The more I looked beyond France and the United States, the more I discovered that fragrance is not simply preserved through institutions. It is carried by people, landscapes, cultures, memory, and generational knowledge rooted in the land itself, preserved by communities like those behind Toba Benzoin long before the industry learned to value it.
FRAGRANCE PERSPECTIVES 14
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What happens when we stop looking at fragrance through launches, bottles, marketing campaigns, and luxury houses, and instead look through the people, cultures, materials, and traditions that make fragrance possible in the first place?
That question led me well beyond the familiar fragrance conversation.
It led me to Korea.
It led me to Sri Lanka.
It led me to North Sumatra, Indonesia.
More importantly, it reminded me that fragrance has never belonged to one country, one institution, one school, one tradition, or one center of authority.
That realization became unavoidable through three conversations that reached me from very different parts of the world: Hani Oh of Heroes of Korea, VILORIA in Sri Lanka, and Ranap Siagian of Toba Benzoin in North Sumatra. Each offered a different perspective on fragrance. Each revealed something the industry often overlooks. Together, they challenged me to reconsider where fragrance knowledge actually lives and what we lose when we fail to look beyond the familiar.
The fragrance industry often speaks confidently about heritage, luxury, craftsmanship, creativity, innovation, and expertise. Those conversations matter. Yet I have begun to wonder whether they are incomplete. The more I travel through fragrance, the more convinced I become that we have mistaken part of the story for the whole.
For generations, much of the industry has looked in one direction for authority. Yet some of the most compelling lessons in fragrance are emerging from cultures that are not asking to imitate established traditions. They are building, preserving, and defining their own.
Learning perfumery should not be linear.
It should be global.
The global fragrance community is far more expansive than the industry often acknowledges. Across continents, people are preserving materials, protecting traditions, building fragrance cultures, solving different challenges, and contributing knowledge shaped by their own histories and landscapes. If we continue looking in only one direction, we do not simply limit our education. We limit our understanding of fragrance itself.
My conversation with Hani Oh reminded me that fragrance can become a language through which a culture tells its own story. Heroes of Korea is not attempting to recreate French perfumery inside a Korean bottle. It asks a different question altogether: what does Korean history smell like when interpreted by a Korean perfumer?
That distinction matters.
When I asked Hani what the global fragrance industry should better understand about Korean perfumery, she responded, “When people talk about Korean fragrances, they often see them as an extension of K-Beauty. I believe the potential of Korean perfumery is much greater than that.”
She continued, “Independent perfumers are creating brands that express deeply personal worldviews and cultural narratives.”
Then she offered the sentence that stayed with me long after our interview had ended.
“Korean perfumery is still in the process of developing its own language.”
I have returned to that sentence repeatedly because it reaches beyond Korea, reminding me that every culture serious about fragrance eventually confronts the same challenge: will it merely consume fragrance? Or will it develop its own language for expressing memory, identity, history, landscape, and culture through scent?
That question feels especially relevant because Korea’s beauty industry did not emerge accidentally. It grew through manufacturing, education, entrepreneurship, regulation, design, consumer sophistication, and relentless innovation. Korean perfumers are not attempting to recreate French perfumery within Korea. They are developing a distinctly Korean fragrance language rooted in their own history, culture, and identity. That is a fundamentally different pursuit.
Sri Lanka revealed a different reality.
My conversation with VILORIA shifted away from cultural language and toward the practical realities of becoming a perfumer where educational systems remain limited. The challenges described were remarkably specific: obtaining an ethanol license, navigating regulatory approvals, securing IFRA-compliant materials, financing production, and overcoming the significant expense of entering the profession at a serious level.
Those answers mattered because they revealed something larger than regulation, highlighting cost in multiple forms, including financial burden, limited access, prolonged waiting, and the challenge of building without clear or visible pathways.
When I asked what challenges exist for aspiring perfumers in Sri Lanka, VILORIA answered plainly:
“Learning this as a subject within Sri Lanka is highly challenging.”
That sentence deserves attention.
It reminds us that talent and curiosity alone do not create perfumers.
Pathways, mentorship, educational opportunity, and access all matter because they determine not only who discovers the profession, but who ultimately remains long enough to contribute to it.
