Bottling Rain and Steam on Skin: Talking Scents with Perfumer H’s Lyn Harris
April 24 | 4 minute read
Words by Madeleine Boles de Boer
If you want to witness a master perfumer at work, you might need to take a trip to London. In the Marylebone laboratory of Perfumer H, Lyn Harris, the brand’s founder and ‘nose’, can be found sniffing, blending and crafting the nature-led scents she’s become famous for.
Harris’ approach to her craft is a mix of innovation and tradition – but always with her own lens: “I don’t follow trends; I don’t look at the new fragrances. But it has always been my mission to celebrate naturals in perfumery. A fragrance is not a fragrance without science, but the magic comes from this balance between science and nature,” she explains.
After 30 years creating unique note combinations (think: coriander seed and smouldering birch tar in Smoke EDP or adding sandalwood and musk to peach and rose to create the curious Rose With Insect EDP, Harris is confident in her abilities – and deservedly so. She was trained by the acclaimed fragrance house Robertet in Grasse, France (the world’s perfume capital), and by a pioneer of women’s perfumery in Paris.
And among an emerging generation of self-taught talents, Harris is one of the only classically trained British perfumers, honing her craft into a curated line of understated and wholly interesting scents.
In this edition of Talking Scents, Harris tells us about capturing memories, skin scents and figuring out what the colour pink smells like.
Lyn Harris: “My grandparents had a smallholding in Inverurie, Aberdeenshire, in Scotland, and I spent beautiful long summers with them. Grandfather was a carpenter and had his workspace next door while grandmother baked and cooked from the garden the minute she started her day. Waking up to the smell of baking and the charcoal on my grandfather’s hands and tools… I’m particularly fond of these memories, as they awakened my olfactory being.”
The first fragrance I wore…
LH: “Eau Sauvage.”
[Editor’s note: A Dior men’s scent with a woody-citrus profile.]
Falling in love smells like…
LH: “Orange blossom, always. There was a period when I was visiting Morocco a lot and lying by an orange tree was the best thing I could ever imagine. The late afternoon with the sun going down – the heat of the day had passed but [was] still present enough to let the scent of orange blossom infuse the surrounding air.”
My favourite person smells like…
LH: “Steam. I find myself drawn to ‘skin scents’ – fragrances that don’t announce themselves loudly, but rather wrap around you like a veil, bringing a quiet, intimate beauty to the individual.”
LH: “Oh, it changes every time! I'm creating a scent for someone right now. There's this image of a place we were together and we had a precious moment. I'm trying to translate the clouds, the sea, the land and this hue of pink that tinged the sky. There was a storm at the end of the day and then the light broke through; I'm trying to capture that but also the person who I'm creating it for. I have this beautiful image and memory, and it's a challenge! I love that.”
Australia smells like…
LH: “Eucalyptus, dry grasses and warm earth.”
The fragrance I wear everyday…
LH: “I usually keep to wearing fragrances that I’m developing, to see how they evolve on my skin and those around me… It brings me much pleasure to constantly revisit trials and materials, finding new subtle differences each time.”
The one note I would never wear…
LH: “I think there are too many smells in our everyday lives that are negative, and as human beings I think we can do something about that. I think it’s my duty to make people aware of these smells. You know, if you analyse all the products and things that smell in your everyday life, if you wrote them all down, you’d be amazed. You just have to say to yourself, do I need my soap-powder to be so strongly scented? No, I don’t.
“When I remember my grandmother, I couldn’t even smell her clothes – they just smelled clean and refined. But now when I go on the Tube I can just smell so many synthetic, horrible smells. For me, a scent should be something from nature – beautiful, special.”
LH: “The one that I am working on right now!”
The scent that changed my life...
LH: “Jicky by Guerlain.”
[Editor’s note: Created in 1889, Jicky is the oldest continuously produced perfume in the world. It’s also believed to be the first ‘abstract’ perfume – i.e. one that is not based on a single note.]
The scent with the most interesting story is...
LH: “Ink – something everyday and nostalgic. The idea of ink on paper and in books, how that scent smell conjures an image or a memory. My challenge is to translate that to skin.”
LH: “Rose With Insect. The idea began with the image of a classic rose – timeless and beautiful – but touched by the unexpected presence of an insect. I wanted to capture that contrast, where a perfect bloom is slightly tainted to reveal a more seductive, unsettling side of nature.”
