Hi, I'm Gabrielle Durand and I'm a natural perfumer and the founder and owner On The Nose Perfumes. Welcome to the On The Nose Perfumes site and to the Sniffing Out The Details blog!

It's taken me a long time to be able to call myself a perfumer...about 45 years since I first thought about becoming one. I've been studying perfumery for around the last 6 years and I've been dedicated exclusively to natural perfumery for almost the last 4.

I've recently completed a 2-year natural perfumery program, as well as having taken many other natural and mixed media perfumery courses with different instructors from around the world.

Brought to you by Mattel® (kind of)

Now, if we go way back to the beginning of when I first got interested in perfumery, I was 9 years old and had saved up my money to buy the Barbie® Perfume Maker by Mattel®. Apparently, my mother had told me it was junk and refused to buy it for me, so I took matters into my own hands.

I mean, I honestly thought I was making an investment, not buying a toy (despite the fact that it came from Mattel®) because, in my 9-year-old brain, I could learn to make perfume with the kit and turn around and then sell it to my friends and family and make a small profit in the process. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, even at age 9, I was pretty sure something was amiss when I opened the box and saw that the perfume-making materials were basically the inside of an old-style Glade® cone-shaped solid room deodorizer. And frankly, they smelled just like room deodorizers. You'd put one of the perfume sticks in the basket at the top of the toy along with a little water, turn the knob a few times, fill the bottles, and voila! Perfume!

Now, I was confident after seeing the inner workings of the “perfume maker” that wasn't at all how perfume was made and I learned a very important $13 lesson.

I figured out how it really happened not too much longer after that and started taking Chemistry classes in high school with the idea of becoming a perfumer, although I ultimately followed a different career path (or two).

I'm sharing this story with you, not because I enjoy embarassing childhood tales, but because I realized in the course of studying perfumery as an adult that how perfume is made just isn't common knowledge, at any age.

The perfume industry is pretty opaque. And natural perfumery, while becoming a little more common and sought after, isn't really well-understood either.

Why we’re here now and what to expect

It took me a lot of classes, instructors, research, and practice before I felt like I really had a handle on things. And there just wasn't a lot of reliable information out there in the wild on natural perfumery. Figuring things out piecemeal was, frankly, pretty expensive and time-consuming.

So, that's why I've decided to create this blog. I'm hoping to help other people to understand natural perfumery better, whether they're aspiring perfumers, curious hobbyists, or fragrance enthusiasts.

The blog is in the early stages, of course, but here's what I'm planning to share:

• Informational articles on natural perfumery, like how to know if a perfume is natural (which is harder than you'd think), fragrance families, which styles of perfume are well-suited to natural materials, some of the limitations of natural perfumes vs. mixed media perfumes - that type of thing.
• Tutorials - like how to find trustworthy suppliers and how to recognize which ones are fraudulent, how to set up a practice lab, why and how to dilute materials, why and how to weigh them, and how to start training your nose to evaluate perfumery materials.
• I'll review some books that might be helpful in learning about natural perfumery, perfume history, olfaction, and natural materials.
• I'll also go behind-the-scenes with looks at my process and how I've formulated my perfumes, how I come up with my perfume concepts, as well as doing deep dives into some of the techniques and materials I've used.

I'm planning to keep each blog article somewhat brief and will plan to make a partner video on my YouTube channel. So, if this sounds interesting to you, please sign up for emails here on the site, subscribe to my YouTube channel, and follow On The Nose Perfumes on Instagram. All three places will include notifications of new blog content. And be sure to let me know if there are any topics you’d like to hear about in the future!