Sarah Horowitz-Thran remembers the first moment she fell in love with perfuming. She walked into an offbeat apothecary-style perfumery called Essence in Boston on famed Newbury Street in the late 1980s.
“I remember all the rows of bottles and the colors,” she said. “It was very spiritual, and Enya was playing in the background, and a man walked up to me and asked, ‘May I anoint you?’ and I thought, ‘I don’t know what that is, but yes you may.’”
That man eventually hired Horowitz, who was a freshman in college at the time and put in a lot of studying. Though she threw herself into the shop and even developed her own perfume customization technique that she dubbed “The Fragrance Journey,” she still considered it her college job.
She was studying performing arts with a minor in philosophy and religions. But her career path took a turn when her employer announced in 1992 that he was going to close the shop and move to Colorado.
“It was when I realized it was going to be taken away from me that I realized that it was what I wanted to do,” Horowitz-Thran said. “I knew if the shop was closed I wouldn’t just walk out and get another job like it. There wasn’t anything in the area like it.”
A friend and she borrowed and saved and bought the shop. They ran it until the lease came up, and then Horowitz-Thran took her fragrance-blending skills to Los Angeles, where she founded Creative Scentualization, which eventually gave birth to Sarah Horowitz Parfums.
Horowitz-Thran counts such celebrities as Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Lopez, and Sydney Poitier as clients. When her line Perfect Perfumes debuted at Malibu’s Planet Blue in 1997 with Perfect Gardenia, a nature-identical tribute to the flower, her fame grew. She created the private line called “What Comes From Within” for Barney’s of New York and “Perfumers Palette” for Nordstrom.
At the heart of Horowitz-Thran’s non-formulaic approach to perfume customization is her trademarked Fragrance Journey. It’s a process that takes about an hour to an hour and a half and allows her to connect with her clients. She asks a series of questions from favorite colors to childhood memories to favorite time of the day. The questions help her create a profile, and from there she works with the client to help narrow down preferred scents.
“The client comes away with a scent they absolutely love,” she said. “The beauty of it is that the client is the co-creator of the fragrance.”
Horowitz-Thran will bring a scaled-down version of her Fragrance Journey process to the C Gallery Sept. 17. Participants will create a journal along with gallery director Connie Rohde to document the information needed to design a personal fragrance. Participants will get the chance to design, name, and take home the fragrance they’ve created. Complimentary lunch will be provided by Café Quakenbush, and jam and preserve tasting will be held across from the gallery with Madeline Jex at the Gentleman Farmer, where participants can select their own complimentary antique tea cup. The day will culminate with a tea party with Horowitz-Thran.
Arts Editor Shelly Cone has a nose for news. Contact her at scone@santamariasun.com
This article appears in Aug 18-25, 2011.