Calice Becker: The Perfumer Who Polishes a Fragment of a Flower and Creates Light That Lingers in Memory

Perfume is the most beautiful illusion.

Calice Becker, Perfumer & Flavorist, “The Juice,” 2017

How do flowers get inside a bottle?

The question young Calice Becker asked her mother became the very starting point of her work. Invisible flowers rise out of a transparent liquid. As she unravels that mystery, she in turn creates flowers and landscapes that do not exist in reality.

Dior’s J’adore, Tommy Hilfiger’s Tommy Girl, and numerous creations for Kilian. Alongside making widely known perfumes, she has led Givaudan’s perfumery school and nurtured the next generation.

What her creations share is a strong impression combined with a certain smoothness, never shutting out the wearer. She polishes flowers, woods, and fruits in small units, joining them like a single light. Such painstaking work lies hidden within Calice’s perfumes.

Perfumery History

Russian Memories and Everyday Life in France

Calice is described as having been born around 1964 in Paris, France. Also known as Calice Asancheyev-Becker, she is a perfumer with Russian roots.

According to a profile in Perfumer & Flavorist, her grandparents fled the Russian Revolution for France, and what was intended as temporary refuge became a long-term home. Although she grew up in France, Russian customs and a sense of beauty remained alive in the household.

Her mother was an artist and sculptor. She seems to have been someone who created beauty in ordinary life, as well as taking her daughter to exhibitions.

When my mother served tea in the garden, she would cover a simple wooden table with a beautiful embroidered cloth, set out a polished samovar, and arrange flowers. A sense of beauty was everywhere. My work, too, is connected to that wish to make everything a joy.

Calice Becker, ÇaFleureBon, 2011

Her father, meanwhile, was a mathematician who also worked on mathematical puzzles made from wood. Art and science, beauty and structure. The two elements that would later support Calice’s work were already present at home.

When she was around four, her mother would put eau de cologne on her after a bath. Even when told that it was made from flowers, she could see no flowers in the bottle. How had they got in, and how did they come out? She recalls asking over and over.

As a child, she also noticed different women wearing the same scent, or detected something beginning to burn in the kitchen before anyone else did. Rather than a superhuman ability, perhaps this simply meant she was a child who could not help paying attention to smells.

How a Girl Who Wanted to Become a Doctor Came to Open the Telephone Directory

She did not set out to become a perfumer. Calice wanted to be a doctor. She wished to heal people, but partly under the influence of her mathematician father, she pursued scientific studies and went on to an internship at an engineering company.

She felt, however, that this workplace did not suit her. Her mother then suggested a career creating scents. In another interview, she names three women who recognized her talent and encouraged her: her mother, her aunt, and Françoise Caron, who later became her mentor.

In the days before the internet, Calice opened the telephone directory. She called Chanel, contacted company after company, and was told that she should approach fragrance houses. The perfumery school in Versailles told her she needed a master’s degree in chemistry. As she considered her next step, Roure in Grasse contacted her for an interview.

When I entered the school, I was like a child in a sweetshop. I could not believe that people could be paid to work with smells. I fell in love with the profession on the very day I began to learn it.

Calice Becker, The Fragrance Foundation, 2021

It was also a time when women struggled to be accepted as perfumers. In a 2011 interview, she described being turned away in a meeting with a company executive and leaving the room after saying that she would become a perfumer with or without that person’s help. She was reportedly called back because they needed someone with courage, and was hired.

There is no need to explain everything through a single dramatic event. Yet both her persistence in making calls and her refusal to back down convey her strength as she approached a profession she did not yet know.

Roure, Quest, and Then Givaudan

Givaudan’s official account dates the beginning of Calice’s perfumery training at Roure in Grasse to 1985. Recalling four years of study followed by experience under mentors, she names Françoise Caron and Dominique Ropion.

In 1994, she moved to Quest International. Working in Paris and New York, she created Tommy Girl and J’adore.

In 2007, when Givaudan acquired Quest, she became a Vice President Perfumer at the company. She has continued to work across a broad range, from major projects for fashion houses to niche brands involving close discussions with their founders.

