The perfume world’s rebel

Christopher Brosius isn’t your average perfumer, said Geoffrey Grey in New York. Known as the Willy Wonka of the perfume world, he’s earned his reputation by crafting such eccentric scents as Wet Mitten, Roast Beef, and Clean Baby Butt. While most of the world’s leading perfume makers train their noses in France, Brosius’s education started when he drove heavily perfumed women in a New York City cab in the 1980s. “Those were the Giorgio days,” he says. “Miserable.”

He began working at a perfume counter, mixing high-end perfumes like a bartender for celebrity clients such as Cindy Crawford. Later, he threw himself into the serious study of scent. He delights in creating unconventional smells. “People who smell like everyone else disgust me,” he says. “That whole ‘Let’s find the universal thing,’ which I know is big in the perfume world. Well, how boring is that?” Lately, he’s been putting the finishing touches on his masterpiece: a complex admixture of jasmine, sandalwood, and amber intended to smell like nothing. “It’s not going to smell the same on each person,” he says. “It smells like us. It smells human.”

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