Olivia Jan
Olivia Jan arrived in New York in 2005, swapping Paris for Hoboken with thirteen years at Robertet's American outpost behind her before eventually joining Givaudan's New York studio. The French-born perfumer grew up in a small northeastern French town, long before the industry had a name for what she was doing: steeping flowers in water to capture their scent through sheer childhood curiosity. She trained at ISIPCA in Versailles, one of perfumery's most rigorous finishing schools, where she polished the intuition she'd been building since she was a girl experimenting with botanicals on her own. Her early career unfolded in France, the details of which she handles with characteristic self-deprecation. "My English didn't improve that much," she's joked, "but I definitely lost my French 5000." The move to the United States reshaped her practice, exposing her to American materials and a different client sensibility while never abandoning her French formalism. Today she sits among the senior perfumers at one of the world's largest fragrance houses, though the coordinates of her life remain resolutely in the Northeast.
The hits
Notable creations
The signature
How Olivia composes
Jan's signature leans toward florals handled with clarity rather than opulence. She bridges the French tradition she absorbed at ISIPCA with the directness that American markets often demand, finding the middle ground where a rose does not need to smell expensive to smell true. Her work shows a preference for natural materials in supporting roles, using them to ground synthetic accords and provide the kind of olfactory honesty that copying cannot replicate. Across her time at Robertet, drom, and now Givaudan, she has developed a habit of treating each project as responsive to its context rather than a vehicle for signature. The consistency, if one exists, lives in restraint and in a certain structural integrity rather than in shared ingredients or thematic throughlines.
Philosophy
What drives Olivia
Jan works with nature as her fixed point. Not nostalgia for nature, but something more structural: a conviction that plant-derived materials provide an anchor against which synthetic elements gain their proper weight and meaning. She approaches briefs by seeking out the sensory thread first: whether a mood, a color recall, or a half-buried memory. From there, she reaches for visual references, images, anything that narrows the gap between abstract direction and material reality. She has spoken about waiting for the raw materials to speak before she translates them into formula. This patience shapes her work across categories, from fine fragrances to functionalscents, where she has built a reputation for compositions that hold up without announcing themselves.
The houses
Maisons Olivia composes for
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