Then, in March 2017, she became Director of the Givaudan Perfumery School. She returned to the school where she herself had studied, this time as an educator. This did not mean retiring from creation, however. The announcement of her appointment explicitly stated that she would continue making fragrances for selected clients while leading the school.

Explaining the Perfumer’s Work to Society

Calice has also served as President of the Société Internationale des Parfumeurs Créateurs (SIPC), working to broaden understanding of the perfumer’s profession and the creation of scent. In a 2021 interview, she described recognition of perfume creation as an intellectual work as the ultimate goal.

Personal recognition has followed as well. In May 2019, she was made a Chevalier of France’s Order of Arts and Letters. On June 10, 2021, she received the US Fragrance Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Perfumer Award, honoring a perfumer’s lifetime contribution.

In interviews around that time, she wondered whether receiving a lifetime award meant that her work would be regarded as something in the past. There was still so much she wanted to do. An introduction to a 2026 interview also describes her work selecting and educating the next generation as the school’s director.

Polishing Small Accords and Joining Them into One Fragrance

Calice compares her perfumery to brushwork in painting. One approach layers subtle changes like Johannes Vermeer; another places broad blocks of color like Georges Braque. Her own preference is to finish small sections with great care.

I make small accords and polish each one. Then I add another small part that I have polished in the same way, adjusting them to one another. Rather than broad brushstrokes, it is like an airbrush, moving very smoothly from one accord to the next.

Calice Becker, Perfumer & Flavorist, 2017

There should be an approachable structure, but not a fragrance that gives everything away at once. She tries to retain a degree of abstraction, like a book that makes you want to read a little further.

In a 2017 interview, she explained that while the laboratory had around 1,400 materials, the palette a perfumer used routinely consisted of roughly 100–300. Individuality begins with the choice of materials itself. These were her figures at the time, not fixed numbers shared by every company or perfumer.

Asked about favorite materials, she answers: everything that comes from the bitter orange tree. Neroli and orange blossom from its flowers, and petitgrain from its leaves and twigs. Lily of the valley, honeysuckle, lychee, and bergamot are other scents that attract her.

Commercial work and art are not opposites for her, either. Painters and sculptors of the past had patrons, deadlines, and technical constraints, and many people supported production in their workshops. Perfumery is not so very different. She embraces the task of creating something that reaches people’s hearts within a set of conditions.

Major Creations and the Stories Behind Their Scents

Tommy Girl: Turning Everyday Tea into a New Floral

Launched in 1996, Tommy Girl marked a major turning point for Calice. In a 2021 interview, she reflected that while she was proud of what J’adore had achieved in the market, Tommy Girl had been the greater breakthrough in terms of olfactory novelty.

The tea accord in this fragrance is connected to memories of home: her mother brewing tea in a samovar and enjoying unusual teas. On this background, perfume critics Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez’s Perfumes: The Guide recounts a story Calice told them about analyzing the air in a tea shop.

According to that account, at Calice’s prompting, chemist Roman Kaiser sampled the air inside Mariage Frères in Paris and studied its distinctive aroma. A tea base developed from this work is said to have led to Tommy Girl.

The brightness of flowers is layered with the transparency of tea. Rather than copying the smell of a drink as it is, the fragrance translates a familiar memory into a new floral structure. The book awarded Tommy Girl five stars and also praised its influence on later perfumes.

J’adore: Five Flowers and Memories of Her Father and Mother

The brief for J’adore in 1999 called for a fragrance to welcome the new millennium. Calice imagined an intricately rendered bouquet of the kind found in Dutch still-life paintings.

For women, flowers are present at the rituals that mark life’s milestones. That is why I wanted to create the most perfect bouquet, with the precision of a Dutch painter.

Calice Becker, Perfumer & Flavorist, 2017

Lily of the valley, honeysuckle, jasmine, rose, and violet. She created each as a separate accord, and when she combined them, elements common to several flowers became apparent. Rather than building up those overlapping parts repeatedly, she brought them together as one. That shared portion smelled like jasmine sambac.

By working precisely with five real flowers, she brought forth a flower that was not any single one of them. This abstract bouquet lies at the heart of J’adore.

For the supporting woody impression, she drew on memories of the amaranth wood her father worked with: its soft, creamy smell as he handled the purplish timber. The fruity impression came from the aroma of her mother simmering plums in Banyuls wine. Vanilla beans, cinnamon, lemon, and sugar overlap, with tartness rising through the sweetness.

