Tauer Perfumes: Scent Sculptures from a Self-Taught Perfumer in Zurich

Creating beautiful fragrances requires absolute freedom.
It also requires time, and the very best ingredients you can obtain.
The true mystery of creating a thrilling scent lies in how you bring all of these to life.

— Andy Tauer​

Basic Information

Founded: 2005
Founder: Andy Tauer
Based in: Zurich, Switzerland
Official website: https://tauerperfumes.com

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The Founder and the Brand’s Origins

A Boy Who Grew Up Beside the Rhine

Andy Tauer was born in 1964. He spent his boyhood in a small, historic village in rural Switzerland, with a bridge spanning the Rhine. Home to fewer than 400 people, the village was reportedly such an important transport hub in the Middle Ages that it held town privileges. There was a farm nearby, and the children played by feeding dandelions to the pigs through the fence. “The narrow cobbled lanes, the cool scent of damp stone, the smell of moss gathering in the shade: those childhood scenes still come vividly back to me,” Tauer says.

He is also said to have grown up with chemistry sets from childhood. This environment appears to have laid the groundwork for his later life as a chemist, although he has also said, “I do not think chemistry directly influences my creative work. The source of creativity lies somewhere else.” His upbringing seems to have taken him back and forth between the poles of science and art.

A Career as a Chemist

Tauer studied chemistry at university and earned a doctorate in the subject, then also conducted research in molecular biology. He subsequently worked for a large petrochemical company before moving into a management role as an IT manager and consultant, helping researchers obtain grants. Creating scents was not even a passing thought.

A Fateful Book: How Amazon’s Algorithm Changed His Life

The turning point came through a trip to Africa. Tauer loved African safaris and had been on several of them. One day, he decided he wanted to take his mother too, and used a bonus to plan a trip for the two of them to Kenya. While looking on Amazon.com for books to read before their journey, the algorithm recommended Mandy Aftel’s Essence and Alchemy.

I do not really know why. I was interested in perfume in the sense that I owned a few fragrances, but I was not enormously passionate about it, and I was not particularly interested in creating scents myself.
For some reason, though, the book’s title struck me as very intriguing. So I decided to buy it.

— Andy Tauer, from an Olfactif interview​

In Kenya, he became absorbed in the book beneath frangipani blossoms. Aftel’s words about the scents of natural materials overlapped with the sweet fragrance of the flowers in front of him, and he says he could no longer resist the impulse to try it himself.​

Back home, Tauer ordered natural fragrance materials from various places and began teaching himself about scent. At first, he simply recorded his impressions of each material in an Excel spreadsheet. He used whatever instinctive words came to mind, such as “the smell of fish” or “the smell of trees beside a motorway.” Later, he met Swiss perfumer Vero Kern, who would go on to found Vero Profumo. As she taught him how to use synthetic fragrance materials, he took on the challenge of creating increasingly complex scents.

Le Maroc: The First Step Began in a Friend’s Bookshop

While devoting himself to fragrance, he had dinner with his friend Pascal Wehrli, who ran the Medieval art & vie bookshop in Zurich. Over that meal, the two discussed Moroccan natural materials, and Pascal asked Tauer whether he could make a perfume using them. With the wine flowing, an agreement was reached on the spot.​

And so, in 2005, Le Maroc pour elle was completed, centered on natural Moroccan absolutes of rose, jasmine, and cedarwood, and placed on the shelves of the little bookshop. It reportedly took about nine months to create, with dozens of trials before the finished version emerged. Sales were initially slow, at around one bottle a week, but the blog he started in July 2005 began to change things.​

L’Air du Désert Marocain: A Cult Classic Born of Chance and Critical Acclaim

Also in 2005, Tauer released his second fragrance, L’Air du Désert Marocain. In contrast to the oriental richness of Le Maroc, it sought to express the wind sweeping through the Moroccan desert at night: dry, warm air mingled with spice, smoke from the souk, jasmine blooming on a terrace, and the sweet aroma of cookies baked after dark.

When the fragrance received the highest rating of five stars in Perfumes: The A–Z Guide (in Japanese) (the 2008/2009 world perfume guide), coauthored by critics Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, Tauer’s name spread rapidly among niche-perfume enthusiasts. Turin himself later called it “a classic alongside Shalimar.”

Around 2008 or 2009, there was a really lovely niche perfumery in Brooklyn called Lui e Lei.
[Passage omitted] Then, when I released the next fragrance, quite a few people actually complained, because they expected something from me that I was not giving them.

And one of the shop owners said this:
“Listen, Andy. This is something you are going to have to live with. You are always going to be compared with L’Air Du Desert Marocain. You had better get used to it.”
What he said was indeed true.

— Andy Tauer, from an Olfactif interview​

Even after this success, Tauer continued making perfumes for several years while working during the day at his main job as a consultant and manager. He made the cautious choice to grow the business gradually and switch entirely to perfume only once his income was stable.​

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The Brand’s Commitments

A Fragrance Philosophy: Absolute Freedom and Time

What Tauer values above all is creative freedom. Unlike major brands pursuing mass-produced consumer goods, Tauer Perfumes has always maintained its independence.

