At Givaudan, we work with several different clients, including fashion brands, celebrities, and haircare brands that want to create a fragrance or fragrance that goes into a shampoo. For example, a celebrity asked for a fragrance that smelled like her baby.
The Brief of a Celebrity Baby
We agreed and set up a brief to understand what her baby smells like. When we asked what her baby smelled like, she replied, “Well, my baby smells like my baby.” The brief is used to obtain the specs for the fragrance.
However, it was tough to obtain the specs because we had no idea what her baby smelled like, nor would we likely meet her baby. We began pulling information from a client that wants a brief that smells like a baby.
How does the celebrity want to use this? Is this fragrance in a bottle? Or a lotion?
The Process of Cruelty-Free Beauty
How our perfumer builds that product will depend if the product is going to be a body lotion, which requires less amount of fragrance that must be mixed differently than a product in a bottle.
Typically, products in a bottle have an alcohol base, which requires a different concentration and different amounts of ingredients. She wanted the fragrance inside of a bottle, but she wants it to be very safe and very soft, stating, “You know, I want it to be cruelty-free.”
We went back and we pow-wowed. We figured what the baby smelled like by the only evidence she provided: it’s how it comes out of the bath. We made sure the norms or regulations went through the regulatory department that tells us what ingredients we can use to make the product cruelty-free.
By the way, all our ingredients are cruelty-free. Just to put that out there.
We considered that she may want it made vegan. Most ingredients in fragrance are vegan, but there are a couple that isn’t because, believe it or not, you can’t use beeswax. Beeswax isn’t vegan, right?
For example, many people say, “I want a honey fragrance, but I want it to be vegan.” To honor their requests—we use our pow-wow. For our celebrity, we found the regulatory pieces we want to hit, the ingredients that smelled like a baby coming out of the bathtub.
We also had to ask ourselves how much did she want to spend? How much fragrance do they want to put into the product and all the other regulator pieces? From there, our evaluator and our perfumer get together and talk about how they are going to build the fragrance. It is usually made through the computer.

When it comes time to formulate products, you can certainly hire someone to come up with your product concepts and a general ingredient brief to pass off to a chemist to formulate, but you don’t have to go that route.

To find a lab, you can Google contract manufacturers and cold call them to set up intro calls.

“We found the lab we launched our first four products with through an ingredient supplier who supplies some of the best natural and organic oils and extracts to labs around the world,” says one beauty product producer. “We said, ‘Listen, you work with all these labs. If you were creating your own product line, which lab would you partner with?’”

“I wasn’t looking to go to a big box lab that everybody uses, because then I was going to get formulas that everyone else has,” adds the producer.

Each lab has its own product brief form that includes the ingredients you want to use, the ingredients you don’t want to use, specifics about the percentages you want in your formula, marketing ingredient callouts, and the viscosity—whether you want it thin, like a serum, or whether you want it thick. The lab asks about the packaging components you’re going to be using for that formula because they can’t create a dense cream if it’s going to need to come out of a pump.

You’ll send the completed product brief to your chemist. Then, you’ll have a call with your chemist and you’ll pay a fee for the product development.

The fee is usually quite small. Labs aren’t charging $50,000 to formulate a product. They’re charging more like $1,500.

Where labs make their money is when you place your order for 10,000 units or 100,000 units or a million units, explains the producer.

“The one thing I found to be extremely helpful was having a contract right out of the gate with the lab that specifies formula ownership,” says the producer. “You want to own your formulas. Most brands don’t know this, so they launch their brand without owning their formulas. And if you don’t own your formula, the labs don’t ever give you the recipe.”

A lot of people have this idea that fashion, beauty and editorial is this hyper competitive industry, where stepping on people is the most strategic move to propel your career. When in actuality, that is one of the most detrimental things you can do to your career.

Sam Escobar, Digital Deputy Editor of Allure, says about workplace relationships, “People who are your interns, if you’re not very nice to them and you don’t facilitate them to learn more, they’re not going to like you later on. And maybe they won’t be your boss, but they might know somebody who might hire you and they might say something.”

That’s obviously not the only reason that you should be kind. In general, it’s bad for your career to think of everything as this huge competition. In business there is sometimes a belief that if someone else fails, you win. That’s not the case. Escobar explains, “If your team is winning, you are also winning. And that’s amazing.”

Escobar believes the key to success is being reliable, consistent and hardworking. “I think if you are very capable of being communicative and working on a team well, those are all things that are going to work so much better than if you gossip about people or devalue other people’s work. Because that’s not fair to them and it’s not fair to your team no matter what the ranking is seniority wise.”

Escobar advises everyone to develop relationships. Whether it’s in a workplace, internship, or even school, get to know the people you’re working with. “That way you can actually feel a connection to those people. And they will blossom into natural friendships, which is also wonderful. Because who doesn’t want to be able to commiserate at the end of a really long day with somebody who actually understands it?”