On Contemporary Perfumery

I was originally going to write a post about the explosion of indie perfumery since I started in 2010 but realized that’s difficult to do without sounding catty. Let me just say: perfumery is an art that requires a long learning process, in part because it involves so many fields of knowledge that no beginner naturally possesses or could possibly acquire in a couple years of study. I’ll leave it at that.

Instead I want to focus on some things I see as widespread misunderstandings regarding fragrance ingredients and the differences between natural and artificial materials.

To be clear: I don’t mean to be insulting to anyone who isn’t selling fragrances using deceptive marketing or misinformation. There’s no shame in being ignorant of the specifics of perfumery if you’re not a perfumer and definitely no shame in having been influenced by the deceptive marketing that is so widespread, especially with brands that are trying to justify their high prices by claiming to use rare, “exclusive” materials. As a result, reviewers often attribute the quality of fragrances almost entirely to the quality of the rare, expensive materials used, as if the perfumer’s job is simply to curate the finest and least affordable materials and combine them with discernment. While it’s certainly true that using quality raw materials is a prerequisite for creating a decent fragrance, often quality has nothing to do with price (beta iononone and the damascones/damascenone are incredibly cheap relative to their beauty and performance, for example, and many lovely naturals are dirt cheap) or whether or not materials are of the absolute highest quality. What is always expensive is the time, experience, and sometimes luck it takes a highly-trained perfumer (something I am not) to create an extraordinary fragrance. For those of us who aren’t highly-trained professionals, our time is still our most valuable commodity. A good fragrance is like a good painting; at the end of the day, what matters is whether it’s good, whether it’s skillfully done, whether it’s creative and aesthetic. Just as it’s possible to make a crap painting with expensive oil paints or a great one with acrylics, perfumery is a skill which requires an understanding of materials and their various qualities but is more about imagination than simple addition. Surprisingly, quality matters even with aromachems, far more than I would have imagined.

Imo, at its best perfumery is an art of skillful illusion and unfortunately marketing departments often take full advantage of this. A competent perfumer can conjure a beautiful rose out of aromachemicals or, better yet, create a vivid impression of an exotic flower that doesn’t exist. These types of illusions are usually made largely from aromachemicals, often nuanced with small additions of naturally-derived aromatic extracts. The reason we use primarily individual chemicals in creating these types of illusions isn’t expense - it’s control and creative possibility. If you’re an architect designing a contemporary structure, you incorporate bricks and boards and metal parts, not rocks and trees and chunks of ore. Certainly one can make interesting structures using pre-industrial building methods, but that’s a particular style and is pretty limiting in terms of the types of results one can achieve.

Unfortunately, fragrance marketing and the fact that until recently perfumery was a fairly opaque art, as well as some often ill-informed fearmongering regarding cosmetic safety, have led many consumers to think they want things they don’t actually want (all-natural fragrances) and some brands to claim they’re selling things they aren’t actually selling (all-natural fragrances). Compounding this, the US FDA literally has no working definition of the word “natural” and places no restrictions on its use. If I wanted to, I could legally make fragrances that are partly or entirely artificial and sell them as “all natural” - and people who believe they want all-natural fragrances would buy them and come to believe that this what all-natural fragrances actually smell like. In fact, this is exactly what seems to have happened over the past couple decades with the rise of niche and indie perfumery, the last decade in particular. Some brands are somewhat honest about this - for example, claiming ambroxan as a natural material because it’s derived from an extract of clary sage - some less so. Marketing phrases I find particularly obnoxious and deceptive are “made with 100% pure and natural essential oils” (and what else?) and “created with a rare and exclusive extraction of ____” (ie it’s probably rare and exclusive because a perfumer created it, possibly based on headspace analysis).

All this is bad enough, but what’s truly unfortunate imo (and here’s where I may make some enemies) is that many natural perfumers, like consumers of “all natural” fragrances, are in the thrall of an ideology that’s adjacent to the anti-vaxers and equally as misguided. I’ve encountered so many people, including people I consider friends, who are firmly convinced that wearing perfume is unhealthy, but that wearing essential oils (or mixtures of essential oils and absolutes created by some indie perfumer who has only just started making fragrance and shares their ideology) is safe. When I first started in perfumery 12 years ago, I believed exactly the same. These days, however, nothing could be further from the truth, something which became increasingly obvious when I looked into the details of fragrance safety. Some of the most suspect chemicals contained in fragrances are only there because they’re contained in natural extracts - and those are heavily restricted for those who follow IFRA standards. Yet practitioners of “safe” natural perfumery generally don’t have much interest in understanding why these chemicals are restricted, have never read the standards (I’ve seen this firsthand with someone who created a trendy all-natural brand a few years ago), and imo are potentially putting people in danger while claiming they’re creating healthy products.

Please don’t get me wrong here, I absolutely love “natural materials” (in quotes because highly concentrated natural extracts do not exist in nature - they’re literally “man-made” and many are chemically changed by the heat used in the distillation process and have the potential to expose people to far higher levels of chemicals than they would ever be in any natural scenario). Like many people, I find IFRA restrictions on naturals traditionally used in perfumery frustrating. I think they’re misguided sometimes (I mean, peanuts are still sold as food and they can actually kill people with sensitivities; I’ve never heard of anyone dying from perfume) and I also think the scientific methodologies and conclusions are sometimes suspect. Plus I have many issues with how difficult and time-consuming they make it it to understand and apply the standards and the fact that they often radically change, sometimes becoming more lenient by fairly large factors, which shows that the original standards were far too restrictive, to the detriment of classic fragrances. Yet I firmly believe that perfumers should at least understand them in order to make informed decisions and that’s not what I’m seeing with most all-natural perfumers.

I could write a lot more on this topic but this is long enough already. I hope anyone who disagrees or who craves further elaboration on this topic will comment. Let’s talk about this, it’s important.

Finally, just to be clear: most of the listed notes in my fragrances are from naturals. I happen to love natural raw materials and one of the things I appreciate is the variety of qualities available (ie not “quality raw materials” but “materials chosen for their specific qualities”). But I also love aromachems, they are what make it possible to push the envelope in terms of creating original fragrances that perform well. Much as I’m ambivalent about the fact that so many beginners seem to be calling themselves perfumers recently, the explosion of interest in learning perfumery has done a lot in terms of making high-tech fragrance materials available in small quantities to people such as myself and has also created a growing audience for independent perfumery. For that I am extremely grateful.

One more note of gratitude: I learned recently that Bill Luebke, founder of The Good Scents Company, died on January 3. I could never have become the perfumer I am today if it weren’t for the incredible online resource he created and made available free of charge. He and his wife Barb were also a great source for raw materials for me over the years. Although his name probably isn’t well-known to fragrance fans nor revered in industry circles, his impact on the history of recent perfumery can’t be overstated. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration at all to call him the father of indie perfumery. Thank you Bill, RIP. You legacy lives on and is probably more important than you ever realized.