Laurie sold Sonoma Scent Studio a few years back, but the delightful fragrances she created still live on and can be purchased on the SSS website.
Sonoma Scent Studio Interview with
Perfumer Laurie Erickson
Perfumer Laurie Erickson lives in the beautiful rolling hills of California’s Sonoma County where she is surrounded by vineyards and gardens. Lucky gal! She took a few moments in between concocting luscious new fragrances to answer a few questions for Sniffapalooza Magazine.
KP: When you gardened as a little girl, did you imagine that someday you would be using these floral aromas to create your own fragrances?
LE: No, I really didn't. When I was young I didn't have a perfume-making kit, though I did have chemistry and geology kits and worked through various experiments with them. I didn't dream of making perfume though. When I gardened as a child it was for fragrant cut flowers and for vegetables. I didn't start to grow cottage-style landscape borders until I was older, and that's when the perfume and essential oil experiments began.
KP: What are your earliest fragrance memories, other than those of the natural scents of the garden?
LE: Besides the garden scents there are lots of other memorable outdoors scents from my childhood. Since I was very young I’ve always loved a nearby park that has a mixture of oaks, redwoods, and bay trees. I loved the smells of the trees, the dusty trail, the dried grass in the hot sun, and the moist earth by the creek. You walk through a whole series of different plant assemblages in just a few minutes as you pass from the dry oak grasslands to the redwoods by the creek, and all the scents change as you walk. I still love that.
My parents took us camping each summer, so I have lots of fond scent memories from those trips, especially the freshness of the mountain air. My brother and I learned that the bark of Jeffrey pine trees smelled of vanilla, so we had to run around sniffing all the tree trunks to see which were scented.
I rode horses when I was a little older and have lots of scent memories from the barn: leather, oats, alfalfa, hay, cedar shavings, and pungent green grass in the early morning dew. Of course the holidays have lots of pleasant scent memories for kids, like Mom’s gingerbread cookies baking and the wonderful green smell of the Douglas fir Christmas tree we’d cut down at the tree farm each year.
As for early perfume memories, my Mom didn't wear much perfume but my grandmother did and whenever we went out somewhere special her sillage of aldehydic floral scents intrigued me. My own earliest perfumes were two miniatures: one of L'Air du Temps with the doves on top and one little painted porcelain bottle containing violet perfume. I loved both but sniffed them more from the bottles instead of wearing
them, partly to make them last longer and partly because the L’Air du Temps seemed so sophisticated at that age.
KP: Are you completely self-taught in perfumery?
LE: I haven't taken any classes, so in that sense I am completely self taught. I feel as though I’ve learned from others through their writing and their fragrance compositions though because I've read many journal articles and books and I’ve sampled thousands of perfumes that have taught me a great deal. Perfumery is part science and part art, and both parts build on past achievements of others and on new materials that become available. Inspiration from past perfumes combines with your own vision, preferences, and style. Studying the classics and learning the materials available is a similar process whether you do it on your own or in courses. The chance to study a whole library full of ingredients all at once would be a dream come true though, and that would have been especially helpful back when I was first starting.
Mainly I’ve learned through years of sampling ingredients and experimenting with them to discover the best ways to use them, and by researching online and in journal articles (I had a science background in college so I’m used to researching via journal articles. I've learned a lot about aroma chemicals from articles in the Perfumer and Flavorist journal (you can subscribe or buy individual articles or get a compendium they publish from time to time). I would have loved to have flown to France to perfumery school, but that's not an option for me. The learning process has been fun though, and there's always more to learn. The deeper you get into any subject the more you realize you have yet to learn, but that’s part of the fun.
KP: What is your personal favorite family of scent and why?
LE: I don't have a single favorite scent family; I love many different types of scents, and that's partly why I got into perfumery. I love florals, woods, incense, and orientals. I love a few chypres but am fussy about them (I do love oakmoss though). The only notes I rarely like are marine, melon, and strong lemon. I don’t have as many favorites in the green family as in the floral and woods families, but I do love a few greens and quite a few musks too.
KP: How do you go about creating a fragrance? How long does it usually take?
