A Life Less Ordinary: Lyn Harris
3 Video Views·Aug 5, 2025
In this episode of A Life Less Ordinary, we visit perfumer Lyn Harris of her eponymous brand Perfumer H at her storefront and laboratory as she collaborates with Sotheby's to translate her olfactory vision of three Old Masters paintings from the Grasset Collection.
In one of the most exciting sensory responses to a Sotheby’s art collection, Lyn has created three bespoke perfumes for three different works from the Grasset Collection (from Abraham Govaerts, Osias Beert the Elder, and Peter Binoit). This episode is all about how art inspires Lyn’s life and work, and how an influential creator can respond to specific art works in the most unexpected and timeless ways.
I want people to be able to see how a perfume works.
That was very important for me in creating Perfume at Eight.
I create poetic landscapes.
I call it olfactory poetic landscapes.
In my process, you have the ability to put all these different olfactory pieces
that you have in your memory into something that smells amazing.
My name is Lynne Harris and I'm a perfumer.
I'm the founder of Perfume at Eight.
What I do is an art form.
I'm so excited to have been invited to translate
my olfactory vision of the Grasset collection for Sotheby's.
I came and selected three paintings.
So I have created three pieces, three pictures.
The first is called Lemon and Bird.
The second is called Insect and Rose.
And the third is Smoke in the Woods.
I'm really proud to have created these pieces.
I mean, I draw so many parallels with how I personally create fragrances
with still life painting.
There's a structure, there's a framework to perfumery,
but there's also something you can't describe
and that's just something within you.
And I think this is what I see with these various painters.
I find it so incredible, this period, the light and dark.
It's these gentle nuances that I put into my work,
which I can see in the paintings.
And then there's these quirks, like the fact there's a bird with fruit.
And I find there's sort of an absurdity of seeing that,
but then there's a beauty.
And I think it's capturing aspects of nature with such beauty,
but also with such reality.
And that's how I can have all these different ideas in a composition.
And it's how they marry and intertwine and work to make a beautiful smell.
My grandparents, they lived in the countryside in Scotland
and my grandmother cooked from morning till dusk.
You know, she was baking, making bread, making jams
with the berries from the garden.
It was just a very beautiful surrounding and way of life.
And my grandfather was a carpenter,
so it was just not a minute went by
that I wasn't smelling something beautiful and real
and so close to nature.
And this really resonated with me throughout my life.
When I left school, I decided, I said, I turned around to my parents.
I want to go to France and I want to be a perfumer.
I can see in the paintings with the artists,
the precision in how they select each subject.
And that's exactly what I do.
And I can't stress that enough,
how important for my process in getting the right materials
to work together in harmony
to create this amazing olfactory portrait.