She creates flowers, woods, and fruits separately, polishes each, then brings them together. J’adore’s abstraction is supported by these tangible memories of everyday life.

Beyond Paradise: A Tropical Flower Never Seen Before

Estée Lauder’s Beyond Paradise is a women’s fragrance from 2003; the men’s fragrance Beyond Paradise for Men followed the next year, in 2004.

The Eden Project in Cornwall, England, is described as part of the background to the women’s fragrance. Images of unusual flowers and fruits were incorporated into the scent from this world of immense greenhouses gathering plants from across the globe.

With names such as Laelia orchid, pink honeysuckle, Mahonia japonica, and jabuticaba, the fragrance’s description can feel like a visit to a real botanical garden. Yet its appeal is not simply a list of unusual names. In layering different flowers to evoke a single bloom never seen before, it reveals Calice’s approach in a way that also connects to J’adore.

Turin and Sanchez also gave this fragrance five stars. Not merely reproducing one real object faithfully, but creating an ideal flower: this, too, is one of what she calls beautiful illusions.

Kilian: A Meeting of Minds at the First Trial

Her collaboration with Kilian Hennessy, beginning in 2007, is an important part of Calice’s work. She has created many of the brand’s varied fragrances, including Love Don’t Be Shy, Back to Black, and Woman in Gold.

She describes Kilian as something like a creative muse. A story about Beyond Love from 2007 captures their relationship especially well. When Kilian smelled the first trial, the answer was an immediate yes.

Leave it as it is. Do not spoil it by changing anything. It is perfect.

Kilian Hennessy’s words as recounted by Calice Becker, ÇaFleureBon, 2011

This does not mean that every project is settled easily. In the same interview, Calice explains that they also go through many trials and spend considerable time until they reach what they both want. That is perhaps what made this instant understanding so special.

In Sacred Wood from 2014, an accord evoking Mysore sandalwood takes center stage. An arrangement that began as a base to support other creations is said to have prompted Kilian to see the possibility of a perfume in its own right.

Imperial Tea from the same year is another creation characteristic of Calice’s attraction to tea. She sought to capture the steam rising from freshly brewed jasmine tea, and its delicate emergence. It feels as though Tommy Girl’s memory of tea continues in another form.

Velvet Orchid: A Smooth Darkness Woven by Four Perfumers

Tom Ford’s Velvet Orchid is a 2014 creation. While inheriting the world of Black Orchid, it moves toward a different expression of flowers.

Alongside Calice, Yann Vasnier, Antoine Maisondieu, and Shyamala Maisondieu created it jointly. Warmth reminiscent of rum and honey, flowers of jasmine, rose, and orchid, and the depth of resins and woods connect like layers of fabric.

Calice says that even when she creates dark scents, she seeks a velvet-like smoothness. Rather than taking away their strength, she shapes that strength so that it follows the skin. That approach also resonates with the name of this creation.

The Musc and Indigo Smoke: Softness and New Landscapes of Tea

Essential Parfums’ The Musc is a 2018 creation. Centered on musk, it combines ginger, lavender, sandalwood, and other elements to express an enveloping softness. The Musc Extrait also appeared in 2025.

Arquiste’s Indigo Smoke, meanwhile, was launched in 2022. Its subject is lapsang souchong, a tea with a smoky aroma. In her work with brand founder Carlos Huber, her long-standing interest in tea expands into a landscape evoking smoke and trees.

Teaching Students Not Only to Use Their Noses, but to Question Themselves

At the perfumery school, what matters to Calice is not simply memorizing material names and formulas. It is understanding that one’s perception is not always in the same state.

It is easy to jump to conclusions. That is why you must always take a step back. I teach what is called metacognition. When you smell something, what did you smell before it, what mood are you in now, have you had coffee? Those things make a big difference.

Calice Becker, The Fragrance Foundation, 2021

A room seems dark when you enter it from bright outdoors, but light when you come from a dark cellar. Smell is similarly affected by what comes before and after it. Trusting a keen nose is not enough; one must reconsider how one is perceiving things.

