Laura Santander | Perfumer

A practical apprenticeship inside the Carbonnel laboratory

Laura Santander developed her career at Carbonnel in Barcelona. In a 2012 interview with the company’s perfumers, she described a route that began as an assistant and progressed through practical learning rather than university training.

By that interview, she had spent around ten years at the company. The account places persistence, daily study and experience with materials at the centre of her development into a perfumer.

Her projects included collaboration with Sonia Espelta on Xerjoff’s Oud Stars collection, working with the character and quality of agarwood. Santander also spoke about the pleasure of the finished bottle, sometimes buying a perfume she had helped create because of its presentation. Her story gives a view of the profession from inside a working laboratory: the gradual acquisition of knowledge, the exchange between colleagues and the relationship between a composition made at the organ and the product eventually encountered by its wearer.