Pascal Gaurin: Playing Memorable Riffs in Fragrance

“I design a fragrance almost as I would write a song. There is a story, a striking riff that catches your attention in the first few seconds, and a chorus that stays in your memory.”

Pascal Gaurin, from an interview with The National

Born around 1970 in Paris, France.

Just as a musical riff lingers in the ear, a fragrance can contain an unforgettable phrase. Pascal Gaurin is a perfumer who has kept searching for that phrase. Working with resins and woods that evoke dark forests, and flowers of rich sensuality, he seeks to create scents that enter the wearer’s memory.

Rouge Malachite for Armani Privé, Gold Knight for Kilian Paris, and Plum in Cognac for Scents of Wood. Behind these glamorous brands is Gaurin’s work: listening to a client’s story and translating its emotions into scent.

A Life in Perfumery

Everyday Life in Paris and the Dark Forests of Creuse

Gaurin was born and raised in Paris. The New York Times described him as 44 in 2014, placing his birth around 1970.

As a child, he says, he smelled everything around him, from food, plants, and furniture to the soil in the garden. He checked smells so insistently that his mother worried he was afraid of being poisoned. An only child whose parents both worked, he also found a familiar storyteller in music.

Another formative landscape was his grandparents’ home, where he spent summers. It was in Creuse, in central France, surrounded by deep forests that felt like nighttime even during the day.

“You can sense the vapors of mushrooms, leaves, and bark.”

From an interview for Maison d’Etto

The smells of bales of hay, uncultivated fields, and stables still bring a smile to his face. The dense resins and deep woods he would later favor carry echoes of this place.

The important scent memories he names are the dark forest, Yves Saint Laurent’s Y, which his mother wore for 20 years, and Cacharel’s Anaïs Anaïs, worn by the first girl he kissed. Human connections, as well as nature, have shaped his olfactory memory.

His admiration for craftsmanship owed something to his great-grandfather, a bronze sculptor. He respected the work of using one’s hands to turn materials into form. A tailor he met at 15 also prompted him to look closely at beautiful materials and details.

Changing Course from Economics to Perfumery

After finishing high school, Gaurin studied economics and prepared for the entrance examinations for HEC, the business school in Paris. Around the age of 19, however, a magazine and a television program changed his direction.

He read a behind-the-scenes article about the perfume industry in Vogue. That same week, he saw a television interview with Jacques Polge, then Chanel’s in-house perfumer.

“That week, I realized what I wanted to do.”

From an interview for Maison d’Etto

The profession of creating scents displaced the future he had previously imagined. Gaurin studied chemistry at Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, then went on to ISIPCA, the perfumery school in Versailles.

In his final year, Pierre Bourdon took him on as an intern. Bourdon was the perfumer behind Davidoff’s Cool Water and Yves Saint Laurent’s Kouros. Gaurin names him as his first mentor.

Learning in Hong Kong, Growing in New York

After graduating, he joined the fragrance company IFF and began working in Hong Kong in 1995. As a trainee and then a junior perfumer, he created scents for markets including China, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines.

Far from familiar France, his daily encounters with different preferences and ways of life were an experience he would describe as a cultural shock. He needed to understand other people’s worlds rather than judge solely by his own sensibility.

In 1997, he transferred to New York. Some of his recollections describe his time in Hong Kong as about three years, but they consistently place New York at the center of his work for about 30 years afterward.

His mentors there were Sofia Grojsman and Jean-Claude Delville. Building on the foundations he had acquired from Bourdon, he refined his understanding of how to bring fragrance to the American market.

He worked for numerous brands, including Givenchy, Calvin Klein, Liz Claiborne, Tom Ford, Giorgio Armani, and Ralph Lauren. As a Senior Perfumer who also held a Vice President role at IFF, he expanded his work across both commercial and niche fragrances.

From New York to Dubai

In 2025, he was featured in connection with a new creative base in Dubai. IFF’s Scent Dubai Creative Centre is a facility of about 2,000 square meters in Dubai Science Park. A company profile in 2026 also presents Gaurin as a Dubai-based perfumer.

From studying in Paris, through Hong Kong and New York, to the Middle East: the places change, but his commitment to giving form to clients’ stories remains.

“My name is not on the bottle. Brands come to me for the skills I have developed over at least 30 years and for my own character, and ask me to translate their stories into fragrance.”

The National, 2025

A perfumer needs a personal identity to tell a brand’s story. Yet putting that identity to work as a storyteller is not the same as becoming the protagonist. Gaurin’s words convey this sense of perspective on his work.

Creative Philosophy

Handling Powerful Materials Like a Sculptor

Gaurin favors materials with a strong presence, such as cistus labdanum, patchouli, Cashmeran, and vanilla. Rather than ingredients that settle gently into place, these are materials he has to engage with in order to give them shape.

“I like materials that come to the fore, that you have to tame as a sculptor works with stone.”

From an interview for Maison d’Etto

Instead of erasing their mass, he puts their force to work within a composition. There is a connection between his admiration for his bronze-sculptor great-grandfather and the way he approaches materials today.

Powerful scents are not his only form of expression, however. For Maison d’Etto’s Noisette, he took the founder’s memory of riding a horse through lavender fields in southern France and combined lavandin, natural orris concrete, and ambrette seed. The materials came from IFF’s natural-ingredients division, LMR, or Laboratoire Monique Remy. This quiet, textured fougère also reflects his three-dimensional approach to materials.

“Listening” to Fragrance

Music is more than a subject for his compositions. It offers clues to how a fragrance begins, unfolds, and remains in the memory.

“I listen to fragrances rather than smell them.”

