Two English Eccentrics
Sarah McCartney and Mark Buxton
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 had to recognise any perfume the presenter gave them to sniff; which they did - and they won. That night they spent in the studio bar getting drunk with Falco and Leonard Cohen.
The next step was an invitation to Haarman & Reimer, now Symrise, where Buxton was offered a place at their perfume school.
His first perfume 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 joyous technique. It’s the same kind of optimistic you get in some of Sarah McCartney’s work 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 as 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. As anyone who's smelled McCartney’s perfumes will know, it’s not polished fayre. She is clearly a heart & soul perfumer, not one who, before dipping a pipette, calculates what will give her the best return for her time.
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 - it explains why he’s 'good at everything around odour' --- which includes having that prodigious perfume memory which helped him learn hundreds of perfumes in six weeks, before going on TV and wowing them with his 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 more freedom to do his own thing. 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 make. Their works are not that similar, but they can feel more similar to each other than the output of some of the corporate perfumers at the Big Five; compare Laguna with McCartney’s olfactory stick of rock - What I Did On My Holidays.
Besides being born in England, what Buxton and McCartney have in common is a 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’s climbed to the top of the corporate ladder.
Instead, 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.
Whatever it boils down to, the stories of these two characters show that success in modern perfumery doesn't depend on coming from Grasse, or being the scion of a perfume family, what it takes is having talent, and the guts to follow your nose, wherever it may lead.