“It’s about the earth, because everything comes from the earth,” says Lyn Harris, describing Clay, the latest scent from her fragrance house Perfumer H. The perfume was launched late last month, but the idea emerged over a year earlier during a visit to a wood kiln in a bamboo forest on the outskirts of Jingdezhen, the city that has been home to China’s porcelain industry for 1,700 years. For Harris, the smells—and the memories they triggered—evoked a heady mix: juniper, birch tar, musk, burnt ash, minerals, malt; the sweetness and warmth of charred cedar and sandalwood; and the effervescence of orange flower and mandarin. The resulting scent captures the universality of the ground beneath our feet, as well as its relationship with everything around it—the nature embedded in it and the light that bounces off it. “It’s an interesting fusion—quite young, it has a gentle sweetness and depth, as well as a twist,” Harris says.
Most of us would struggle to describe a scent in even two words, let alone the dozens that make up Harris’s baked clay accord. But as a classically trained “nose” (and the first British woman to achieve this), Harris is among the rare few who can break down a smell into its multiple constituent parts, describe it and reconstruct it—not just materially but also emotionally. It has led to a 30-year career, in which she has built a brand that creates perfumes, incense, candles and cosmetics, as well as teas, jams and oils, that sell in stores all over the world.
Perfumer H’s flagship store in London’s Marylebone Photo: Tom Fallon Photography
Of all the luxuries, scent is the most evanescent. Ephemeral and invisible, its success depends heavily on how it is delivered, something Coco Chanel knew only too well when she developed the disarmingly modern Chanel No.5 in its minimalist bottle. Harris communicates to those with less gifted noses by working with a range of collaborators to craft a sensory experience through other media.
The glass bottles that contain the 100ml of eau de parfum are hand-blown in Michael Ruh’s London glass-blowing studio (and cost £650). She is accompanied on all her travels by João de Sousa, a Portuguese film-maker who provides unique visual stories. Studio Frith, the chosen graphic designer of everyone from Artangel to Valentino, creates the clean packaging, while the Retrouvius studio, which specialises in clever reclamation, has designed the interior of her flagship store in London’s Marylebone. Together, these tell a story that words alone cannot.
In 2022, Harris was invited by Sotheby’s to develop three scented candles around an important auction of 17th-century still-lifes and landscapes by Dutch Old Masters—like perfume, priceless in their emotional impact. “What I found particularly clever was Lyn’s ability to draw out subtle aspects of a painting through scent,” says Alex Bell, chairman of Sotheby’s UK and Old Masters worldwide, who commissioned the project. “It was the first time we had explored scent as a way of interpreting and enhancing the experience of an exhibition in our galleries. We introduced Lyn to the paintings in the collection and invited her to respond to them in her own way. It was fascinating to see how she translated visual elements, atmosphere and mood into scent.”
Harris created the bespoke Smoke in Woods fragrance to perfume Sotheby’s in London during the preview and sale of Abraham Govaerts’s early 17th-century painting A wooded river landscape with travellers and peasants on a path, men in a boat and a village beyond Courtesy Sotheby’s
Alternative readings
Rather than responding literally to each artwork, Harris teased out alternative readings. In a painting by Abraham Govaerts of peasants in a clearing by a river (A wooded river landscape with travellers and peasants on a path, men in a boat and a village beyond (early 17th century)), she homed in on the flickering light coming from a distant fire for a scent called Smoke in Woods. For Osias Beert the Elder’s floral still life of a fading floral bouquet (Still life of roses in an oriental lacquer and canework bowl, on a ledge with a butterfly and dragonfly (around 1615)), she picked up on the butterfly and dragonfly and created a fragrance called Rose and Insects—it’s one she often wears herself and contains no trace of rose, but honey, immortelle, papyrus and vetiver. “It’s about beauty, with imperfections,” she says.
She traces her love of fragrance back to her childhood in the Yorkshire countryside. “Nature has always been my thing,” she says. “From the minute I was born, I loved being outside.” Holidays were spent with her grandparents on their smallholding in the Scottish Highlands. “There was the smell of cooking, of jam, of the fire, of my grandmother’s garden with sweet peas and geraniums,” she recalls. “There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t think about that place.”
