Meet Clare

IHow it started

I wanted a perfume I couldn’t find

Spiritus Florum began with a very particular violet.

After becoming increasingly interested in fragrance during the pandemic, I started looking for a violet and oud perfume, but nothing I found gave me the long-lasting violet impression I wanted, or smelled quite the way I wanted it to.

Eventually it became apparent that if I wanted it, I was going to have to make it.

That perfume became Rhapsody in Violet. It took two years, three major revisions and more than 200 trials before I was happy with it. The first version was sketched out in August 2023; the finished formula was completed in June 2025.

IILearning the craft

From curiosity to formulation

I studied perfumery for two years at the Perfumery Art School UK with Isabelle Gellé Merchant, working with natural materials.

That gave me a lasting fascination with raw materials — how differently they behave alone, together and over time — as well as a grounding in the rather less romantic business of making perfume safely and legally.

My own formulas now use both naturals and modern perfumery materials, as a blended approach allows me to explore a wider range of scent profiles.

IIIHow I work

An idea first. Then quite a lot of weighing and sniffing.

The starting point is often a particular image, place or idea: fairytale violets with a twist, a perfect day under the Florentine sun, or a two-thousand-year-old act of devotion with a legendary material.

From there, the work becomes much less romantic: weighing, testing, adjusting, waiting, and starting again when necessary.

This can take some time, and it’s never as quick as I’d hope. I will delay putting something out to test if 0.002% of something smells better than 0.004%.

I work slowly. I’m not interested in having a large catalogue of perfumes. For one thing, since they’re all made in-house, all of the testing, safety assessment and compliance work has to be arranged and funded by me, so launch cadence is always going to be more snail than stallion.

IVThe studio

Formulation happens here too

Spiritus Florum is a tiny independent perfume studio, not a private-label fragrance brand. One advantage of this is that I don’t work to a deadline, or to the idea that my perfume must cost £x to make, which allows me to select more expensive materials if I think they suit the perfume better.

The formula, the trials, the blending, the maturation and the bottling all happen here. I work from individual perfumery materials and build each fragrance from the ground up.

Many hatsIn common with other sole indies, there is no marketing, photography or packaging department here. I do have in-house tech support through the husband, which is very excellent.

I designed the packaging myself. This website is my own little sniffy cove. So if you don’t vibe with something, it’s probably my fault. Hey, this is a lot of hats, you know. 😊

VOn pricing

Perfumery is an economy of scale.

For a tiny studio, the costs of raw materials, packaging, safety assessment and compliance are substantially higher than they are for larger businesses buying and producing at volume. Some fragrance businesses also work with ready-made compounds, where much of the formulation and supporting technical documentation has already been done upstream.

There are cheaper ways to put perfume into a bottle than the way I’ve chosen to do it, and that’s fine. They’re simply different business models. Spiritus Florum is built around original formulation in very small batches, so I’m unlikely to be the cheapest option, and I don’t try to be. I’d rather price the perfumes in a way that lets me formulate them the way I think they should be made.