Reclaiming Heritage through Natural Perfumery

I have been a teacher and course content creator at the Natural Perfume Academy since its inception nearly 17 years ago, and one of the fascinating things, to me, anyway, is how connected to their own perfume culture our students become by the time they graduate. Most begin with dreams of evolving into world-class perfumers (and some of them do), dabbling in ‘classic’ perfumery styles of the Belle Epoch and studying French perfume history, but over time, they find themselves drawn back to the scents of their own landscapes, uncovering the rich olfactory traditions of their culture and realizing that the truest inspiration has been with them all along.

One of the more interesting aspects of this revelation are their stories, their earliest memories with scent formed in their grandmother’s kitchens or on the hillsides and rivers near their historic family homes. Meadows and forests, sunrises and sunsets, snow and ice and scratchy wool mittens, all of these scent experiences informed their understanding of fragrance, shaping a deeply personal olfactory language that speaks of home, memory, and the quiet beauty of the familiar.

Mark Twain once said, “Write what you know.” In the world of inspired natural perfumery, the deepest form of knowing comes from tapping into one’s own culture – an intimate wellspring of scent memories, traditions, and raw materials that shape a perfumer’s unique artistic voice.