Pia Long
Finnish-born, UK-based perfumer and co-founder of Olfiction. She learned perfumery on the job after years in fragrance retail and describes her style as olfactive magic realism.
Finland
About Pia Long
Pia Long is a Finnish perfumer who made Britain her home in the early 1990s. In 2016 she founded Olfiction with evaluator Nick Gilbert, a perfumery studio, publisher and fragrance house. She creates for brands ranging from designer names to ultra-niche, concept-driven projects. She is also a co-founder of Boujee Bougies, a luxury candle brand separate from Olfiction.
Career
Long started selling fragrance at 13, behind a perfume counter in Helsinki alongside school. A London College of Fashion graduate, she first worked toward a career in film, TV and theatre. The turning point came at a London fragrance distributor in the 1990s, when a visiting sales rep presented a perfume with a miniature perfume organ, and she began to wonder how perfumes are made. Rather than attending a perfumery school, she began training in 2006 and learned on the job. As a junior perfumer at Lush for seven years, she helped develop its scents and trained in-store teams. She then worked as a perfumer, with quality-control duties, for two small fragrance suppliers.
Philosophy
Olfiction holds that scents and stories are structurally inseparable. Long describes dreaming in smell and moving olfactive objects in her mind, and calls her style olfactive magic realism, shaped by her love of stories and colour. On work days she avoids wearing strong scents, which she compares to listening to two records at once while she works on a formula. In the Buckinghamshire studio she and Gilbert formulate, evaluate and compound every trial, then send the finished formulas to Accords & Parfums in Grasse for production.
Signature Works
- *Terror & Magnificence* (BeauFort London)
Inspired by the Georgian architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, whose buildings nod to Ancient Egypt. Church incense, candle wax, papyrus and kyphi meet a wet stone accord that recalls London's first downpour after a hot summer.
- *Chipmunk* (Zoologist)
Nutty and woody accords, accented with spices, bring together the forest floor and the food the animal gathers in autumn.