Nor does she only give students exercises to which she already knows the answers. In 2021, she said that she was investigating the scent of yellow orris together with her students. She, too, searches for answers and learns something every day. That curiosity sustains her teaching.

She is also interested in advances in tools that assist creation. Just as photography and music have editing software, she has said that tools to help compose scents will emerge. Even so, she believes that producing high-quality perfumes that endure as classics requires a perfumer’s judgment and creativity.

An Aside: Preserving Perfume as Someone’s Memory

In the countryside of western France, Calice values time with horses, nature, and her family. Riding, reading, cooking, and growing flowers. The smells of dry hay and leather are also pleasant to her.

Among her favorite artists, she names Michelangelo, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Raphael. In music, the names continue: Jean-Baptiste Lully, Johann Sebastian Bach, Gioachino Rossini, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sergei Prokofiev, Niccolò Paganini, and many others. She listens not only for the power of a work but also for its tenderness and harmony.

In cinema, she has said that she likes Luc Besson’s Le Grand Bleu and Ariane Mnouchkine’s Molière. A perfumer she admires is Maurice Roucel. She values a boldness that she does not possess herself, and formulas with a concise, powerful message.

The first perfume she bought for herself was Dürer; the perfume she wishes she could have created is Dior’s Diorissimo. Her mother wore Guerlain’s Shalimar. By contrast, she dislikes hospital smells, which suggest sadness to her.

In 2017, she shared a story that conveys her sensitivity to emotion particularly well. A woman who had spent at least a year in hospital after a major road accident asked her to recreate a discontinued perfume. It was a precious scent, given to the woman before the accident by the person she had planned to marry.

Fortunately, the fragrance had been developed at Givaudan, and Calice was able to recreate it and send it to her.

She wrote in her letter that the scent had restored the feeling of the time when she could still walk. I cried. That letter was a lifetime’s reward.

Calice Becker, Perfumer & Flavorist, 2017

This is not a story of perfume healing the body. It is a story of being able to touch the feeling of a lost time once again. The woman who had wanted to become a doctor and help people may have found another way to support the human heart.

Acknowledging your own ignorance is the path to knowledge.

Calice Becker, interview with Nose Paris

Even after creating worldwide hits and taking on the education of the next generation, she continues to search for scents she does not yet know. The curiosity of the child who asked how flowers got into a bottle remains at the heart of her work today.

Perfume Creations

The main creations are presented in chronological order. Launch years and co-perfumer credits can differ between sources, and different versions and relaunches are listed separately. “—” indicates that no collaborator is listed, and does not necessarily mean sole authorship.

References

• Perfumer & Flavorist: The Juice: Calice Becker (2017)
• The Perfume Society: Superstar perfumer Calice Becker talks about her beautiful career
• ÇaFleureBon: Exclusive Interview with Calice Becker (2011)
• The Fragrance Foundation: Lifetime Achievement Perfumer: Calice Becker (2021)
• Nose Paris: Calice Becker interview
• Givaudan: Appointment as Director of the Perfumery School (2017)
• Givaudan: Announcement of the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters Honor (2019)
• Givaudan: Lifetime Achievement Perfumer Award Announcement (2021)
• Nez: Calice Becker, The ultimate goal would be to see perfume design recognised as an intellectual work (2021)
• Perfume Room: Introduction to the Calice Becker Interview (2026)
• Penguin Random House: Excerpt from Perfumes: The Guide
• AbeBooks: Perfumes: The A–Z Guide, Book Excerpt on Tommy Girl
• Kafkaesque: By Kilian Sacred Wood (2014)
• Kafkaesque: By Kilian Imperial Tea (2014)
• Fashion Quarterly: How luxury fragrance brands find their scent
• Essential Parfums: Calice Becker / The Musc
• ÇaFleureBon: Arquiste Indigo Smoke, Interview with Carlos Huber on Its Creation (2022)
• Now Smell This: Arquiste Indigo Smoke Launch Introduction (2022)
• Now Smell This: Calice Becker
• Fragrantica: Calice Becker
• Fragrantica: Beyond Paradise
• Fragrantica: Versace Pour Femme Dylan Blue
• ScentAdvice: Kissing (2018)
• Parfumo: Calice Becker
• Wikipedia: Calice Becker