Jacob Varela
“I’m very curious by nature, I’m always on the hunt for something new, especially in modern art exhibitions. I liked the Anish Kapoor exhibition in Berlin, maybe because of the way he uses the visual arts to play with our senses.”
Sensitivity to smells and pleasure in guessing the perfumes of people around him came very early on for Jacob Varela: first during childhood in Barcelona, where he was born in 1986, then in Luxembourg, where he lived until adolescence.
After studying chemistry and completing an Erasmus internship in a chromatography and organic chemistry laboratory in Nice, Jacob, who as a child had wanted to be an inventor so that he could understand and dissect everything, decided to enrol at the ISIPCA fragrance and cosmetics school to understand and dissect molecules and then be- come a perfumer.
He graduated in 2012 with work experience in quality control and evaluation at Takasago. He continued his training there, spending almost two years on Fine Fragrance and Personal Care, before joining the creation centre on rue Torricelli, where he developed his know-how with Francis Kurkdjian, in particular, over a period of 18 months.
Jacob could already speak four European languages; he can now converse in Mandarin, having worked in the Shanghai subsidiary for three years as a perfumer-creator for Fine Fragrance and Personal Care. The substantial experience that he has acquired on a cultural and professional level helps him explore new registers and expand his horizons and sources of inspiration in this world of raw materials.
In September 2018, he returned to Paris and his place in the Parisian team, and still juggles these two market segments with passion.
