Launching a Niche Perfume Company Rooted in Memory and Landscape

This little Midwestern girl launched a company.
A perfume company.
A perfume company in France.

I’ve always been a little bewitched by fragrance.

The honeyed sweetness of the lilacs in the way-back part of the backyard.
The sharp green tang after my dad cut the grass.
The tiny drawers at the top of my mom’s dresser, filled with white leather gloves and small square silk scarves.

As I got older, the redbud tree on the corner of N. Chauncey and Smiley Alley became my reading nook and retreat. My mom would shoo me outside to “get some fresh air,” and I’d climb to the place where the smaller branch curved like the back of an armchair above the trunk. Wrapped in heart-shaped leaves, I’d disappear into the world of my book and the soft green interior of the tree, fragrant and hidden and full of secret worlds.

My past is dotted with olfactory memories – so when I look back, I’m reminded that loving perfume is not a new passion at all. It has been there from the beginning.

That love of words and atmosphere led me, almost by accident, to graduate work at the University of Oregon, where I fell in love with  contemporary literature, critical theory, and especially Irish women poets who wrote their own, intimate versions of landscape — full of gardens, vegetables, ferns, willows, « steam and greenness » (from « Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the God », Eavan Boland).

Childhood summers with my family and, later, many years living in the Pacific Northwest deepened that pull toward green and woody spaces: old growth trees, moss, wet earth, cedar, the quiet of the trees, the breath of the forest. Those experiences now live on in the notes I’m drawn to as a perfumer: galbanum and its bitter greens, Virginia cedar and pencil shavings, vetiver’s earthy roots, the silvery vegetal facets of orris.

Eventually, I trained in olfactory work and perfumery, learning how to build accords and work with raw materials so that all of those landscapes — the Midwest backyard, Irish poetry, Oregon forests, and now European gardens and vineyards — could coexist in a bottle.

Today, that journey has become La Vie En Nose, a perfume company in France dedicated to scent, memory, and the stories they tell.

Join one of our classes to explore raw materials, build accords, and discover how fragrance tells a story. Train your sense of smell, deepen your sensory awareness, and experience perfume in an entirely new way.

Your nose knows more than you think - come wake it up.