Mind to Bottle: How I Translate Memories into Custom Perfume

When people hear that I create custom perfumes, they usually assume the process starts with fragrance notes.

"I like rose."

"I don't like vanilla."

"Can we make it smell like bergamot?"

Sometimes that's true. But more often, people arrive with something much more interesting. They arrive with memories.

Recently, a client sent me a letter before our first appointment. It wasn't a perfume brief in the traditional sense. It was several pages about a woman she met in France, the fragrance she wore on her wedding day, Earl Grey tea every morning, orange blossom soap, the tomato leaf candle she can't stop smelling, the herbs she reaches for when she cooks, and the way certain perfumes have quietly followed her through different chapters of her life. She wasn't asking me to recreate a fragrance. She was asking me to recreate a feeling.

That distinction changes everything. As perfumers, it's easy to become consumed by raw materials. We think in bergamot, rose absolute, ambrette, Iso E Super, sandalwood. Those are the words of our language. But clients don't think that way. They think in places. In people. In moments. One of my favorite parts of custom perfumery is learning to translate between those two languages. When someone tells me they drink Earl Grey every morning, they're probably not asking for a perfume that smells like tea. They're telling me they find comfort in bright bergamot. When they tell me they love a tomato leaf candle, they may be describing a love of green freshness, sunshine, or the feeling of a summer garden. When they tell me they wore a certain perfume in college, they're often talking about a version of themselves they'd like to revisit.

The materials become secondary. The story comes first.

Not every project begins with memories. Another client came to me with a completely different vision. She wanted her fragrance to smell like the most beautiful chocolate body oil imaginable. She loved rose, but she didn't want a traditional floral perfume. Together we explored the balance between velvety cocoa, skin-like musks, and rose until we found something that felt indulgent, sensual, and unmistakably her.

Different inspiration. Same process. In both cases, my job wasn't simply to combine ingredients. It was to listen.

One client gave me a concept. Another gave me a lifetime of scent memories. Both required the same question: What are you really trying to capture?

The answer is rarely a single ingredient. It's usually a feeling. I've started to believe that custom perfumery has very little to do with making perfume. It's about paying close enough attention that someone feels understood. The bottle is simply where that understanding ends up.

If you are interested in exploring having your own custom scent, hand-crafted by an artisan perfumer, reach out here.