Fanny Bal

"I'm passionate, uncompromising, I'm not black or white, but I'm also almost young, so I think I can win anything. That's not true, of course, but it's what drives me and fuels my passion".
Fanny is young and alert. Her youth and calm, as well as her slight detachment from circumstances, almost invite a form of contemplation.
Fanny became a perfumer by studying under Dominique Ropion. She was Dominique's pupil, apprentice and assistant in the project to reorganise the IFF's in-house perfumery school, which Dominique directed. Fanny was doing an internship at the IFF as part of her course at Isipca when she was recruited to work on the Isipca perfumery project. At the end of the project, Dominique offered to train Fanny as a perfumer, and that's how it all started: "He gave me lists of raw materials, I went to the lab to make my solutions and in the evening we smelled them and he asked me questions. We drew up a table classifying the raw materials into families, natural and synthetic, my own periodic table. We went through the perfumery school syllabus again. In addition to the ingredients, he had me draw the structural formulas for perfumes like Trésor L'Air du Temps, short formulas that he had developed with ten ingredients, which are the essence of these perfumes, their skeleton, their structural formula. He would give me one of these short solutions and I would have to smell it and recognise the ingredients, write my own short formula, go to the laboratory, weigh the ingredients, smell and correct it. Today, the IFF perfumery school is based on this work.
As well as offering Fanny this technical apprenticeship, Dominique was the figure of the perfumer who materialised the profession she wanted to pursue: "When I started my training, of course I wanted to be a perfumer, to create perfumes, but I didn't know exactly what it was, what it meant. Working with him, seeing all that rigour and precision, made me understand.
In 2025, she joined the Givaudan team.