Euan McCall

Euan McCall

Euan McCall is a Scottish perfumer. After about a decade as a consultant and perfumer for UK fragrance brands, he founded Jorum Laboratories in 2010, a fragrance formulation and manufacturing house based in Scotland. In 2019 he and his partner Chloe Mullen launched their own perfume brand, Jorum Studio.

Career

His grandparents ran a horticulture business that created gardens across the UK, and they passed on to him a love of aroma, nature and curiosity. Early in his training he met Dr George Dodd, an Irish master perfumer who had retired to the Scottish Highlands, and he learned from Dodd's research on pheromones, the aroma chemistry of whisky and natural aromatics. In 2010 no other formulation and manufacturing house operated from Scotland, and McCall founded Jorum Laboratories because he believed Scotland should be part of perfumery's global story. After Dodd died in 2020, Jorum took custody of his large archive of raw materials.

Philosophy

McCall combines advanced technique with instinct. He works with natural essences and high-performance synthetics, and with the interplay between the two. Once a subject is chosen, the team researches it at length and builds a moodboard of images, film stills, music, architecture, typography, textiles and notes on new materials. Perfume sketches are made alongside the moodboard until the concept settles, and then the work turns to formulation. He describes the northern smell landscape as muted and intimate but dense, which pushes him to look for both native and distant materials.

Signature Works

• *Cape Wrath* (BeauFort London): inspired by the wild coastline at Britain's north-western tip, it opens with bracing ocean air, moves through frankincense smoke and geranium, and settles into a lasting mossy base of ambergris, seaweed and oakmoss.
• *Pyroclasm* (BeauFort London): linking the basalt of the Giant's Causeway with the Clyde shipyards that built iron ships, it conveys heat and pressure through rust, saffron, black pepper and tarry cade.