Next-Gen Noses: The Indie Perfumers Shaking Up Scent
Like many of us, Bryson Ammons picked up a hobby during the height of the COVID pandemic. But it wasn’t TikTok dances or sourdough bread that piqued his interest — instead, he began learning how to make perfume.
In 2023, three years after the beginning of the pandemic, Ammons launched his own fragrance brand, The Alloy Studio. It’s stocked at Stéle, regarded by hip, young perfume connoisseurs as the crème de la crème of fragrance boutiques in New York City. Despite Ammons’ early success, his entrée into fragrance wasn’t easy, nor conventional. He didn’t study chemistry, the hard skill at the core of perfumery, in college. Nor could he afford to attend one of the handful of prestigious perfume schools in France that are recruiting grounds for the world’s biggest fragrance houses — corporations that formulate and produce perfumes for other brands.
Instead, Ammons, now 25, began reading about aroma chemicals — like Ethyl Maltol, a synthetic compound with a cotton candy-like scent that stars in Maison Francis Kurkdijan’s Baccarat Rouge 540 and Ariana Grande’s Cloud — on his bedroom floor. Eventually, he saved up enough money to begin buying these materials from online suppliers, like The Perfumer’s Apprentice and Eden Botanicals, and smell them in real life. Ammons also looked to resources like the popular YouTube channel run by Sam Macer, another self-taught perfumer; the online fragrance forum Basenotes; and books like The Diary of a Nose by Jean-Claude Ellena, Hermès’ former in-house perfumer.
Before the advent of social media, it would have been virtually impossible for young people like Ammons — at the time, an unemployed student with no connections to the fragrance industry — to even entertain the idea of becoming a perfumer. But the secrets of the insular perfume industry are now accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Self-taught perfumers are stepping into the limelight with their own successful brands, challenging the notion that one must follow the perfume-school-to-fragrance-house pipeline. Along the way, these “guerilla” noses are pushing the boundaries of olfactive art — and redefining what it means to be a perfumer in the first place.
How to become a perfumer, the old-fashioned way
Traditionally, the path to becoming a perfumer has been relatively narrow, as Ashley Santiago was lucky enough to learn early on. She began reading perfume blogs as a teen and in college, got a job at Ministry of Scent, a fragrance boutique in San Francisco. There, she met perfumers who encouraged her to get a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, often a prerequisite to pursue a master’s in perfumery.
Santiago took their advice and, after graduating from San Francisco State University in 2016, embarked on her master’s in France, home to the holy trinity of perfume schools: ISIPCA (where Santiago went), École Supérieure du Parfum et de la Cosmétique, and Grasse Institute of Perfumery. These institutions “feed” graduates into the world’s seven major fragrance houses — Givaudan, DSM-Firmenich, International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF), Mane, Robertet, Takasago, and Symrise — which are responsible for creating the scent and flavor of virtually everything you consume, from cleaning supplies to energy drinks to luxury perfume.
For some aspiring perfumers, a job at one of these fragrance houses is a golden ticket — it offers the chance to create the next big scent for luxury fashion brands and A-list celebrities. But a master’s isn’t always enough to secure a job. Many of the “big seven” fragrance houses offer their own internal perfume programs, which dive even deeper into the art, chemistry, and practice of fragrance creation. Competition for spots at these programs is fierce — at the end, most trainees are offered a permanent role.
During Santiago’s last year at ISIPCA, she applied for a spot as one of Givaudan’s Perfumery School Trainees. After completing an olfactive test and navigating nine months of interviews, which included traveling to meet the entire Givaudan team, Santiago was accepted. “From what I understand, there's roughly 2,000 applicants every year,” she says. “They take between one and six people.” Now, she works out of Givaudan’s office in Paris as a fine fragrance perfumer.
According to Santiago, ISIPCA’s master’s program provided a “super surface level” overview of the raw materials perfumers work with. At the end of the three-year program, she could recreate famous fragrances and construct accords, a blend of notes that make up one facet of a perfume. “But you can’t really make a fragrance from scratch to the level of the fragrances being put out on the market.”
At Givaudan’s four-year training program, Santiago’s studies dove much deeper. Trainees smelled materials in the company’s own garden — Santiago recalls picking citrus and learning exactly what organic compounds give the fruit its zesty, fresh scent. Understanding raw materials and their chemical makeup is one thing, but learning how to navigate the industry is another. At Givaudan, Santiago realized that collaboration is key. “[Givaudan] looks for people that are willing to work with others. They're looking for people who are going to thrive in that type of environment, as opposed to someone who is like, ‘This is my formula and this is the next best thing.’”
Skipping school
But not everyone has the opportunity to study chemistry in college or attend perfume school in France, where tuition can cost tens of thousands of Euros. And while internal training programs like Givaudan’s don’t technically require a chemistry degree or a master’s in perfumery to apply, they tend to favor students fresh out of university — those without degrees, who may have discovered perfumery later in life, are often overlooked.