From Accords, The Fragrance Foundation

The riff in the opening quotation is the impression that catches one’s attention in the first few seconds. The chorus is the central melody one can remember afterward. Gaurin looks for this kind of structure in perfume, too.

The musicians he names span a broad range: Radiohead, David Bowie, Portishead, Pearl Jam, PJ Harvey, Neil Young, Lana Del Rey, and Kendrick Lamar, among others. Rather than a similarity of genre, what seems to attract him is the ability to create strong emotions through chords and words.

In cinema, he names Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Ridley Scott, David Fincher, and Denis Villeneuve, among others. The work of creating a story from a blank page and translating it into images also resonates with his perfumery.

Listening for a Client’s Emotions

Gaurin uses a Proust-style questionnaire when working with clients. Learning what they like, which memories they cherish, and what they fear helps him find a direction for the fragrance.

He says that when a client first smells a fragrance, he can tell by looking into their eyes whether he has conveyed the story. Smelling good is not enough: a fragrance must be memorable.

Signature Fragrances and Their Backgrounds

Rouge Malachite: A Flower Born from an Imaginary Red Stone

Rouge Malachite, released in 2016, belongs to a collection inspired by Armani’s travels. Malachite, normally green, is imagined as a red stone that does not exist. This premise led Gaurin to focus not on reproducing an object, but on the emotions of the color red.

“I had always wanted to explore the possibility of creating a fragrance that both men and women could wear, centered on one of the most iconic and expensive flowers: the magnificent tuberose.”

From an interview with ParfumPlus

He pairs tuberose absolute and ylang-ylang with sage and vetiver. The ambery captive ingredient Operanide connects the two poles, which he describes in terms of feminine and masculine aspects.

He gives the lavish flowers an herbal, dry outline. Gaurin’s interests in strength, sensuality, contrast, and harmony converge in this interpretation of tuberose.

Gold Knight: Golden Radiance and the Depth of Patchouli

Gold Knight, released in 2017, was part of a collection marking Kilian’s tenth anniversary. Its inspiration was the knight in golden armor depicted in Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze.

The brightness of bergamot and star anise is layered with honey, vanilla, and patchouli. Sweetness creates radiance, while patchouli casts shadows beneath it. The perfume clearly displays Gaurin’s way of creating contrast within richness.

His collaboration with Kilian Hennessy continued, including Adults and Madly in Love in 2018 and Rolling in Love in 2019. Each reveals a different sensuality, despite being the work of the same perfumer.

Plum in Cognac: Layers of Fruit and Barrel

In 2020, he created Plum in Cognac for Scents of Wood, the brand launched by Fabrice Croisé. It is a rich gourmand-woody composition layering plum, rum, cinnamon, Peru balsam, osmanthus, vetiver, vanilla, and cistus.

A distinctive feature of the brand is its use of alcohol aged in wooden barrels in perfume-making. Blending fruity sweetness with resins and the warmth of wood, this composition won Perfume Extraordinaire of the Year at the US Fragrance Foundation Awards in 2021.

The collaboration continued with Cedar in Acacia, Oud in Bourbon, Apricot in Cognac, and other fragrances. Combinations with fruit and resins develop their shared themes of wood and aging.

Polo Blue Parfum: Thinking about Continuity through Materials

Polo Blue Parfum, released in 2022, was co-created with Carlos Benaïm. While carrying forward the world of the original Polo Blue, it incorporated a material made using oak obtained from the cognac-barrel manufacturing process, as well as responsibly sourced patchouli and vetiver.

The fragrance won the Consumer Choice award in the Men’s & Universal category at the 2023 US Fragrance Foundation Awards. It combines the continuation of a popular series with a renewed approach to choosing materials.

Love Delight: Drawing Honeyed Pastries through Flowers

Amouage’s Love Delight is a 2024 creation. Creative Director Renaud Salmon wanted a honey-glazed pastry accord at its heart.

Gaurin focused on a world of pastries combining nuts, baked goods, orange-flower water, and rosewater. The flower he chose was heliotrope. Its almond- and cherry-like facets connected with the idea of honey-glazed pastries.

Rather than reproducing the smell of food directly, he approaches the memory of pastries through a flower’s character. It is a construction characteristic of Gaurin’s storytelling through scent.

Henry Rose and Perfume-Making with Ingredient Disclosure

For Henry Rose, launched by Michelle Pfeiffer in 2019, he developed the initial perfumes with Yves Cassar. The brand’s stated policy was to disclose all of its formulation ingredients.

Working within the standards of the Environmental Working Group, or EWG, and Cradle to Cradle, he composed with fewer options than in his usual palette. These constraints also offered an opportunity to reconsider the functions of materials he had previously used.

The relationship began with Torn, Dark Is Night, Fog, Jake’s House, and Last Light, and continued with Queens & Monsters and Dave. Obtaining particular certifications while also making compelling perfume is another part of his work.

An Aside…

Gaurin’s personality also emerges in his words about life beyond work. Asked about perfect happiness in a Proust-style questionnaire, he gave a very concrete answer.

“Sitting facing the sea in the Cyclades, surrounded by my family.”

From an interview for Maison d’Etto

His greatest luxury is a VPI turntable and the time to use it. His favorite fictional characters include Dory from Finding Nemo, Ellen Ripley from Alien, and Andy Dufresne from The Shawshank Redemption.

He describes his state of mind as anxious but happy, and the quality he wants in others is reliability. Speaking of his family, he jokes with affection about his wife, presenting having persuaded her that she could find no one better than him as an achievement in life.

Dark forests, films, music, and family: these intimate, concrete moments form the background of a perfumer who seeks depth in his compositions.

Perfume Creations

The principal creations are listed chronologically. A “—” in the co-perfumer column means that no collaborator is named in the sources cited here.

References

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