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For French perfumer Jérôme Epinette, even after making hundreds of perfumes for dozens of brands over more than a decade in the industry, there is always something new to work on.
“I always tend to go for new business. And my first request is, ‘I want to meet the founder.’ I want to meet the founder to understand what their vision is, what they’re trying to do,” said Epinette. “You need to be behind your brand. If you need me to stay motivated, then I need to hear from you. Because at the end, it’s about emotion, memories, collaboration.”
Epinette finds many proposals worth saying yes to. If you take a quick look at the major perfume launches of 2025, you will see his name come up again and again: A perfumer at the French fragrance manufacturer Robertet, Epinette is the nose behind launches ranging from Rare Beauty’s first eau de parfum to newcomer Lore’s buzzy scents to Byredo’s new gourmand, Alto Astral.
“It’s like therapy,” Epinette said of his process. “I don’t have a couch to have the client lay down on, but I let them open themselves up. And that’s really when you start learning about their personality. There is the aesthetic and the visual, but I think going deeper in the person is very interesting.”
And it comes as no surprise that those companies keep knocking on Epinette’s door. His creations have proven to be consistent hitmakers for brands ranging from mass to luxury.
Epinette’s addictive body mists for Sol de Janeiro have helped the body-care brand become the top-selling line at Sephora and best-selling fragrance brand on Amazon — Sol de Janeiro makes up 31.6% of parent company L’Occitane Group’s annual sales of €2.8 billion ($3.2 billion). And his debut perfume trio for Victoria Beckham’s namesake beauty line helped her company achieve a 26% growth in sales to £112.4 million ($151.8 million) in 2024.
And that’s to say nothing of the now classic scents like Bal d’Afrique, which Epinette created for Byredo in the early 2000s — Epinette reworked Bal d’Afrique into new Absolu versions in 2025. Puig, which acquired Byredo in 2022, reported a 7.7% like-for-like sales growth to €2.3 billion ($2.7 billion) in the first six months of 2025, with the conglomerate attributing a double-digit growth in niche fragrance sales to Byredo specifically.
Raised in Burgundy by a mother who owned a perfume store and trained at the Grasse Institute of Perfumery, Epinette has been based in New York since 2006. In the decades since, he has seen the explosion in fragrance firsthand and, with it, the role of perfumer growing from behind-the-scenes figure to a key part of a brand’s storytelling. After all, today’s consumers aren’t just buying a Noyz or a Liis perfume, but they’re also buying a Jérôme Epinette creation.
“The perfumer is more exposed than before. Before it was like working in the shadow of the brand,” he said. “But now [the perfumer] is really a pillar of the brand.”
