Every shampoo bottle she read as a child had the word in its ingredient list: Parfum.<\/p>\n
And as she inhaled, MacKenzie Cuthbert thought, \u201cSomeone\u2019s got to make this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today, she\u2019s that someone.<\/p>\n
Cuthbert \u201914 is a perfumer for Firmenich, a position held by only 90 of the company\u2019s 10,000 employees. She lives in Geneva, Switzerland, where Firmenich is headquartered, and spends her days using both her nose and her Furman chemistry degree.<\/p>\n
Cuthbert has always been obsessed with scent.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would go into Bath & Body Works and smell everything,\u201d she says. \u201cI loved doing laundry as a kid because of the smells.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once she learned that being a perfumer was an actual career option, she never looked back. Her dad suggested chemistry as a starting point, and she liked what she heard about Furman\u2019s science programs.<\/p>\n
Chemistry Professor Brian Goess introduced her to a colleague in the flavor industry, a close cousin of fragrance.<\/p>\n
\u201cStudents who have an interest are going to find someone on our faculty who knows someone in industry,\u201d Goess says.<\/p>\n
One name led to another. Some of the conversations were dead ends. But Cuthbert had a stock answer: \u201c\u2018OK, great. Thanks for talking to me.\u2019 Then I would call the next person.\u201d<\/p>\n
It worked. By fall of 2014, Cuthbert had a temporary position in the applications lab at Firmenich\u2019s New Jersey office. Six months later she was a perfumer\u2019s assistant, compounding oils from formulae sent to her by a master perfumer.<\/p>\n
\u201cI took every opportunity to smell and ask questions,\u201d Cuthbert says.<\/p>\n
She also passed a test that every would-be perfumer must take \u2013 \u201cthey need to make sure your nose works\u201d \u2013 and ultimately was chosen for the four-year training to become a perfumer.<\/p>\n
The world\u2019s largest fragrance houses have two primary tracks: fine fragrance and consumer fragrance. The latter includes everything from laundry detergent to candles to deodorant.<\/p>\n
Cuthbert\u2019s first year of training was spent memorizing roughly 1,000 smells. Then she began learning how to develop a scent for a specific application. She was nominated as a full-fledged perfumer in November 2020.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s no surprise Cuthbert considers smell the most important of the human senses.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s an emotional attachment to it,\u201d she says. But she also understands scent as an escape. During a research trip to India, she was overwhelmed by the unpleasant smells a large city produces. She was motivated to develop a laundry fragrance that would provide relief.<\/p>\n
Cuthbert works primarily with European clients but is also involved in global projects in countries including Colombia, Argentina and Singapore.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery country has their own types of smells, just like food,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Personally, she leans toward \u201cwoody and creamy\u201d scents, with touches of white floral.<\/p>\n
In the spring of this year, she was looking forward to a trip to France to smell a mimosa tree in full bloom, a scent she hadn\u2019t experienced yet outside of a lab.<\/p>\n
She loves the challenge of home care perfumes. Her formulae \u201chave to create a fragrance that covers the base, which usually smells terrible.\u201d<\/p>\n
But a perfumer also works within restraints, including safety regulations and price restrictions.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not just a nose, we\u2019re also a brain,\u201d Cuthbert says. \u201cThere\u2019s thought that goes behind every formula.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fresh laundry, a mimosa tree in full bloom \u2013 scents can stir emotions or offer an escape. And MacKenzie Cuthbert \u201914 has the formula.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":272,"featured_media":28076,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2667,2299,1963],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-class-notes-fall-2023","category-fall-2023","category-furman-magazine"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/272"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28075\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}