After pivoting from a career in marketing, perfumer Chelsey Owen is scenting Seattle at her custom fragrance boutique.

Written by Rachel Gallaher

Perfumer Chelsey Owen has fond memories of all of her customers—helping them create one-of-a-kind fragrances at her boutique, Atelier Madrona, requires getting to know people beyond surface level. After nearly six years in the business, one appointment stands out in particular for Owen because it fully encapsulates what drew her to working with scent in the first place.

“I was doing a fragrance fitting with a woman, and I had narrowed it down to three or four options,” Owen recalls. “I handed her a bottle, and as soon as she smelled it, she started crying. She looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know why I’m crying, but this reminds me of a summer I spent in Greece… it was a time that transformed my life.’”

It would be hard to find someone who hasn’t had an intense memory-jogging experience with scent (this can happen via food, fragrance, or environmental smells such as salty beach air or freshly cut flowers). For Owen, who opened the doors of Atelier Madrona in 2017, this entrée into a form of personal storytelling is what keeps her in the business.

“There is such an emotional aspect of scent,” she says. “Everyone wants to be remembered forever, and one of the ways to do that is through scent.”

Before mixing fragrances, Owen had a career in marketing, but she had reached a point where she wanted to pursue “something purely creative.” Over the years, she had spent time in Paris, and the relationship that French women had perfume struck her.

“There is a whole culture around fragrance there,” she says. “It’s a rite of passage for young women to find a personal scent once they reach a certain age.”

Curious, she started learning more about the industry, eventually signing up for an intense program taught by master perfumers that took six years to complete. Owen traveled back and forth between Paris and the United States, spending one to two months in France working her way through courses that ranged from extracting scents from natural materials and learning the categories of fragrances to memorizing more than 1,500 individual fragrance notes. The process was much like becoming a master sommelier. By the end of the program, Owen was able to identify the minutiae of fragrance, for example, whether a scent was from an Italian orange or Floridian orange.

“When I started, I thought I would just learn the industry, not become a perfumer,” Owen says, “but the further I got into my studies, the more I wanted to pursue it.”

At Atelier Madrona (which first opened in the Madrona neighborhood but moved to Chophouse Row in Capitol Hill at the beginning of 2021), Owen offers appointment-only sessions that range from a bespoke fragrance fitting to the curation of a fragrance wardrobe, which includes scents for every season, as well as a day and night option. For each session, Owen works through questions aimed at getting to know her clients better—not only what kinds of scents they like but also their lifestyles and how they want to present themselves to the world. From there, she will have them start smelling fragrances, tweaking formulas to meet the client’s needs. Creating a full fragrance wardrobe can take anywhere from six to nine months.

“It’s hard for people to understand that I’m not just tossing together a few essential oils,” she says. “A fine fragrance can have up to 60 unique components.” Owen works with all-natural ingredients from around the world (rose from Turkey, orange from Italy, cedar from the mountains of Colorado) as well as select manmade molecules.

When it comes to giving perfume as a gift, Owen says that unless you really know that person, it can be a risk, and that’s why she offers the customization process. “Fragrance is such a personal thing,” she says. “It’s a beautiful gift to give to someone, and allowing them to design something exactly to their taste means you know that they will wear it and love it.”