I am 100 percent independent and follow my own taste and instincts.
I consider perfumery a craft, and I always want to remain deeply connected to what I create.

— Andy Tauer​

A perfume usually takes one to two years to complete, sometimes longer. An idea is first written down in an Excel spreadsheet as a “skeleton” listing notes from top to base. Small trials are then made repeatedly in his home perfume studio. The trials branch out like an evolutionary tree before converging on a final form. His signature Lonestar Memories was completed after 18 basic versions and countless fine adjustments.

Although deeply committed to natural materials, Tauer also actively explores the possibilities of synthetics. “The complexity of natural materials is unique. They are difficult to master, but they give depth and intensity,” he says. At the same time, his PentaChords collection takes on the challenge of perfumes composed entirely of synthetic molecules.

Bottles and Packaging: A Pentagon and Deep Blue

Tauer’s trademark perfume bottle is a pentagonal blue-glass flacon. The choice of blue glass is not merely aesthetic; it also serves the practical purpose of “protecting the precious perfume from sunlight.”​

The outer boxes are produced using FSC-certified paper in collaboration with Swiss partner Vögeli AG. The dark-blue sliding box, developed with longtime design collaborator Donovan of Designer’s Club in Zurich, won bronze in the Packaging category of the 2024 Swiss Print Award. The boxes, said to be printed on old Heidelberg presses, carry a silver-foil Tauer logo.

A One-Person Process: From Labeling to Handwritten Notes

Since founding the brand, Tauer has handled almost every stage himself, from fragrance formulation to bottle filling, labeling, packing, and dispatch. Packages are also known to arrive with handwritten notes, and the human warmth absent from mass production has become emblematic of the brand.

He cycles around 15 minutes to his production space to bottle and pack the perfumes, work he describes as “repetitive, but very calming.”​

Community and Transparency

Tauer started his blog in 2005 and has continued to write candidly about failures and struggles in composing fragrances, as well as raw materials. The famous episode in which he humorously described a trial of Lonestar Memories as “the smell of a horse made to smoke tobacco” also arose from this open communication.

In 2009, he also took part in the collaborative platform PERFUMism.com, testing and adjusting his direction through dialogue with the perfume community. He has also said that “having a blog helps me keep my thinking grounded.”

The Fragrance Lineup

Tauer Perfumes is currently organized primarily into the following collections.

Classics

The line at the core of the brand, centered on the early creations that won its following. Representative fragrances include Le Maroc pour elle (2005), L’Air du Désert Marocain (2005), and Lonestar Memories (2006). Their personalities differ, but they share a rich, long-lasting foundation of amber, woods, and incense within a distinctive accord characteristic of Tauer, sometimes called “Tauerade.”

Au Coeur du Désert, released in 2016, explored this amber world in greater depth and also received a five-star rating from critics.​

Homages

A line with a high proportion of natural ingredients, themed around “homage” to the materials themselves. It is characterized by the use of natural oils at high concentrations.

PentaChords

An experimental collection embodying the philosophy of “less is more.” Each fragrance consists of just five synthetic molecules, bringing the pure presence of the materials to the fore. The lineup comprises three creations: Verdant, White, and Auburn. It is Tauer’s adventurous demonstration that rich perfumes can be created entirely from synthetics.

Collectibles

A limited series released in small batches using rare raw materials. As production quantities vary with ingredient availability, these are worth acquiring when you encounter them.

The Absolue Series: Successors to Tauerville

Tauerville, introduced in 2014, functioned as a creative laboratory for offering experimental fragrances at accessible prices. As the brand matured, however, the separate line was deemed confusing and was absorbed into the Absolue series, which carries its spirit forward. Rose Absolue and Vanilla Absolue, released in 2025, deepen and refine Tauerville’s Rose Flash and Vanilla Flash and are housed in the iconic pentagonal bottle.

Tableau de Parfums

Launched in 2011 as a ten-year collaboration with American independent filmmaker Brian Pera, this distinctive project links cinema and fragrance. Inspired by the women in Pera’s film series Woman’s Picture, three “fragrance portraits” were created: Miriam, Loretta, and Ingrid. Some emerged in a direct rush of inspiration: Tauer himself recalls that, for Loretta, “it took a single day from the birth of the idea to writing it down in Excel and putting it in a test tube.”

By the Way…

• The bookshop where Tauer released his first perfume, Le Maroc pour elle, was Medieval art & vie in Zurich, which also sold Moroccan crafts. In other words, Tauer’s first “shop” was a bookshop.​
• It was not Tauer but a blog reader posting as “Prince Barry” who suggested the perfume name Lonestar Memories. Tauer had reportedly intended to call it Texas Memories.​
• Tauer is also known for his talent for painting, and regularly shares his own hand-drawn illustrations on social media.​​