To smell good and pleasant is a desire of every person. A good fragrance coming from your body automatically lifts your mood and shoves you to walk with more confidence and grace. They give you a pleasant, lovely, and satisfying feeling for the rest of the day. There are numerous best perfumes for men and women and among them, there are few favorites of almost every person which they like to wear to smell good and feel lovely.
Talking about perfumes, the black community has a different kind of love for perfumes. You have probably seen many black people running a perfume business. Black people are said to be the biggest consumer of fragrances. They are responsible for almost 23 percent of the market. Black people are the only largest consumers of scents and despite being such a large fragrance consumer community; they are rarely mentioned in any news or are given any credit. They are never represented in the industry even after knowing that they are the keen consumers of fragrances. They are always seen behind the curtains.
There are many black people currently running a perfume business successfully and are making their name in the industry. Chris Collins, who controls the fragrance line World of Chris Collins, is the Black perfumer in luxury retailers like Bergdorf Goodman and Nordstrom. Chris Collins developed a love for extravagance and a profound appreciation for good fragrances. He is well known for creating exotic and attractive scents.
Not only Chris Collins but there is other black perfumers as well who are changing the scent industry. Let’s have a look at 5 black perfumers and their achievements and how they made their name in the perfume industry.
Kimberly Walker, Kimberly New York
Kimberly was born in Jamaica and raised in Florida and New York. She started by working with customers in the fragrance industry and later made her mind to start her own brand. She wanted to start a successful brand owned by a black woman that people will love and admire. Her eponymous line has appeared in publications like Cosmo and Allure — creates fragrances for men and women. Her first ever attempt to make a perfect fragrance, took 29 iterations after which she got successful in making that fine scent.
Kimberly Walker continued to expand its outline when she launched her Echelon collection, which she calls a love letter to Black men. It is counted among the best perfumes for men. Kimberly has always liked centering and focusing her work on blackness. She launched her latest collection called Diaspora that is the merriment of all aspects of Black culture. Now her goal is to be in the race with Estée Lauder, Lancôme, and Chanel.
Maiya Nicole, Black Girls Smell Good
Maiya first worked at Nordstrom as a beauty stylist before moving on to Saks, where she accumulated a clientele of fragrance enthusiasts who liked her comprehensive method of selling perfume. Her goal was to create a space like Black Girls Smell Good because most of what she comes across on Instagram is all beige and she wanted to make space for black girls. She gained success by posting her first TikTok video of the first installment of her “Fragrance 101” series, which she marked as a safe space to learn about fragrance without feeling like an outsider.
Furthermore, she explained that her community is divided into three kinds. The first one is the OG’s. They are longtime fragrance lovers with exciting collections, then comes enthusiasts who are familiar with it but still are keen to learn more and the last one is the newbie who are totally new to the space. Her collection of fragrances is the most luxurious and has contributed to the scent industry.
Dawn Marie West, La Botica
Dawn Marie West launched La Botica in 2018 as a way to magnify her creativity. She was also on the roundups list of Black-owned brands. She started with candles and later expanded on to perfumes. She believed that the representation of black perfumers in the industry is virtually nonexistent.
She studied plant-derived and synthetic compounds and essential oils to understand what makes up a perfume and swiftly learned how expensive and affluent it could be. Her latest edition was Flor de Selva. It has notes of Dominican orange, resin, Pimenta, cypress, nutmeg, and cedarwood.
Kimberly Waters, MUSE
She opened Modern Urban Sensory Experiences, or MUSE — the only Black-owned fragrance boutique in New York City. At first MUSE had only a few perfumes at a time. In May 2021, T Magazine called MUSE a beauty destination, along with shops like clean-beauty retailer Shen and Atelier Beauté Chanel.
Kimberly Waters joined a fragrance community that gave her admittance to the industry. She was also able to visit Symrise that is the main fragrance manufacturer. Her goal was to create a scent that brings niches fragrances to audience. She was the first woman to stock the Black-owned, U.K.-based brand Maya Njie in the U.S. and it can now be found all over the world.
Ezra-LloydJackson, Perfumer’s Assistant at Olfiction
Ezra-Lloyd Jackson started off with working at Roullier White, a London boutique that stocks a huge selection of niche fragrances. And soon after that he started working in a lab as an assistant. Through his continuous effort and struggle he got the opportunity to work on a fragrance for Ford. His goal was to make space for black people in perfume industry. And for that he did everything possibly he can to make the black people get the attention and appreciation they deserve in the perfume industry.
