November 17, 2025 |
I have been wearing the dark rose Róisin Dubh. The name is Irish and means ‘little black rose’. The perfume has enough class to prompt reviewers to say it is exquisitely blended, but I was drawn to its absence of light. Or the shadowy notes, including paper and faint incense/smoke, that give the perfume its edge. It is sensual in a quiet way. Like a secret once hidden in a remote tower.
Is perfume changing in the 2020s? I looked at a few modern scents. Namely Róisín Dubh, Marc-Antoine Barrois’s Ganymede and Akro’s Smoke. They are all liked, even loved, by perfume insiders. They are labyrinthine scents and contemporary. The more I studied them, the more I felt there were huge gaps in my understanding. Kindly, the perfumer who created Róisín Dubh agreed to meet in London. Meabh McCurtin is a young pertumer. She has a coveted position at IFF (International Flavors & Fragrances) and has created many well-regarded perfumes. Her Under the Stars for Margiela has a beautiful finish and even though I only wore the perfume once, I can’t forget it. It was caressing, musky and smoky. I asked her if perfume was changing in the 2020s. “Some things don’t change,” she said. There 1S always seduction. And in of trends, she told me there are perfumes linked to well-being. I have always preferred darkness to wellness… so… not for me. But I wanted to know if science was driving change. I was playing a hunch that perfume was high-end biotech.
“No,” she said. “That’s one of the things I like about it. It’s quite like a craft in a way. It’s changed in terms of the tools we have. They allow us to more scientifically analyse upfront, to get projections of diffusion. But the actual basics of how you conceive of making a fragrance is more like a craft. It has this timelessness to it. I imagine that 100 years ago the way to train to be a perfumer was the same as it is today. You have to go through memorising the whole palette of ingredients.
Of being able to identify the lemon from Italy and the lemon from Spain, and know the differences and nuances of those smells. And know how to build them up into discreet accords… It takes a few years and there’s no fast way through it.” But I have been told that modern perfumers can ‘edit’ natural ingredients. McCurtin explains that IFF owns a company in the south of France that produces natural ingredients and creates special edits or cuts. “With patchouli, for example, they split it apart, almost. Different fractions, we call them. They isolate different parts. They have a way to separate out certain elements. Patchouli is woody and earthy. You might say, I just want the woody facet without the earthiness, and they can do a molecular distillation where they can isolate the molecules. They know which ones are responsible for the earthy and which for the woody note and they can separate them out and create a new quality.”
Could McCurtin make a phone call and demand a version of rose? It’s not exactly like that, she said. It’s more the other way around. “They ask us what is missing from your palette. They will ask the pertumers if you feel, for example, that you have enough options within the amber family. We can make requests. Sometimes they can do them. And sometimes they can’t.” I have been thinking that perfume is a game with nature. A game of unusual complexity. I asked her if she was a student of nature. Or a thief. “I hope I’m not a thief. I’m often amazed by how nature is the best perfumer. Sometimes when you smell natural ingredients you can feel happy. There’s a direct emotional impact. If you are in a field or in a forest, there’s that smell of the leaves on the trees. It’s very healing, especially when you are training as a pertumer and learning the composition of the different flowers. Even throughout a single day a flower itself can change the qualities of the different molecules to make itself smell slightly different at different times. It has the capacity to alter its own fragrance.” If a perfume smells different to me on different days is the perfume shifting, or is it my… “Perception? You can’t control how it is perceived. But what you make you have control over.” So every subtle flash is there by design. I didn’t know that. But I still want to know more about how a perfumer thinks. What they know about nature
clockwise, from top: Smoke by Akro, Ganymede by Marc-Antoine Barrois, Risin Dubh by Cloon Keen
“I never expected to work in perfumery. One of the more beautiful surprises in my life is that I got to learn about these things. There’s an enchanting side to perfumery that gets a bit lost in these huge commercial campaigns. Do people realise the time that has gone into this? Orris is an ingredient. We use the root. But it spends two years below the ground. Then five years above the ground being warmed, which allows a certain molecule called irone to develop. We test it and when it’s at the right level we do an extraction to get the orris butter. It takes seven years. It’s one of the most expensive ingredients. It’s very mysterious. It smells waxy, woody, floral…” If McCurtin never thought she would be a perfumer, what was she going to do? “Molecular biology. I worked as a chemist but I was missing the creativity. I read an interview with a perfumer and that was a lightbulb moment. She talked about nature and the language of nature. That really appealed to me.”
