Metropolitan Palm Beach Feb 2022

Sue Phillips, one of the world’s most renowned fragrance experts, has created fragrances for brands, celebrities, and connoisseurs at her ultra-chic and discreet House of Fragrance Atelier in New York. For a once-in-a-lifetime experience, Sue takes her clients on a journey of scents, sharing secrets, histories, and the effect of the rarest of ingredients she has collected throughout her storied career. Their bespoke perfume formula is recorded in the database and can be reordered at any future time. Now, “The Nose that Knows” finally relates her relationship with fragrances. Sue’s long-awaited and much-anticipated book The Power of Perfume: How to Choose It, Wear it and Enjoy It! (Central Park South Publishing Company; $19.95) is finally here. http:// www.thepowerofperfume.com The 240 page book, available in bookstores worldwide and on Amazon, is filled with highlights from Sue’s career, myths about perfume, and little-known facts about the intoxicating effect of fragrance on all of your senses. The Power of Perfume: How to Choose It, Wear it and Enjoy It! also includes photos of celebrities Sue has worked with throughout her career: Hollywood elite, from Katie Holmes to Jamie Foxx and Zendaya,

How to Choose It, Wear it and Enjoy It! with Fragrance Expert Sue Phillips

By Adam Kluger

and the late Cicely Tyson. There’s plenty more in Sue’s book, but to reveal it would ruin the surprise. It’s an homage to perfumes, fragrances, and scents (whichever you want to call them) and how they help people gain confidence, reflect their individuality, and create a signature. ‘Why wear what everyone else wears when you can create your own?’ Sue Phillips, a native of South Africa, is a resident of New York. An internationally recognized expert on fragrance, she has worked in senior-level positions at many of the beauty industry’s top companies, including Elizabeth Arden (working on licensees Chloe and Lagerfeld), Lancaster on the Davidoff brands and Chopard, Trish McEvoy (developed her first 3 fragrances); Lancôme Paris (Magie Noire) and Burberry, where she created scents for its “Society by Burberry” brand. It was at Tiffany & Co., that Phillips achieved her renown: creating its first-ever perfume TIFFANY, which became one of the company’s top sellers. She followed that up with Tiffany for Men. Global luxury beauty companies, Elizabeth Arden and Lancȏme hired Sue Phillips for her marketing expertise, followed by Tiffany & Co. who recruited Sue as VP Marketing Fragrance, where she spearheaded the development, creation, and

launch of the successful TIFFANY perfume for their 150th Anniversary internationally. From Tiffany, Sue established her company Scenterprises Inc. and designed and launched fragrances for Society by Burberry, Burberry for Men, Diane von Furstenburg, and many other well-known brands. Throughout her career, Sue’s passion, ability, and ingenuity have resulted in her being at the forefront of innovation and always delivering quality products and experiences to her clients. “My mission,” she says, “is to lift fragrance out of the bottle and to create memorable fragrance experiences”.

Sue, you became a brand ambassador and influencer for Tiffany and other major brands. Why did you leave Tiffany? When I left Tiffany to have my daughter that's when I started my own business Scenterprises (https:// suephillips.com/scenterprises/) and it has been extraordinary. When I left Tiffany and started my own business I was retained to develop a fragrance for Burberry and the Trish McEvoy fragrances and then Avon retained me to develop several different business models, so I was creating and developing many

innovative fragrances and businesses for all these companies and then in 2008 the economy crashed so this is when I started thinking about what's next? The designer fragrances and the celebrity fragrances were really being proliferated and there was so much confusion in the marketplace and after the crash, nobody was interested in fragrances at that point so I started thinking about bespoke or custom-made fragrance. So, at this stage, I had become a fragrance expert and I knew about fragrances, and the history of fragrance and I developed 18 different perfumes to expand the entire olfactive palate. I worked from my apartment and offered custom fragrances to people who wanted to create their own custom fragrances. This was in 2009-2010 just at the start of the personalization trend. People said to me," what are you doing? Tupperware parties for fragrances?" and they laughed at me. Now, as we know, personalization is the hottest trend and everybody is a brand. Social media is everywhere, and Instagram, Pinterest, Linked-in, clubhouse, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch and Clubhouse is popular and everybody is a brand. In 2013 I opened my first perfume studio in TriBeCa which I called the Scentarium and I turned it into a beautiful oasis. People like Jamie Foxx and Katie Holmes would come by. I presented corporate events and small team-building events and it was so cozy with such a lovely ambiance and perfectly suited for a custom fragrance experience. I was there for 12 years and sadly because of Covid in March of 2020 I had to move because the building was being sold and the pandemic happened So, serendipitously I found a new location But all of this is to say that the whole idea of custom perfumes has really taken off and as the pandemic subsides, more and more clients are coming in to create their own Custom Perfumes. People love the idea of custom fragrances and reflecting their individuality and personality. We present corporate and teambuilding events and many consultations and sessions through zoom.

