Vocation vacations: Job-auditing firm turns career switch dreams into reality

Our reporter takes a short stint with a perfumer. What this man 'nose,' you can learn.

from the March 31, 2008 edition

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"I am a Nose," he says by way of introduction.

In the lexicon of perfumery, a Nose is someone who can sniff a bottle of perfume and distinguish all its different notes, or scents, as many as 25 discrete smells in the average perfume. According to Harding, Noses are one in a million.

Harding specializes in replicating name-brand fragrances without the alcohol or additives and at a fraction of the price. Although perfume houses don't advertise their ingredients, they aren't patented either. That means anyone can make Chanel No. 5 if they have olfactory senses good enough to pick out the ingredients. Harding makes this and 724 other men's and women's commercial fragrances – all with the word "Resemblé" on the label to avoid copyright infringement.

The way Harding talks about discovering his own nose is almost mystical.

It wasn't until later in life. He was in a jazz band, attending graduate school at Berklee College of Music in Boston. Tiring of the lifestyle – "going to bed when the sun was coming up" – he met Miriam Novalle, a French-trained master perfumer, at her shop while on vacation on Martha's Vineyard, Mass.

"I picked up a bottle and smelled it, and out of my mouth came 'heliotrope'," says Harding, who doesn't recall having been told about the plant with a fragrant purple bloom. Ms. Novalle was so impressed that she offered to apprentice Harding and sell him her fragrance bar.

As Harding begins dripping different ratios of "Rain" (his own creation made of lily of the valley and hints of seven other flowers) and other oils onto coffee filters (the most scent-free paper), I become confused. I can distinguish the difference; I just can't say which I like better.

There is something delightfully mad scientist-like about swirling glass pipettes in bottles of oil. And after Harding tells me to smell my sweater, as a way to cleanse my nasal palate, I develop a new appreciation for the simplicity of its woolly smell. My nose would be happy to sniff my sweater all afternoon.

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Mentor: Perfumer John Harding creates fragrances, including replicated name-brand ones, at his Nantucket, Mass., shop. He also lets visitors apply their noses to his art. mark Thomson