Eau so exclusive

What’s your favourite scent: pistachio macaroons, warm milk or your pet Labrador after a walk in the rain? Now, with a little imagination and a lot of money, you can have one of the world’s best perfumers create it for you. Dipal Acharya sniffs out the noses creating truly bespoke fragrances

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Dipal Acharya

19 April 2013

‘Through the wrought-iron gates at their portals came the smells of coach leather and of the powder in the pages’ wigs… It was here as well that Grenouille first smelled perfume in the literal sense of the word… the more complex, more costly scents of tincture of musk mixed with oils of neroli and tuberose, jonquil, jasmine or cinnamon, that floated behind the carriages like rich ribbons on the evening breeze…’

Thus wrote the German author Patrick Süskind in Perfume, his dark novel exploring the true nature of fragrance in 18th-century Parisian society. It was a time when bespoke fragrances were the preserve of the wildly wealthy. In the 1700s, in the laboratories of the grand perfume houses of Paris, a single fragrance for a discerning client could take up to a year to refine. But the rise in the use of synthetic ingredients and mass production meant an end to such laborious processes and the start of the great democratisation of scent.

However, custom blends are enjoying a renaissance. ‘In the last century the fragrance market was obsessed with immediacy and customers craving a product instantly,’ explains Shaylegh Foyle, head perfumer at Floris London. ‘But people have started recognising that the way scent performs on the skin is a personal thing. Fragrance is an emotional trigger. We have smells that we have positive connections to and negative associations with. The process of bespoke eliminates the negative elements.’

Lyn Harris, founder of the British perfumery Miller Harris, says that the trend for bespoke has a direct connection to the gloomy economy: ‘The Western world has changed so much over the past ten years and has been in shock. Yet I was amazed at how many people I had coming to me, in this very depressed era, wanting to invest in quality things that give them individuality.’

A bespoke creation at a reputable perfume house costs anything from £4,000 to more than £15,000. Once the perfumer and client have found a winning formula, it is kept on file and can be reordered at retail price. To ensure that a formula is never lost, perfumers go to extreme lengths. Ben Gorham, the founder of Byredo, locks all his clients’ formulae in a safe: ‘Just in case I die and they need to reorder.’

At Illuminum, the English fragrance house established in 2011, which produced the White Gardenia Petals scent that the Duchess of Cambridge wore on her wedding day, they haul in the lawyers to sign over the copyright and original formula of the bespoke scent to a client as a safeguard against unauthorised reproduction. After a series of consultations at its Dover Street boutique, the finished scent can take anything from ten weeks to a year to complete, depending on the quirks and tastes of the customer.

Bart Powlak, Illuminum’s head fragrance advisor, says you can’t speed up the process: ‘People think that creating a bespoke fragrance is a case of putting a few oils together and adding some alcohol. It is far more complex. Each fragrance is a piece or art rather than a blended, scented liquid.’A prized or rare ingredient, such as Florentine iris or Chinese agarwood oil, can also lengthen the process (and bump up the final price). Bespoke perfumery is still very much a rarefied and expensive practice, but personally designed quality scents are increasingly reaching a wider market.

At the more affordable end is French perfume brand Le Labo. Customers visiting its Marylebone boutique can have one of the brand’s 12 fragrances made up and hand-poured into a bottle on-site. This ‘made-to-order’ perfume service, which costs £80, means that the essential oil concentrates in the perfume remain separate from the alcohol right up to the moment of purchase, ensuring the highest level of purity.

Even commercial heavyweights are getting in on the act. Chanel’s Les Exclusifs range is a 14-strong collection of fragrances concocted by one of the world’s leading noses, Jacques Polge. Launched in 2007, the concept behind the range was to give complete creative licence to Polge to produce original scents that represented the brand. Bottles retail from £110 and the limited distribution of the scents (only through Chanel’s boutiques) increases the sense of exclusivity. Christian Dior has followed with its La Collection Privée, as has Tom Ford with his Private Blend range. So if you can’t afford a £15,000 personalised scent, you can always make do with a bottle of Tom Ford’s Santal Blush.