Her career has partly been shaped by the rhythm and simplicity of that carefully crafted life. “My grandfather was a carpenter. He had a place where he made furniture, and he always wore the same jacket, dungarees and boots,” she says. “My grandmother made our clothes. They didn’t buy a lot of things, but the way they curated their life with authenticity and dignity intrigued me.”
Clay, Harris’s latest perfume, captures the earth, the natural world embedded in it and even the light that bounces off it Photo: João Sousa
Recently she was inspired by her late grandmother to create a new fragrance called Soap for her friend Nick Wakeman’s fashion brand Studio Nicholson. In an episode of the label’s in-house podcast, Wakeman says the starting point of the project was sniffing fabrics and asking, “What does flax smell like? What does wool smell like? What does cotton smell like?” Then the conversation turns to how fabrics feel against the skin. “We wanted the perfume to feel like it was like a fabric that would veil you,” Wakeman says, while Harris tells me Soap is designed to be “a layer between your skin and your clothing. It’s clean, utilitarian and easy, with a whiteness—a starched smell that I’ve used sparingly.”
As a teenager in the 1980s, Harris was a rebel. She bleached her hair and dyed it red, and was eventually asked to leave her strict school. Her parents encouraged her to work in a perfume shop in their home town, and it was there she saw how scent could transform a person. “Women would come into the store and I could see how fragrance defined them—like lipstick, but more so,” she recalls. Today her work is still about how people feel when they wear her scents. She often tests then on any available “subjects”, including her son—her fragrances are intended to be unisex.
In 1992, she started training with Monique Schlienger, a renowned perfumer who had set up her own school in Paris in 1976. Perfume-making was traditionally a male-dominated field, but Harris was determined to be taught by a woman. “Monique taught me not to be scared of my emotions when being creative,” Harris recalls. She did further training at Robertet, in Grasse, near Cannes, before co-founding the luxury fragrance line Miller Harris in 2000. In 2015, she set up her own house, Perfumer H.
Floating and dreaming
Harris describes her career as a continuous education. “In your first ten years you’re completely an innocent, finding who you are,” she says. “When your fragrances start to work in the marketplace, you become much more confident. In 20 years, you know your materials and your palette—you streamline, you cut back.” It has been a gentle progression. “Everything’s so rushed in today’s world,” she continues, “so a lot of new perfumers don’t have the luxury of time that I had. I would spend weeks floating around, dreaming.”
This summer, the first visitors to the fancy new St Clement Hotel in London have engaged inadvertently with Harris’s work. The hotel’s elegant foyer, hung with artworks by Richard Prince and Mark Grotjahn, is infused with a bespoke fragrance by Perfumer H. While the establishment takes its name from the nearby church of St Clement Danes in Aldwych, Harris has derived the scent’s bergamot and bitter orange notes from the opening lines of the nursery rhyme “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement’s.”
For the newly opened St Clement Hotel in London, Harris devised a bespoke citrus-based perfume, which infuses the building from foyer to penthouse Courtesy St Clement Hotel
The hotel’s founder Nick Jones, who also opened private members’ club Soho House in 1995, wanted something fresh, and told Harris that he especially likes the smell of freshly baked bread in the morning. She has blended that with toasted sesame, cardamom and tonka to develop what she calls a “moreish” smell.
“Lyn’s far cleverer at this than I am,” Jones says. “I’d have stopped at oranges and lemons; she’s put all this warmth underneath. When you walk in and smell it, you relax. You don’t know why, but you do.” Beyond the foyer, the same fragrance is used in all the soaps, hand creams, body lotions and haircare products throughout the hotel—in refillable glass bottles, at Harris’s insistence.
“It feels real and useful,” Jones adds. “It’s not scent as decoration, for its own sake. It does something.” And indeed for Harris, scent is anything but a decorative layer; it is an integral part of everyday living. It is not just in her grandmother’s garden, the soil of Jingdezhen or the stylish lobbies of St Clement, but “in my blood, my breath, my heartbeat”.