I have been nursing a theory that smoky notes in perfumes are apocalyptic and signify an end of nature. McCurtin agrees that smoke is a dark note. but in terms of trends, she says, perfumers want to stimulate consumers. The perfume equivalent of molecular cuisine. They want to make scents that will intrigue. I can see this intrigue in her perfume 14 Juillet, which has a gunpowder, or fireworks, accord. I can also see this intrigue in the great fragrance of the moment, Barrois and Quentin Bisch’s Ganymede, which has reviewers reaching for words like alien, as the scent appears so otherworldly it may have bled from another universe. But one level that Ganymede belongs to is Earth: it is sour, green (chartreuse) and a little fetid. I know this nature. But there is a compelling strangeness. I asked Barrois if Ganymede was very 2020s. “Ganymede is a very sincere and authentic new fragrance. In 2020 it was unknown and very confidential, but I feel it corresponds every day to the increasing demand for authentic fragrances. Clients do not want marketing-driven scents, so in this way it is very 2025.”
Is perfume changing? There are new notes, new accords. There are new molecules, which we haven’t discussed in this story. But from the perfumer’s point of view, nothing beats a hit. There must be something so beautiful or curious we are compelled to consume it.
“When you want to create a fragrance, one thing you are looking for is signature,” says McCurtin. “Signature is the holy grail of perfumery. If you smell Dune [by Dior], then it is Dune and nothing else. And signature is close to addiction if you can create something that somebody wants to smell and smell and smell. I think that food has that too. Like mushrooms. And it is not always linked to pleasantness.”
Olivier Cresp’s Smoke is a great perfume of the moment. It is a tobacco scent. a nuanced wood with wonderful levels of discretion and a burnt (at times) aspect. There is also a hot blush of sensuality that is dandy-ish. Like Dorian Gray. Now, Cresp is a veteran and master perfumer. He has created hundreds of scents. Many classics. Smoke is one of a handful of perfumes he created for the niche house Akro, which he runs with his daughter, Anaïs. I sent Cresp some questions and one of the answers was fantastic, I think.
“You have to differentiate,” he said, “between the figurative and the abstract in perfume. In an abstract perfume, you don’t see nature. In a figurative perfume, we always start with elements connected to nature such as flowers or other natural raw materials, which is what we did for Akro’s Breathe. When we create a figurative fragrance, we always have a link with nature, with the elements, because that’s what makes it tangible and understandable.”
If the perfume doesn’t want you to ‘see’ nature, then you won’t see nature. So I shouldn’t torment myself by trying to detect ingredients. Then what is Smoke? A dark masculine without the toxic signatures I can’t enjoy in older masculines. In that respect, I would file it alongside Ganymede, which similarly is masculine reconfigured. I read a review that mentioned cigarettes but this is not Smoke. “Smoke from Akro smells like tobacco, not cigarettes,” says Cresp. “It’s a woody, spicy tobacco note that often appeals to men, even if it’s for everyone. It’s a very complex and powerful fragrance.” And as a cautionary note, the more you question
perfume, the less you know. I asked Barrois about the science and he referenced his fragrance Aldebaran, which we haven’t discussed. It is a striking tuberose. If I had more time I would compare it to Frédéric Malle’s Carnal Flower to see how a tuberose from 2025 plays against one from 2005 (more edge probably). Anyway, I was asking Barrois about the science. “Biotech definitely brings new ways to extract fragrances from nature, but the interesting thing is that an oil, let’s say a tuberose absolute, doesn’t smell like the flower in nature and so ingredients are sometimes far away from the natural feeling. Then a perfume needs the genius work of a perfumer [Quentin Bisch] to recreate with different synthetic accords the naturality of a tuberose field to create Aldebaran.” I was hoping certain perfumes were transforming 2025. Or transforming perfume. But I learned something different. I was thinking that Róisín Dubh, Ganymede and Smoke played with nature. And that is part of their story. But I realised the nature they work on… is mine. These perfumes are drugs. Fashioned to ‘intrigue’.
Photography by Rikki Ward. Taken from 10 Magazine Issue 75 – BIRTHDAY, EVOLVE, TRANSFORMATION – out on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