Lyn Harris, 43

Founder of Miller Harris

Hidden beneath the Miller Harris boutique in Notting Hill is Lyn Harris’ perfume atelier. With its dove-grey armchairs and wall-to-wall glass shelves stacked with brown vials, it’s reminiscent of a Victorian apothecary. ‘When perfumers were practising 150 years ago, the ready-to-wear fragrances were out front and there was a little atelier at the back for the bespoke clients,’ says Harris. Bespoke perfumery has always been part of the Miller Harris DNA, even before the Notting Hill boutique opened in 2000: ‘Everyone at Grasse [the French Institute of Perfumery, where Harris trained] thought I was crazy because who would want to create a fragrance for an individual? How do you fulfil an individual? It’s a minefield.’ Harris’ low-key, high-quality approach has proved a winning formula, earning her a loyal customer base — ‘75 per cent of bespoke clients come back,’ she tells me — and celebrity fans include Michelle Obama and Helena Bonham Carter.

What’s the most complicated perfume you’ve put together?

A bespoke fragrance for Jane Birkin. She had always been showered with gifts by Serge Gainsbourg but had never found a fragrance she loved to wear. The skill came from fusing random ideas — the smell of her father’s library, the fragrance from oak trees in her garden — in an intriguing way. It really was her life in a bottle.

What’s the strangest request you’ve ever had?

Animalic notes seem to be something that people are drawn to, like the smell of a horse. That’s as far as I’d like to let people go, though.

What’s the weirdest ingredient you’ve used?

Riz absolute [made from rice] for an interesting fragrance based around sake.

Bespoke fragrances at Miller Harris start from £12,000 (millerharris.com)

Ben Gorham, 35

Founder of Byredo Parfums

A former pro-basketball player, who then trained as an artist, Ben Gorham is not your average perfumer. Yet despite his lack of formal training and the fact that he doesn’t wear scent himself, the nose behind the Swedish brand Byredo has enjoyed huge success since he created it in 2006, after a chance encounter with perfumer Pierre Wulff at a dinner party: ‘I was intrigued by the creative possibilities of scent — how it could invoke memories or become a person’s signature. I became obsessed.’ Ditching paint for perfume, Gorham began to experiment with scent compositions based on childhood memories, often limiting himself to three or four natural ingredients. The brand quickly amassed a cult following: ‘By limiting the number of raw materials and using generic branding, we showed a confidence in our product and let the scent speak for itself.’

What’s the most complicated perfume you’ve put together?

M/Mink, based on the smell of Japanese calligraphy ink, an incredibly hard scent to capture. Obviously one can’t use the real thing, so the fragrance delicately combines notes of patchouli leaf, clover honey and dark amber.

What’s the strangest request you’ve ever had?

A female client once asked for a fragrance to contain elements of a wet dog. Animal scents are incredibly hard to capture, but I’ve found the warm smell of animals asleep is slightly like nutty biscuits.

What’s the weirdest ingredient you’ve used?

Milk. Warm and cold milk differ enormously in scent. This particular client wanted warm milk, which is slightly sweeter and very comforting at the heart of a fragrance.

The bespoke fragrance service at Byredo starts from £14,300 (byredo.com)

Linda Pilkington, 42

Founder of Ormonde Jayne

‘I once had a Russian man who asked me to scent his family home, all 11 bedrooms, with fragrances, room sprays, candles, soaps, body washes, the whole shebang,’ says Linda Pilkington, founder of the Bond Street perfumery Ormonde Jayne. The brand was born out of a home-run candle-making business in 2002. But Pilkington’s fragrances have since been established as a favourite of the elite. Her first client was Chanel and today the brand can be found in the bathrooms of Mandarin Oriental hotels. Customers range from Qatari princesses to Savile Row gents and she takes on no more than two or three private clients per year.

What’s the most complicated perfume you’ve put together?

One using the Tiare flower, a Tahitian gardenia. The flowers need to be specially grown in the South Pacific. The oil is extracted and sent to America to be cleaned and filtered. Next it is sent to France for quality control, then they forward it to the Ormonde Jayne studio 12 months later. It is still like that and I have to think a year in advance for this particular client.

What’s the strangest request you’ve ever had?

An Italian client (a cross between Nancy Dell’Olio and Amy Winehouse) requested a perfume that would make her husband love her again, desire her and render him into an uncontrollably passionate lover. It was a tall order.

What’s the weirdest ingredient you’ve used?

Hemlock is what Ormonde Jayne is famous for. When our clients tell us they love cedarwood and sandalwood, we offer them hemlock. It was Socrates’ chosen poison.