Tell us about your book. Last year I wrote a book entitled The Power of Perfume, and because of Covid, sadly so many people have lost their sense of smell. I have now helped over 100 people regain and rediscover their sense of smell after Covid through the power of perfume. Many people have found me through press outlets like NBC which ran a profile on my book. I was asked if I could help a long-hauler regain her sense of smell and I said I would try. She had lost her sense of smell in March of 2020 and NBC did an interview with us an asked if they could bring in someone with Anosmia. It was amazing as she had a breakthrough. Halfway through the perfume journey, she was trying 18 layers and then she suddenly said, "I smell something and it's beautiful, ' and she started to cry and it was so emotional. And so that program went viral and I appeared on Inside Edition and GMA and literally

hundreds of programs and as a result of that I've had so many people contact me and they realize how important their Sense of Smell is. I explain to clients that I'm not sure I can help, and I am not a doctor but I will certainly try as I know the power of fragrance and my blends are beautiful and complex. As a result I've actually been able to help Covid sufferers of all ages through my passion for fragrance.

Future plans? I am now distributed by Scentbird, a digital retailer they have a subscription service, with 8 million subscribers. I've put together five beautiful artisanal fragrances. I'm starting my own Sue Phillips collection of fragrances. I'm preparing for a Ted Talk that I am excited about. I am launching on TalkShopLive soon and continuing to help people feel so much better because of fragrance. I am looking at doing a TV series which I think could be fantastic about fragrance. I have a lot of fingers in lots of different pies at this point. Part of being an entrepreneur is seeing how I can expand what I have been doing and really help people understand the power and glory and magic of fragrance. Fragrance is not just something to be sprayed in the store. It is so much more than that. Our sense of smell is our most powerful sense, with our Sight being the strongest. So when people lose their olfactory sense, it affects them in so many ways and they become really very depressed. Covid has really accelerated the awareness of Anosmia or loss of smell. Years ago, I interviewed the head of the taste & smell clinic in Washington DC, Dr. Robert Henkin, when I was a beauty editor for a magazine, and at the time he said 25 million Americans lose their sense of smell every year, but now Covid has really accelerated the awareness of it. I'm not sure that Covid is going to disappear so I've developed a scent kit, the olfactory rediscovery scent healing kit.

What scents inspire you, are they like colors? I often discuss the analogy of art and music. In art, you have three primary colors, red, yellow, and blue. Think about those three primary colors and how many exquisite pieces of art and paintings have come about from secondary colors and tertiary colors. How red and blue make purple and yellow and blue can make green and millions and millions of colors have been basically used and developed by those three primary colors. In music the octave is comprised of eight notes. Think about the amazing diverse musical works that have come from just those eight

“MY MISSION IS TO CREATE MEMORABLE FRAGRANCE “EXPERIENCES” AND PRODUCTS…. DROP BY DROP.” -SUE PHILLIPS

notes of music – Jazz, Classics, R&B, Pop, Folk, Opera, even HipHop! So, in fragrance, there are eight fragrance families (Chypre, Citrus, Green, Floral, Spicy, Woody, Herbaceous, Animalic. Each one of those olfactive families is then split into several subfamilies. Those eight fragrance families are responsible for millions and millions of different fragrances. Fragrance can expand your confidence and make you feel uplifted, sexy, sensual, happy. Our sense of smell has a direct correlation to the limbic system, so what you smell actually triggers a feeling and an emotion. So when you smell something you are also processing the event or the emotion or person that goes with it. Scent and emotions become so indelibly imprinted in your brain so when you smell the scent again it triggers the memory again as it is tattooed on your brain.

So if you fell in love with someone wearing a certain scent and you come across that scent years later what happens? When you come across that scent years later, you immediately think back to the person you fell in love with, it is so palpable. Scent is so powerful.

website: www.suephillips.comFebruary 2022 39