The conversation did not end in Sri Lanka.
It followed me home.
The questions VILORIA raised followed me home because they are not confined to Sri Lanka. They simply appear differently in the United States. We are one of the world’s largest fragrance markets. We celebrate launches, innovation, scale, and luxury with remarkable confidence. Yet the journey into perfumery remains surprisingly fragmented. Meaningful programs, workshops, nonprofit initiatives, academic offerings, and independent educators certainly exist, and each contributes something valuable. What remains less visible is a cohesive pathway that helps aspiring perfumers discover the profession, develop the craft, and move confidently from curiosity to competence.
As a result, many independent perfumers build their education piece by piece through books, conversations, raw materials, experimentation, reformulation, travel, costly mistakes, and extraordinary persistence. The destination may be different, but the underlying reality is surprisingly familiar. Whether in Sri Lanka or the United States, builders often succeed not because a clear path exists, but because they refuse to stop walking.
And in that way, the distance between Sri Lanka and the United States begins to narrow.
The challenges are not identical, but the underlying truth is shared. Access shapes possibility, and pathways shape who ultimately continues long enough to become part of the profession itself.
And when those pathways are unclear, the responsibility shifts to the individual to create what does not yet exist.
That realization stayed with me as the conversation moved further outward, beyond education and into something even more foundational.
Then came North Sumatra.
Following the publication of FRAGRANCE PERSPECTIVES 13, Ranap Siagian shared a comment that immediately expanded my thinking.
“I come from a benzoin farming family in North Sumatra, Indonesia, where the knowledge of cultivating and harvesting Sumatra Benzoin has been passed down through generations. Preserving these traditions, the farmers, and the cultural heritage behind natural fragrance materials is just as important as preserving the fragrances themselves.”
His words reached beneath the bottle, beneath the perfumer, and all the way back to the material itself.
Benzoin Sumatra is part of the DNA of SANCTUAIRE DE FLEURS, a material I have come to understand not only for its warmth and depth, but for the quiet beauty it brings to a composition.
What I had not fully considered until reading Ranap’s perspective was the human inheritance carried inside the material long before it reaches my organ.
The Toba Benzoin story describes the resin as “the breath of life and a sacred heritage passed down through generations.”
That sentence deserves to sit beside any discussion of luxury, because luxury is not merely rarity, if it is rarity at all; it is memory, patience, and devotion, knowledge protected long enough to become inheritance.
The Batak people have preserved techniques, relationships with the land, and material knowledge across generations. The fragrance industry ultimately commercializes the resin, but it did not create the wisdom required to cultivate it.
That realization reminded me of something entirely different: Black beauty, not because the work is identical, but because the principle is.
For generations, Black beauty schools, educators, manufacturers, salons, and entrepreneurs preserved professional knowledge, developed standards, trained future practitioners, and created economic mobility long before the broader industry acknowledged their significance.
Knowledge survived because communities chose to preserve it, the medium happened to be beauty, the principle was inheritance, and perhaps fragrance has been trying to teach us the same lesson all along, because the bottle is not where fragrance begins, nor is it where fragrance ends.
Between the land and the luxury bottle exists an extraordinary chain of people whose knowledge makes fragrance possible.
The farmer.
The cultivator.
The perfumer.
The evaluator.
The educator.
The founder.
The writer.
The archivist.
Each preserves something the next generation will inherit.
Hani, VILORIA, Ranap, and my own journey through SANCTUAIRE DE FLEURS do not represent separate conversations; they represent different points along the same continuum.
Each reminds us that fragrance becomes richer when we expand our view beyond products and begin listening to the people, cultures, materials, and histories that give those products meaning.
Perhaps the future of fragrance will not be determined by who speaks the loudest.
Perhaps it will be shaped by those willing to listen the furthest.
If you have not yet read FRAGRANCE PERSPECTIVES 13, I invite you to begin there. That investigation asked what cultures choose to preserve, teach, document, fund, and prepare others to inherit. It also raised a larger question that has continued to follow me long after publication and in this series.
With reverence,
Serene B. Hollingsworth,
Parfumeuse de Vérité and Composer of Extrait de Parfum, is the founder of SANCTUAIRE DE FLEURS, A Maison