“I’ve always loved perfume, ever since I was a Saturday girl selling it in a small chemist,” says Ellis, who then decided to combine her passion for fine fragrances with her love of chemistry, and become a perfumer. She’s been at Floris London for seven years now, guiding her customers through crafting their own bespoke fragrances. “It’s quite a perfecting job; a tiny drop really matters. So you need to have the rigour of science behind you.” Penny Ellis: in-house and bespoke perfumer for Floris reveals her five favourite smells…

For Ellis, the best part about creating bespoke perfumes is the people she gets to meet, and the stories she gets to hear. “What my customers are looking to do is capture these memories and put them in a bottle,” she explains. First, she sits down with them to discover the types of fragrance they love best, before discussing the memories the customer would like to recreate. Then comes the fun part: the building and layering of base notes, top notes and heart notes to uncover the perfume the customer has in their minds eye. “It’s completely collaborative,” says Ellis. “As it’s their memories I need them to do the creation for me. I just guide them through it.” Once the customer is happy with their unique fragrance, Ellis uses her expertise to blend and bottle it,storing the recipe in the Floris ledgers. “I always look forward to customers telling me what they want to call their fragrance,” says Ellis. “It’s the final step on the way to capturing their memories in a small glass perfume bottle, to be kept safe forever.”



One supposes that perfumers shouldn’t really admit to having favourites (just as parents are wise not to name their most beloved children), but every nose we’ve met eventually admits to having particularly strong scent memories…

Penny Ellis is an in-house and bespoke perfumer for Floris, lucky enough to be working in one of the most evocatively historic British perfumeries (her studio at the back of their Jermyn Street boutique dates back 300 years, with very little having altered greatly during that time) while striving to create fragrances that delight their many loyal fans and attracting new admirers alike. We were lucky enough to catch up with Penny during the recent launch of their Jermyn Street fragrance, celebrating the resonantly scented heritage of the original Floris store’s location – inspired by the smell of gin and freshly laundered shirts, no less! Once cornered in her wood-panelled room,
The Perfume Society managed to get Penny to spill the scented secrets of her five favourite smells in the entire world…
1. Narcissus. Of course as perfumer you’d expect me to love florals, but for me they have to be fresh florals, and definitely the yellow ones. There’s something about this that just conjures up being in the garden and sniffing great lungfuls of it.
2. The sea. One of the reasons I love using bergamot so much is because it reminds me of the sea. That sounds a bit odd, I know, because it doesn’t actually smell like the sea, but when I was a little girl everyone used to take 4711 to the beach and splash on to keep cool – so it’s completely tied in to my happy memories of the beach.
3. Bonfires. That’s a strange one because I don’t actually like very smokey smells in perfumes, or working with smokey ingredients, but the smell of a bonfire after it’s gone out and you get that whisp of the woodiness on a breeze rather than a facefull of the smoke itself…
4. Spices. Food, definitely. I adore cookery smells, but the herbaceous corriander type rather than the dry cumin variety. Cumin’s a bit… sweaty. But I love baking, though have to be very careful when I am in case you reach for an old jar of something and it’s that gone-off yeasty smell. I associate that with hair colourants, because I used to work with them a lot in an old job. People think hair colourants don’t really smell of anything, but there’s a particular sort of dead yeast smell that any hairdresser will know and has to learn to tolerate.
5. Vetiver. I put this all through Jermyn Street – it runs from top to bottom of all the notes, because we got an amazingly good batch to work with. They vary wildly in quality, like all naturals. It drives the freshness because it has this incredible greenness – I don’t like it when it’s heavy and smokey (that smoke again) as you find in many fragrances that use it.

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