Fanny Grau

About Fanny Grau

Fanny Grau is a French perfumer with a doctorate in chemistry. Her work combines fragrance creation with research into natural materials, and includes an ongoing collaboration with Abel founder Frances.

Career

Raised in a family of scientists, Grau was drawn to smells and colours from an early age. After completing her doctorate and undertaking an internship at Imperial Chemical Industries, she trained individually with perfumer Marc Vom Ende. She then spent a year working as a junior perfumer in Mexico and ten years in Brazil before returning to Paris.

Creative Style & Philosophy

Grau describes her role in collaboration as translating someone else's ideas into scent, whether the starting point is an emotion, a memory or a colour. She experiments with materials and accords, gradually assembling the elements into a coherent composition rather than beginning with a fixed sensory formula. Her parallel work on natural-material development involves exploring extraction methods and improving existing ingredients; understanding their complexity and variability helps her judge how they will behave together in a perfume.

Signature Works

• *Nurture* — a soft Abel floral combining orange blossom, rose and jasmine with musk.
• *Pause* — an Abel floral in which mimosa and narcissus meet the dry, woody textures of hay and cedar.