Mark Buxton was born in England but grew up in Germany.
He was studying geology at Göttingen university when a friend suggested the two of them appear on a TV game show. The idea was, they would be challenged to recognise any perfume the presenter gave them to sniff, which they did, and they won.
They spent that night in the studio bar, getting drunk with Falco and Leonard Cohen.
And the next step for Buxton was an invitation to visit Haarman & Reimer, now Symrise, at the end of which he was offered a place at their perfume school.
His first commercial release was for Babar the elephant, a cartoon character for kids; the second was Laguna for Salvador Dali, a powdery and aquatic mint-tobacco, with a technique that allows his joyous creativity to shine through. It’s in the same optimistic vein you get in some of Sarah McCartney’s perfumes for 4160 Tuesdays.
McCartney was born in England, like Buxton, but unlike him is self taught, although she may have picked up quite a bit from her time working as a staff writer at Lush - where she would turn out some 50,000 words every quarter for their website (and eventually a novel - about a perfumer).
Eventually she took the plunge and started making the stuff herself. And, as anyone who's smelled McCartney’s work will know, it is not polished high street fayre. She is clearly a heart & soul perfumer, not one who - before dipping a pipette - sits down and calculates what will give her the best returns on the market.
Mark Buxton says he is rubbish with figures, and can't remember names (so he's probably not a corporate type either). He grew up in his parent's pub kitchen, and - because he likens perfumery to cooking - that would explain why he says he’s 'good at everything around odour' --- which includes having a prodigious perfume memory that allowed him to learn hundreds of perfumes in the six weeks before he went on the show and wowed them with his nasal skills.
Being the son of entrepreneurial parents, Buxton decided to leave a career at Symrise, where things were becoming too safe, and set up his own studio where he would have creative freedom to do his own work. He's also a co-founder of Nose boutique in Paris.
I think it’s significant that Buxton and McCartney both arrived at perfume by round about means, and perhaps this bears on the perfumes they produce. Their works are not that similar, but they can feel more similar to each other; compare Laguna with What I Did On My Holidays, and then contrast them with the output of some of the ‘corporate’ perfumers who work for the Big Five.
Besides being born in England, I think what Buxton and McCartney have in common is a natural gift for perfumery; theirs are practices where vivid - and in McCartney's case - abundant ideas take precedence over commercial considerations.
And this isn’t just the case of ‘if you have a formal training you go to work in a big oil house, and if you don’t you become an independent’; Alberto Morillas is a self taught perfumer but he has climbed to the top of the corporate ladder.
Instead, I think it's a question of attitude: or - could I say - art-itude … and through this attitiude (and raw talent) McCartney and Buxton have found their ways into perfumery, almost by chance it would seem.
But, whatever it boils down to, the stories of these two characters demonstrate the fact that success in modern perfumery doesn't depend on being born in Grasse, or belonging to a perfume dynasty, but having the guts to follow your nose, wherever it may lead.