'Choreograph' Scent Development (2019 - 2021)

I am a self-taught perfumer and have been experimenting by creating my own fragrances and collecting olfactory raw materials since around 2012. I started out collecting only natural ingredients - essential oils, absolutes and resins. However, as my fascination with scent painting grew, I decided to also incorporate into my collection the wonderful array of synthetically produced aroma molecules, a decision which really opened up the possibilities for evocative scent creation.

It is a fact that opportunities for scent creation are exponentially greater once synthetic molecules are included into the perfumers palette - it's rather like the disparity between black and white imagery versus technicolour! I educated myself around the debate of 'natural' versus 'synthetic' ingredients and am confident in justifying my choices in this respect.

I was lucky to find other independent perfumers to share knowledge and materials with - a small private group emerged named Formula Fun where we would post works in progress samples to each other around the UK for the purpose of critique and feedback.

I attended a training course in 2014 run by Sarah McCartney of '4160 Tuesdays' explaining step by step how to legally launch a fragrance - however it wouldn't be until 2020 when I would return to the information pack I received during this course to actually put into action the complex procedures to get a personal fragrance validated by an independent laboratory, comply with labelling regulations and also to satisfy the strict IFRA guidelines to guarantee safety for the perfumes end users.

Perfume development is a notoriously slow and laborious process - often taking professional perfumers a minimum of five years to hone their creations. Although I claim that 'Inbetween' was developed between 2019 -2021, in actual fact some facets and core ingredient accords began some 5 years earlier. Making a fragrance that somebody actually wants to wear on their body or clothing all day or night is really quite difficult given the way that scent molecules both natural and synthetic decay and change over time.