Nothing Smells Like Perfumer H

“Smell is our first sense. Subconsciously, we’re always smelling. We are animals, after all,” says Lyn Harris, the founder of the fragrance line Perfumer H. 

She’s seated in her 10-year-old shop, complete with lab and office downstairs, on Crawford Street in Marylebone, wearing grey New Balances, white jeans, and a white T-shirt, her blond hair straight and long. Her wiry dog, Pop, is hanging out near the door, looking very accustomed to his life as shop dog. It’s hushed inside the store but in a warm way, with soft lighting and low velvet sofas, walls lined with minimalist amber bottles and candles like a sexy apothecary. Harris is brewing one of her own teas — an orange blossom oil and green oolong blend — and talking about her philosophy of scent. 

“It’s not like, ‘This is your rose, this is your lily.’ It’s not airport perfume. I don’t like loud things,” she says. “I like things to just touch you and then bring something out, quite poetically and beautifully. I like it when somebody comes up and goes, ‘Oh my god, what are you wearing?’ Then I’ve done a good job. But if you walk into a room and everyone knows what you’re wearing, I know I’ve done bad.”

Her goal is to translate things into smell, whether it’s a landscape, a picture, a person. She doesn’t like any one note to dominate. “It’s more like a memory, then, right?”

Take, for example, a new fragrance, Steam, which is currently her bestseller, outpacing Ink, which really does smell like a woody version of ink on paper. She worked on Steam for 10 years, wanting to recreate the scene and experience of drinking tea. She wanted a tea leaf fragrance, but not one that screamed Earl Grey. Two years ago she was in Taipei and suddenly cracked the code. “It came to me that what I needed to complete it was this humid, wet note,” she says. She used notes of green tea, along with magnolia, green leaf, and plum. When you spritz on Steam, it does smell like a hot cup of tea. But it’s also fresh and energizing. What Harris did was a magic trick; her job is both artist and translator. There’s a reason why her brand’s motto is “making air visible.”

Harris is one of the only classically trained British perfumers. She grew up in the North, in Yorkshire, but her core childhood memories were formed in Scotland, where her grandparents lived in a small cottage surrounded by stretches of land. They grew their own fruits and vegetables in one walled garden and flowers in another. Her grandmother sewed, and her grandfather made furniture. “When we went to stay, we used to be in our grandparents’ bed, and they slept in front of the fire. In the morning, I always remember my grandfather tending the fire and my grandmother making bread and cakes and jam,” she says.

Less idyllic was school. Harris says she was a terrible student, but she worked at a fragrance store in the late ’80s as a teenager, when bombastic perfumes like Charles of the Ritz and Jean Patou’s Joy were big. She was reading a French newspaper and saw a story about a woman named Monique Schlienger who had a fragrance school near the Eiffel Tower. Schlienger had been taught by the famous nose Jean Carles, which is akin to learning painting from Vermeer. 

The traditional fragrance world is very codified, very male, and very French. Most classically trained perfumers work at a few great houses in Grasse, the worldwide capital of perfumery in the South of France. A house gives you materials, mentorship, and nurtures your career. That would have been the next logical step for Harris, but she wanted to be independent and to keep her quirky Britishness intact. She returned to London, where she met someone who wanted to introduce her to the Maubert family of the lauded House Robertet. “So I took a flight to Grasse to meet them and showed my work,” she says. “And they said, ‘Make Grasse your home,’ and put me under a master.” She ultimately trained with the house for two years and maintains a unique arrangement wherein she’s affiliated with Robertet but remains independent and in London. 

Harris knew what she didn’t want to do in her career: no household scents. No “detergents or soap powder. I just want to do fine fragrance and candles and a bit of skin care,” she says. “So that’s what I specialized in.”

“It was funny because when I parted company with Miller Harris, they were like, ‘Well, you can’t do another brand,’” Harris says. “And I was like, ‘I’m a perfumer. I can’t do anything else. That’s how it is.’” So she consulted — she has worked with Claus Porto, Fresh, LEGENDÄR, Maison Trudon, Solange Azagury-Partridge, and Vyrao. She spent time with her young son and eventually started making fragrances again out of her kitchen in Primrose Hill. 

Harris opened the Perfumer H space in 2015 with the intention to do custom scents for clients, which she still does, and a few candles. Then she got Michael Ruh, a glass blower, involved to design the candle jars and perfume bottles (all of which are refillable). Studio Frith does their design, and Tim d’Offay of Postcard Teas does their tea collection, with oolong from “Mr. and Mrs. Hsieh’s tiny one-acre tea farm in Ming Jian, Nantou County, Taiwan,” as the Perfumer H description notes. The whole brand is a work of tight collaboration — a way for Harris to work with people she likes and respects. These days, Perfumer H has stores in London, Paris, Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Macau and is stocked in shops on every continent.

Ironically, Harris doesn’t really wear perfume — a result of having a job that involves smelling things all the time. She loves the scent of her skin. (Another favorite smell: a downpour of rain on a hot day, the mix of humidity.) When she goes out she wears her own Orange Blossom scent; she likes to spritz her sweaters or scarves or the inside of her coat. Aside from that, she loves to go to pharmacies in Spain and stock up on Alvarez Gómez Agua de Colonia. She likes Harry Styles’ perfume a lot. 

Harris was ahead of her time in becoming an independent perfumer. The internet has bred a guerilla generation — people who trained themselves rather than completing formal schooling. It’s a vastly different approach, but Harris isn’t against it. “The information you get online is quite phenomenal. I think if you’re very intelligent and have a natural affinity to materials, it’s kind of like being a cook; you can learn without going to school,” she says. “I was isolated because I never worked with a perfumer day to day. I had amazing experiences in Grasse and in Paris, but I was always totally by myself in my lab in England. But I’m a lot better off having that.” The downside is that she thinks it took her longer to develop her signature. The upside is that nothing else smells like Perfumer H.

The way customers are interacting with fragrance is changing, too. “It’s very mood- and weather-based,” Harris says. “People are much more aware of fragrance and much more confident. They reach out, and they dabble much more.” 

Harris is scouting her first North American store in New York, but she’s willing to wait to find the perfect space. And, like her hit Steam that took a decade to make, she’s about to finish another perfume long in the works. “I’ve got one about incense. I know I’ve just nearly completed it,” she says. “You can’t give it a deadline to decide to come out. You can’t know when it’s ready. It’s done when it’s done.”