“I have a supreme jealousy for anyone who has had the privilege of going through those programs,” says Trey Taylor, a self-taught perfumer who plans to launch his own fragrance brand, Serviette, in 2025. “That intensive level of instruction definitely appeals to me, but I just don't think it's realistic.” Taylor, 34, completed his master’s in fashion communication at Central Saint Martins in London in 2015. He’s built a career for himself as an editorial director at a creative agency in New York City and, at this stage, doesn’t think it makes sense “to spend another 20 to 30-thousand Euros on a perfume program.”
So what are aspiring perfumers like Taylor to do? They teach themselves, an undertaking that not only involves poring over YouTube videos, online forums, and books, but also grappling with the deluge of misleading and flat-out false information populating the internet.
Joey Rosin, the owner of boutique fragrance house Hoax Parfum, recalls the challenges of this type of self-guided learning. In Rosin’s view, the vast majority of online perfume-making content “is just showing what something is” — a creator describing a raw material, or recounting a formula. “Quite frequently, the way they’re presenting it is inaccurate,” he says. For Rosin, separating the wheat from the chaff comes down to experimentation: “adopting other people’s point of view in certain instances, and in others, recognizing that this guy isn’t pronouncing ‘linalool’ correctly and maybe his point of view isn’t the best.”
Like Ammons, Rosin and Taylor cite Sam Macer’s YouTube, Basenotes, and Jean-Claude Ellena’s books as central to their independent studies. Unlike Ammons, Rosin and Taylor had another invaluable resource at their disposal: mentorship from an experienced perfumer. Early in his career, Rosin worked as an assistant to Michael Nordstrand, who studied at the Grasse Institute of Perfumery. Taylor took classes with Marissa Zappas, who previously worked at Givaudan and apprenticed under Olivier Gillotin, now an executive perfumer at the company. For both Rosin and Taylor, having an authority figure to guide them through the minefield of perfumery misinformation was invaluable.
When asked if classical training — a chemistry degree, perfume school, and internal fragrance house training — is necessary now that information on perfume-making has become more accessible online, Rosin takes a middle ground. “When you come out of these schools, you know your materials really well. You’re able to construct classical accords. You’re able to think like a perfumer. There’s tremendous value in that,” he says, adding that understanding the global history of perfume and scent culture is also crucial. “The very best self-trained perfumers are brilliant and genius and make groundbreaking, unconventional perfumes… But more often than not, self-trained, independent perfumers have a chip on their shoulder. Like, ‘I don't want to smell other people's things. I want to put my head down, grind out my thing.’”
Chandler Burr, the former perfume critic for The New York Times, is skeptical that one can gain the knowledge and skill — at least at the level fragrance houses look for when hiring — entirely on one’s own. But he also acknowledges that “some of the greatest filmmakers are autodidacts… They never studied, they never got any sort of degree, and yet they became great directors.”
Santiago, whose studies have spanned over a decade, stresses that anyone wanting to become a perfumer, self-taught or classically trained, must be willing to put in the time. “You have to learn your craft, and that's true whether you do ISIPCA, Givaudan Perfumery School, or if you decide to teach yourself.”
Going indie
The meaning of “self-taught” is relatively self-explanatory. But what does it mean to be an “independent perfumer,” another term gaining steam in the world of scent?
Once perfumers like Santiago join a fragrance house, they enjoy stability, competitive salaries, and access to any raw material or molecule they could possibly want — including “captives,” aroma chemicals made for exclusive use by a fragrance house. They also relinquish ownership of the formulas they create. They have relatively little control over which projects they work on and are largely guided by creative briefs — high-level documents outlining the target demographic of a perfume, its underlying story, and its marketing plan — which brands submit when they contract a fragrance house to create a scent.
Independent perfumers, on the other hand, have more creative autonomy. To Arabelle Sicardi, a beauty writer who runs a series of scent-focused writing workshops called Perfumed Pages, “an independent means that you are ultimately your own boss. You can make the weirdest fragrance if you want to, or you can make the most marketable thing in the world, but it's up to you. You are the captain of the ship.”
The word “freedom” comes up more than a few times while speaking to independent perfumers.
When a brand approaches them to create a scent, they have the freedom to say no if it’s not a fit. If they say yes, they have more agency over the final product — they may be working off of a creative brief, but an indie’s clients are usually looking for something more bespoke and less beholden to fleeting fads, marketing buzzwords, and consumer market testing (which fragrance houses began introducing in the late ’90s). And independent perfumers aren’t constrained by the tight deadlines that fragrance houses operate on, which Rosin describes as “crazy,” particularly for junior perfumers.
Of course, there are drawbacks to working independently. At fragrance houses, perfumers work with machines that compound their formulas at the touch of a button. They may have assistants and coworkers to lean on and learn from. “It’s a different perfumer lifestyle,” Rosin says. Going indie also means forgoing a gleaming office building. Taylor works out of his New York City apartment, where he formulates, bottles, and packages his scents — “all in one tiny room,” he says. Perhaps most importantly, independent perfumers source and pay for their own materials. Ammons, for instance, has spent approximately $8,000, a significant expense for someone running an entirely self-funded brand, to amass his collection of natural and synthetic ingredients.
