How a perfume is created

Until a perfume is ready to be marketed, many actors are involved, in addition to perfumers: creative directors, marketing teams, packaging designers, regulatory specialists (in charge of the safety and stability of the formulas), not forgetting the ingredient suppliers, without whom it would not be possible to create essences that capture the intensity and variety of fragrances that nature gives us.
Perfumers are responsible for bringing the olfactory concept, a sensation or a story to life through perfume. The growing interest in the world of fragrances has made them more visible. Also, projects such as the one you have in front of you, Wikiparfum, a platform for the dissemination of perfume culture that covers the entire value chain.

Another way of working is that of in-house perfumers who work exclusively for a brand. This is the case of Nuria Cruelles, perfumer at Loewe. "Jonathan Anderson is such a creative person and has such clear ideas that it is easy to work with him. He has approached perfumery as he is approaching fashion, from art, nature, from a perspective of transition, of innovation", she explains.
And that's not all, because there are also big companies that create fragrances for brands. Perfumers such as Rodrigo Flores-Roux and Jordi Fernández, at Givaudan; Jérôme di Marino, at Mane; and Alberto Morillas and Ane Ayo, at Dsm-Firmenich, to cite just a few examples, work on projects for new fragrance developments that will later form part of the portfolios of well-known perfumery firms.

"The large composition companies have great value in their team of perfumers," says Agustí Vidal of Symrise, emphasising the collaboration that exists between these companies and luxury firms, whose in-house perfumers work in harmony with these teams, thus having access to a wider palette of raw materials.
A separate case is that of niche perfumery, in which the firm may have a founder and creative director who is also a perfumer, or else collaborate with perfumers who make the fragrance a reality.

The daily activity of the perfumer is far from the romantic image of a laboratory full of bottles of essences. Although it is true that the perfumer's organ exists (a space where different raw materials are kept), creators nowadays work in front of a computer with a list of ingredients.
Chemists, biologists, pharmacists… Many of them have a scientific background, which gives them an in-depth knowledge of how the chemical compounds in essential oils behave. Almost all of them have passed through Grasse, the cradle of perfumery, and have spent years learning about and memorising scents. As perfumer Ramón Monegal explains, of the four years he spent training as a nose, the first two were based on learning smells until he had a base of some 2,000 ingredients.
The perfumer's challenge is to translate an idea into an olfactory composition that provokes an emotion. Everything is executed in the head, which has to balance creativity and science to write a formula that is passed to the laboratory where the sample is created. After this step, we have the first test to smell and repeat the process as many times as necessary until we find the final fragrance.
At the same time, the bottle and packaging have to be designed with the focus on the story that the perfume is going to tell. Everything must be coherent so that the olfactory proposal makes sense to the consumer, who can identify the brand's values and connect emotionally with the perfume in question.

We cannot forget the artistic nature of perfumes, the DNA of niche perfumery. This is recognised by Carlos Huber, founder, artistic director and fragrance developer of Arquiste, who tells us from New York what the creative process is like in an independent perfume house.
But first, let's put it in context. Trained in architecture and restoration at universities in Mexico, Paris and New York and passionate about the preservation of historical heritage, Huber took the leap into the world of fragrances due to his interest in the aromas of the Mediterranean and after a mentorship with perfumer Rodrigo Flores-Roux. Behind this background is the germ of Arquiste, a niche perfumery firm that recreates unique sensory experiences of a time and a place.
The name Arquiste gives us clues about the creative universe that we access through its fragrances. It is an invented name that plays with the words "architecture, architecture, history, art, artist and archive".

How are the brand's fragrances born? "The inspiration or concept can come from a particular story or historical place," Huber explains.
For example, the brand's next launch, A Grove by the Sea, evokes Mediterranean scents and the historical past of the island of Lopud (Croatia), with its rich Renaissance architecture that gives the place a regal, bohemian and somewhat wild atmosphere due to its rugged nature. "Historically it was an olive and olive oil producing island. There are a lot of fig orchards and there is a lot of pine, cypress and aromatic herbs. In this case, the inspiration for the perfume came from this experience on the island," he says.
Sometimes the starting point for a new fragrance is the discovery of a raw material that he has not worked with before: "The constant work of studying and researching ingredients in my creative activity means that sometimes there is an interest in a particular ingredient that I haven't dealt with before, which leads me to want to know more about everything that surrounds it historically and sociologically."

In the case of L'Or de Louis, a perfume that won an award from The Fragrance Foundation this year, the inspiration comes from the Orangerie at Versailles, commissioned by Louis XIV, which was a large orangery that housed citrus trees. In these tree-filled galleries, gardeners would light bonfires to warm the atmosphere and make the trees blossom. "The bonfires made the orange blossom smell more concentrated and, at the same time, there was a smell of smoke and wood. That's why this perfume has a woody base and a very subtle smoky note, and on top of that it has a very concentrated orange blossom note that takes you to honey," she says.
Huber explains that rather than inventing a concept, she likes to research something authentic and real and study it in order to rediscover it in some way. This is how he starts the project of a new fragrance and then goes on to gather the ingredients that will give rise to the olfactory pyramid.

When it comes to planning the structure of the perfume, you have to decide which notes are going to be the heart of the perfume, he explains. We have to choose which notes are going to be ornamental or more relevant to the top notes and which are going to give us the foundations and the base to support the whole perfume, which will have longevity and good projection.
This part of the process is carried out in collaboration with the perfumer to adjust the combination of ingredients in the structure with expert criteria. Huber currently works with perfumers Rodrigo Flores-Roux, Yann Vasnier and Calice Becker.
The evaluation process of the samples is carried out, in this case, between the perfumer and the creative director, who is responsible for indicating where the formula should go until the finalist is decided.
"We can take six months, a year or more to decide on the final composition of the perfume. But there are also times when maybe a month later you're convinced you have something good," says Huber, who acknowledges that sometimes ideas are put on hold and are brought back after a while, when you feel you're ready to take it forward.
"In general, we can make a hundred modifications until we have the final fragrance," he says.