LE: I usually start with the heart of the scent, the primary theme notes. I build an accord that I like for that, and then I experiment with other notes that complement that theme accord. I go through a lot of trials that usually take 3-12 months, sometimes putting the scent down for a month while I search for an ingredient that I need. Some scents take more time than others and most average about 4 months or so, but often I complete two at once during that time.
KP: Your site mentions a To Do list. How many scent ideas are you kicking around to eventually produce?
LE: I almost always have about five or six scents in progress. Right now I have Ambre Noir, Lieu de Reves, and Gardenia Musk all nearing completion and I have Fete de Fleur and Zen Musk half-done waiting in the wings. I rotate working on different scents so I don't smell the same ingredients more than 2 days in a row. There's never enough time to finish all the ideas I have in progress. Between filling orders, answering emails, website work, sourcing ingredients, and paperwork, only a portion of my day is left for blending.
KP: Are you happy to stay small as an indie perfumer, or do you hope to increase your market by selling your wares in shops and boutiques?
LE: I've split my fragrances into two groups, one that will be available to boutiques and one that will be sold only online and here at the studio. I have a little list of things to accomplish before I sell to boutiques, and I've nearly completed the list. I just recently had some pretty custom boxes made for my bottles so they would be ready for retail. Now I want to finish a few more of those scents on my To Do list (Ambre Noir and Lieu de Reves) and then finalize which scents to wholesale and which to keep as online only. Even when I wholesale I want to stay small and continue to offer hand made products with personal customer service. I don't dream of becoming huge; I really like the positives I can offer as a small indie perfumer. I think I still have plenty of growing I can do and stay with those goals though.
KP: What is your all-time favorite smell?
LE: That's a very hard question because I don’t have one favorite smell above all others. As a whole, floral smells probably make me smile the most. I love rose, jasmine, sweet pea, and orange blossom. But I also love the smells of green trees, dried grass in the sun, incense, and woods. For sniffing straight natural ingredients, rose, jasmine, frankincense, labdanum, and oakmoss are all extremely beautiful. In the food category I love the scents of warm spices, tea, coffee, oats, apricot, and mandarin. It's hard to imagine life without the roses in my garden though, so they are certainly very high on my list of all-time favorite smells and may be my best answer.
Sonoma Scent Studios Reviews
By Kathy Patterson
Laurie Erickson is a woman who is not afraid of musk (only 4 of her 14 current offerings do not include musk of some type). I’m a big fan of the note myself, as is my husband, so I was thrilled to be able to try a handful of her fragrances.
Champagne de Bois
Notes: aldehydes, jasmine, clove, sandalwood, labdanum absolute, vetiver, amber, musk
Champagne de Bois is an aldehydic delight, happily effervescent, yet grounded by spice and woods. Aldehydes + clove is really an astoundingly wonderful combination that turns a wintery, warmly spicy note into something less dark and more exhilarating. I feel happy wearing this scent, reveling in the juxtaposition of bright and dark and especially in the bold muskiness of it all.
The aldehydes Laurie uses have a tangy sweet quality that’s not unlike ginger juice, or ginger ale, although without a gingery bite. And they last forever, keeping the drydown just as pleasantly sparkling as the opening.
Vintage Rose
Notes: Rose, plum, amber, labdanum absolute, sandalwood, cedar, vetiver, tonka bean, musk
Vintage Rose is like a glass of strong sweet wine flavored heavily with crushed rose petals. It’s not a powdery, or watery rose, but one that is rich and heady. The plum note not only gives the impression of wine, but also of a dark, unsweetened chocolate. It’s completely delicious and very nearly gourmand.
As the scent dries down, the amber and sandalwood come in to make the scent a little powdery, but no less rich. The scent also becomes quite musky, but only as an enhancement to the dusky rose/plum combo which does fade a bit as the basenotes make their way forward. Hours into the drydown, sandalwood predominates, creating a sexy woody rose aura. Gorgeous stuff.
Although the scent is called Vintage Rose, don’t let that scare you with olfactory visions of dusty, forgotten corsages or anything even remotely “old ladyfish.” Vintage Rose may reminisce a bit, but it is a gorgeous modern scent that is a must-try for rose aficionados.
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