But the challenges seem worth it for both perfumer and consumer. Rosin feels he has greater latitude to create “something that’s new [that] makes a statement.” And the proof is in the pudding — or, rather, the perfume. One of Rosin’s recent creations is Sala, an earthy, dewy fragrance for Troye Sivan’s Tsu Lange Yor, a line of sophisticated and sometimes arresting scents that stands apart from the recent crowd of candied, cloying celebrity perfumes.
Similarly, consumers are gravitating toward independent perfumers — some buzzy examples include Marissa Zappas, Maya Njie, Laura Oberwetter of Clue Perfumery, Noah Virgile of Amphora Parfum, and John Pegg of Kerosene — for something more artful and less mass-market. As Rosin puts it, their work “satisfies the ‘I'm wearing this and no one else is’ effect.” There’s also an emotional component at play. It’s easier to feel connected to an independent perfumer who can talk about their work without the censorship of contracts, NDAs, and public relations agencies.
“I don't need to wear the most popular or the newest fragrance,” Sicardi says. “I want to wear something that excites me, and that I can talk about with someone else. I love to see [fragrance] as an art and a community space, rather than something commercial.”
“Good” perfumers and “good” perfumes
Since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, interest in fragrance has surged, ushering in a newfound awareness of perfumery as a profession. As consumers invest more in scent and champion their favorite brands on social media, perfumers themselves have begun to take on celebrity status.
Burr compares the phenomenon to sports fandoms. “Fans cheer for specific people, they don’t just cheer for teams,” he says. “They know [athletes’] backgrounds; they know their personalities. You have the exact same thing going on now… perfumers have become names in themselves,” he says, rattling off a list of superstar noses including Daniela Andrier (the Givaudan perfumer behind hits like Prada’s Luna Rossa and Gucci’s Envy For Men), Jérôme Epinette (Robertet, Byredo’s Bal Afrique and Sol de Janeiro’s Cheirosa '62), and Yann Vasnier (Givaudan, Marc Jacobs’ Lola and Tom Ford’s Velvet Orchid).
But with fandoms comes division. On and offline, some contend that self-taught, independent perfumers are more creative than those who are classically trained. Others take issue with a certain class of anti-establishment perfumers who create scents so subversive, they’re unapproachable and unwearable. But it’s impossible to make blanket statements about these two genres of perfumers and what they create.
“People who know fragrance are able to distinguish self-taught from professionally trained,” Burr says. In his circle, the reaction to the work of self-taught perfumers is usually negative. Industry insiders and veterans “have been taught that a good perfume equals a perfume that has a certain structure, a certain this-and-that,” he says. But in his mind, perfume is an art form far too subjective to judge as right or wrong. “Some self-taught perfumers have ways of creating a fragrance that's very different. Maybe they're not polished, maybe they're not balanced… But maybe that's better. Who's to say?”
If we accept the quality of a perfume as subjective, then what makes a quality perfumer? What makes a perfumer, period? For Taylor, calling oneself a perfumer can be an act of defiance in the face of an industry that, historically, has been notoriously difficult to penetrate — particularly for those who don’t have the opportunity to attend perfume school.
Like many industries, perfumery is largely dominated by white men, though fragrance houses and organizations like The Fragrance Foundation have launched initiatives to increase representation. Growing up, Ammons “never saw another Black perfumer… Access to education is part of the diversity problem in the perfume industry, for sure.” It’s also Eurocentric. Grasse, France — a town on the French Riviera with a microclimate that’s particularly suited to growing popular perfume materials like jasmine, rose, and orange blossom — is considered the cradle of modern perfumery. As a result, French perfume is often seen as the pinnacle of luxury, despite the fact that scent culture has existed in countries like India, Egypt, and Iran “long before the European market cared," Sicardi says.
Ammons believes that every perfumer has the right to self-identify. “It takes a certain level of mastery and intention within this art form to be able to call yourself a perfumer. I don't think that's something that is quantifiable by others, but is quantifiable by you.” That said, he has one non-negotiable: Perfumers who sell their work must be well-researched on safety and regulation. In the United States, there are relatively few legal requirements to sell perfumes. They must meet labeling standards set out by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) but, like all cosmetic products, they do not require FDA approval before being sold. That’s where the International Fragrance Association (IFRA) comes in. Acting as the industry’s self-regulatory body, the organization publishes a list of prohibited and restricted fragrance ingredients. IFRA compliance is voluntary, but adhering to its guidance is seen as the gold standard in consumer safety.
“What does it mean to be a perfumer?” Rosin questions, and proceeds to pose several more: “Does it mean you've bought some materials and you've put them in a bottle and sold it on Etsy? Does being a perfumer mean you have an interest in how natural materials are extracted to create products that smell, but you don't actually make stuff? Are you a perfumer if you only make toilet cleaner and you work at a big company? Are you a perfumer if you've only been doing it for a month and you launch a brand because you have a lot of money?”
To Rosin, there’s no straightforward answer. Being a perfumer takes work — “more than most people are willing to put in,” he says. “At the same time, I think anyone can be a perfumer because perfume should be accessible to everyone. The information is out there, and it's more accessible than you think. You just have to have a discerning nose and mind.”
