Magazine · Arabian perfumes · people
The Names Behind Arabian Perfumes
We know the names of the perfume houses, admire the bottles and can list the precious ingredients. About the people who actually composed the scent, we usually know nothing.
Yet a single bottle may hold years of work and hundreds of trials. Here are four creators – and four very different routes into perfumery.
An artist whose work cannot be seen
A writer has words, a composer notes, a painter colours. A perfumer works with a material that can be neither seen nor held. They must know how hundreds of ingredients behave together, which one will drown out the rest and what the scent will be like six hours on. And they must be able to imagine the result before mixing anything.
Two schools meet in the perfumes of the Arabian Peninsula today. One consists of family makers of scented oils who learned the craft through trade and practice. The other is made up of international perfumers who compose for houses in Oman and the Emirates.
Haji Ajmal Ali: from the rice field to oud
The story of Ajmal begins not in a boutique but in the village of Alinagar in Assam, India, where Haji Ajmal Ali was born into a family of rice farmers. Assam is one of the homes of agarwood, and the young farmer decided to try his luck in the oud trade.
In 1951 he moved to Bombay and began blending his own scented oils – the year the brand regards as its beginning. In 1976 the family opened its first shop in Dubai, in the Murshid Bazaar, and ten years later built its first manufacturing unit there, with its own research and development. The company remains in the family’s hands to this day.
Ajmal’s route did not lead through a perfumery school. It rested on knowing the raw material, the trade routes and what customers actually wanted.
Cécile Zarokian: a rare kind of debut
The French perfumer Cécile Zarokian graduated from the ISIPCA school in Versailles and trained for four years at Robertet. It was during that time that she composed her first perfume – Epic Woman for the Omani house Amouage, launched in 2009. The spicy, resinous yet floral scent remains one of the brand’s mainstays.
In 2011 she set up her own independent studio in Paris and has since created for brands in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East. Her career shows that a perfumer need not be employed by a house to enter its history. Sometimes a single composition is enough.
Quentin Bisch: pear, frankincense and hazelnut
The Frenchman Quentin Bisch composed Guidance for Amouage, released in 2023. He worked on it with the brand’s creative director, Renaud Salmon, and the task was to reinterpret the triad on which the house is built – rose, frankincense and ambergris.
The result opens with pear, frankincense and hazelnut, has saffron, rose, jasmine and osmanthus at its heart, and ends in sandalwood and vanilla. On paper it sounds unlikely; on skin it is surprisingly coherent.
The collaboration also neatly shows the division of labour. The perfumer composes the scent itself; the creative director sets the direction, the story and the shape of the whole collection.
Pierre Negrin: order amid chaos
Pierre Negrin was born in Grasse, and both his grandfathers traded in raw materials for perfumery. He did not learn the craft at school, however, but directly in the laboratory. In the early 1990s he left France for Mexico and then the United States, where he works in New York.
For Amouage he created Interlude Man (2012). The brand describes it as a fragrance inspired by chaos and disorder that hides a moment of harmony at its heart. Oregano, bergamot and pimento at the start give way to frankincense, opoponax and cistus; the base holds leather, smoky agarwood, patchouli and sandalwood.
It is a good reminder that a perfume need not be smooth from the first minute. It can work with a tension that only eases with time.
So who is the author?
The answer is not simple. Some houses grew out of a family craft; others invite perfumers who work for many brands. Creative directors, raw-material specialists, laboratory technicians, evaluators and packaging designers all have their say as well.
Some brands proudly name the perfumer; others keep them in the background. Even then, the scent did not come about by itself.
We can smell a scent, take it apart and describe it in words. But behind every successful composition stand someone’s judgement, experience and patience – and that still makes perfumery more of an art than a manufacturing process.
