips.
But I also know what it’s like to create with very little. I’ve been taught to compose fragrances on a shoestring budget, with limited access to materials. And I’ve seen other perfumers do the same—crafting something resonant and exquisite not in spite of constraint, but because of it. Maurice Roucel, for instance, has built breathtaking perfumes from formulas that read like haiku. Sophia Grojsman worked magic on a single-digit budget. There is no correlation between the number of raw materials or even their quality and the greatness of a fragrance. Sometimes, it’s precisely the restraint that makes the structure sing.
Henry in The Scent of a City: Notes from Lviv: I remember the aroma of incense in many of Kyiv’s Orthodox churches being different, cleaner, than what I remember from Latin churches. I’ve tried getting frankincense, musk, and rose incense… April 17, 2025 at 7:47pm