How I got into the perfume industry.

A bit about me, why I do what I do, and why I love it so damn hard.

Make a brew my friends, this is a long read. And then some.

I was sitting in my kids’ school reception recently, having been invited as part of their ‘Careers Week’ to chat to Year 3 pupils about working in the fragrance industry. I started making small talk with the two other parents beside me. “I’m an A&E consultant,” said one of them (flippin’ ek!) and “I’m an architect for office buildings,” said the other. “How about you?” asked the doctor.

Well, there is no single straightforward answer to that question. “I describe perfumes” sounds absurd. “Fragrance expert” sounds obnoxious. “Perfume journalist” isn’t accurate. When I’m around serious, big-career people, I inevitably end up delivering a TedTalk of incompetent waffle like a blithering idiot, which goes a little something like this:

“I used to be a beauty journalist on magazines and newspapers for about 20 years [hints at professionalism and maturity], then I specialised in fragrance and moved my work over to Instagram [waits for knotted brows of confusion and alarmed blinking]. I describe what perfumes smell like in an educational way, and I also host customer events with fragrance brands. I still write a bit; I sometimes train sales consultants and I help brands with strategy and…” [cue utter bewilderment].

I should really just leave it at “I work in the fragrance industry.” But there’s so much more to it. I’ve taken the thing that brings me joy and light and I’ve made it my full-time job and purpose. I am doing something that didn’t even exist until I started doing it, so it’s not like I had a goal to strive for. I guess I designed my own career. It didn’t happen overnight (nothing does, or should), and it wasn’t easy. So here is the unedited, long-read version of how, finally, after many years, I figured out what I wanted to do.

There was a big 5-year chunk of poorly paid hustle, right at the start, from when I was 18 until about 23. For the first two years, I was at Uni in London but only had a handful of lectures, so I had three jobs that fitted around my studies: as a fashion assistant at Tatler Magazine from Monday to Thursday, as a food photographer’s assistant on Fridays and as a sales assistant at Brown’s fashion boutique on Saturdays. Three jobs, while at Uni. How the hell did I have the stamina for all of that?! I guess I was hungry, I wanted to earn my own money, and I knew I had to work in the industry if I wanted to study it.

Once I’d graduated, I got a full-time job at the Telegraph Magazine as Fashion & Beauty Assistant to an amazing editor I’d met during my time Tatler. I was paid £150 a week for three years, but was bullied horribly by our Fashion Director – a snooty, connected, overprivileged woman who wafted around in white linen dresses and delegated without actually doing any work. She was vile. She’d steal expensive beauty products from under my desk, which I needed to shoot, and pretended she was trialling them or ‘lost them’. She’d swipe clothes samples from the fashion cupboard, wear them, trash them, and throw them at me to ‘fix’ before sending them back to the press office. I vividly remember trying to scrub the skid-marks she left on a cream Melissa Odabash bikini with hand soap in the loos. And when I (and my parents) couldn’t remove the melted candlewax stain off a dove grey suede Chloe handbag she “borrowed” for the weekend, the magazine had to stump up the cost of the ruined sample. The following week, she told me my beauty page was to be dropped from the next issue because of an interiors special. There was no interiors special. What an absolute knob.

I’m glad I went through that, though. I knuckled down and built relationships with junior PR assistants – who are now close friends and running the beauty industry as kickass Comms Directors and CEOs for major brands. We bonded over our intense love of beauty products, hugged at launch events and encouraged each other to apply for roles.

When I was offered a 6-month gig as Beauty Associate at Glamour Magazine, I learnt a very different set of survival tactics.