What do you find the hardest?
Knowing when to stop! A few years ago, a perfumer in Los Angeles once gave me a sage warning. She told me that perfume-making is endless. You can always keep adding to a formula, or reinventing it, or exploring new materials. There is no set boundary. The discipline of a nose is to know when to put the pipette down, and that can be quite hard at first.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
I used to trawl through the “classics” section at the now-by gone video store for fun.
By the time I was around fifteen, I was convinced I’d one day be a renowned director, making glamorous suspense movies just like Alfred Hitchcock. A lot of my muses exist in the world of old Hollywood. This is echoed in the ethos of PERDRISÂT—“cinematic perfume”. There’s still time to realise this teenage dream.
One thing you can’t live without?
If we are strictly talking about things—not people—then, the cable machine at my local gym.
Perhaps, the proper answer is the notebook containing all my own formulas, but I like to think if I lose that, I could rest easy knowing I’m not going to run out of ideas anytime soon.