My Perfume

Names are important. Pick the wrong name and you might get sued. Pick the right name and not only do you sell more perfume, you add a valuable asset to your business. Most perfume names neither help nor hurt. Most perfume names neither inspire nor infuriate. They waste an opportunity. They drain potential profits. Yet people continue to name perfumes without ever bothering to ask, "Aren't there any axioms I can follow to help me develop a valuable perfume name?" The most obvious rule is you don't take someone else's name. But each year more than 1,000 new fragrances are launched and each must have its peculiar name. That means every ten years 10,000 names become off limits to you. You need to know, now, how to avoid picking a name that has already been taken while establishing your rights to names you have developed. Then, in years to come, those other marketers will have to watch out for you There's a second piece of common wisdom in developing a name

There's a moment in a short promotional film for Eau De Magnolia in which Frederic Malle raises his hand into the air and mimes running a fine thread through his fingers: the scent was tweaked and reworked, he explains, until it displayed a "seamless continuation" of its central idea. It is this precision which is perhaps one of the perfume's most praise-worthy attributes: from the moment it starts to the very last stages of its drydown, it remains locked on its core concept, refusing to be tempted by any prettiness that might prompt a diversion into less relevant territories. The concept in question is, of course, the magnolia flower. As Malle rightly points out in the video, although the plant is often interpreted as a lily by perfumers, it's actually far fresher, much less cloying and markedly more citrusy, traits brought to the fore in a headspace rendition of its scent put together by the late Dr Braja Mookherjee. Using this as a starting point, Carlos Bena

I knew I had done it when my wife started wearing it without being prompted. I knew I had done it when, in the late afternoon, I could still detect the clear aroma of the perfume she had put on that morning. I knew without a doubt that I had created a fragrance that (1) my wife liked well enough to USE without being prompted, (2) that had enough RADIANCE so that I could detect it on her from a distance, and (3) that it had enough TENACITY to last all day. I was even more gratified to learn that several of her friends had ASKED her what perfume she was wearing ... because they liked it too! How much training does it take to create a successful perfume of your own, on your own? A number of people have asked me where I got my training in perfumery. The fact is that my "training" is quite limited and nothing that is not, today, available to anyone who wants it badly enough and who is willing to read, learn, spend a little money, and discipline themselves to think, smell, take n

In a year that saw the release of a film about the evils of sugar, mainstream scent compositions seemed to keep getting sweeter and sweeter. Perhaps that's not surprising: I guess if people can't eat the stuff, they want to walk around in a permanent fog of it. Jokes aside, the increased calorie content of our perfumes served as a useful symbol of the fragrance industry's behaviour across the whole of 2015. In a nutshell, it continued to play it safe and pander to the lowest common denominator. A few other details and near-trends rose up from the sticky syrup of the last 12 months. One of these was the greater prominence of musks in mainstream scents. It goes without saying that they've been present in perfumes for decades (and that, surprise surprise, they're getting more sugary too). However, in several pieces of work (notably Clinique's Aromatics In White) they were pushed to the foreground with an insistence we hadn't seen for a while. In most western