Scenthusiasm

How I got here and why I created Scenthusiasm

In 2011 I founded 4160 Tuesdays, an independent artisan perfumery. I had been writing about fragrance for 14 years, and read over 200 books on herbs, cosmetics, essential oils and chemistry. In 2010 I wrote a novel about a perfumer who made perfumes to remind people of their happiest times and places. No one seemed particularly interested in publishing it, but they were fascinated by the idea of having their own scent memories recreated and bottled. 

With very little idea of how hard this would be, I decided to make the fragrances I had imagined for my book. I already owned some essential oils, and took a Sunday afternoon course on synthetic materials to explore some gaps I knew were missing from my knowledge (known unknowns, as they say). 

I went on to blend dozens of accords, using the small number of materials I’d bought from Hermitage Oils and Pell Wall in the UK, and learned that it’s possible to make literally millions of combinations with only a handful of materials. My early fragrances had no Hedione or Iso E Super as I had yet to explore these groundbreaking aromachemicals. I met Odette Toilette (Lizzie Ostrom) at a friend’s house, and she asked me to share them at a Scratch + Sniff event; I found that people wanted to buy them. And a London retailer asked to stock them that evening!

Next, I had to find out how to make them legal to sell; that was far harder in 2011 than it is now.  The advice I was given by the experts I approached was to give up and get a real perfumer to make them for me. Undaunted, I finally found Cosmetics Safety Solutions and the rest is history.

Once we had a London stockist, Lucky Scent in LA asked us if they could stock them too; that’s when we had to work out how to ship perfumes overseas, and do our Dangerous Goods By Air course.

I was determined to make this path easier for other artisan perfumers by opening the gates I had found locked. I have been teaching live classes since 2014, and in 2019 I decided to share online what I had learned as an independent artisan perfumer.

When I first got interested in perfume, like almost everyone starting out, I thought that perfume was made from flowers, herbs, fruit and trees. No one mentioned the aromachemicals which had been in use since at least the 1860s. This changed with the launch of Molecule 01 from Escentric Molecules, bringing more transparency to how perfume is really made. Of course perfume is also made with essential oils and these are all made of chemicals, by plants. 

I created my own fragrances and built a small company by not giving up when things went wrong; sometimes I made blends which I imagined would smell wonderful but were really awful. I kept going all the same, made a note never to try that one again, and gradually my good results took over from the bad ones.

The internet enabled people to discover more about perfume making, but it is also full to bursting with people talking absolute nonsense. I started my YouTube channel 4160 Tuesdays because I wanted to help people to make their own fragrances, without having to go through everything I did - and to help build the worldwide community of independent creative perfumers.