Science meets creativity: my life as a trainee perfumer

Three years. One thousand smells. 

My big challenge for the next three years is to learn and memorize the smells of around 1,000 different ingredients. It might sound like an unusual sort of challenge – but not if, like me, you’re in your first year of training to be a Technical Perfumer. 

Technical Perfumers do not create new fragrances. Their job is to adapt fragrances that have already been created. It’s a job that requires encyclopedic knowledge of everything from how much formulas cost to how the ingredients in them interact at a chemical level. That’s the knowledge I’m going to spend the next three years attempting to acquire. 

A day in the life of a trainee perfumer

Unsurprisingly, my day involves a lot of smelling. Every morning, for example, I’m given a blind test where I have to recognize five separate ingredients. This is to help me prepare for my first-year exam, which is due mid-July. 

After that, my mentor will give me my exercises for the day, which usually involve working through formulas in my mind and on the computer – how to create them, how to balance them, how to make them in the lab etc. I then spend some more time smelling ingredients, often alongside other perfumers who always have lots of useful tricks and insights to share with me.

Recreating the smell of an apple

Here is a fascinating exercise my mentor recently set for me: I was given a list of 10 ingredients and told to create an apple scent. This may seem easy, as the ingredients have already been selected. But, as I soon found out, the real challenge is to achieve the perfect ingredient balance and craft something that feels genuinely natural. 

To make things more difficult (or more fun, depending on your viewpoint), I also had to create versions of the scent where I intentionally overdosed one of the 10 ingredients. The aim was to find ways to disguise the imbalance so that I still got a beautiful apple effect. What I discovered, fascinatingly, was that by making small adjustments to the formula, I could evoke completely different kinds of apple. Granny Smith one time; Red Delicious or caramelized sugar apple another. Every apple I worked on had its own personality – and I loved the challenge of bringing each one to life.

How I got into perfumery

My childhood dream was to become a vet. It was only later, after consulting a careers advisor that I realized I could have a future as a perfumer. She identified that I thought like a scientist but that I had a very creative side as well. Perfumery, I discovered, was one profession where I could harness both those strengths.

Creativity is everything

I recently attended an exhibition at a renowned museum in Geneva, where a perfumer colleague of mine had created a fragrance to represent the museum itself. There was one person at the event who kept saying something that truly resonated with me. She said: “Creativity is the most important thing of all.” I couldn’t agree more. We may be technical perfumers rather than creative perfumers. But creativity is still at the heart of everything we do.