Inside the Natural Perfume Academy this October; extraordinary student work, two final perfumes, an international award, a new little Advanced cohort, and a nudge for anyone who has been sitting on the fence.
It is Friday, 30 October, here in Galway, and winter is beginning to set in.
November can be one of the bleakest months in Ireland. The days are getting very short, it is cold, and you have the whole of winter stretching out in front of you.
Yet I opened my laptop this morning to a queue of student assignments and felt completely energised.
And I thought, this is worth sharing.
Especially with those of you who have joined one of our free courses, read the articles, watched the videos, followed the Academy for a while and thought to yourselves, "maybe one day."
If you've been circling natural perfumery for a while, consider this your little nudge from Galway.
Start with the CPD-Certified Natural Perfumery Diploma
And if you already have a solid foundation in perfumery, something rather lovely is happening in the Advanced Natural Perfumery Workshops & Masterclasses right now.
A group of perfumers have arrived at almost exactly the same point
Over the last few weeks, a small group of students have converged at the beginning of the Advanced Perfumers Workshops.
Some have come through our Diploma. Others bring previous experience.
They are now beginning to find one another in the course, and there is a lovely little group forming.
One of the first things they have to do is organise their perfume organ properly.
And I mean properly.
This is where anyone who only likes the romantic idea of being a perfumer might decide to run for the hills.
There is tedious work in perfumery.
There is measuring, diluting, labelling, cataloguing, recording, cleaning and organising. Your organ needs to work so that when you need a material, you can put your hand on it.
There is a right way to do this.
I personally operate more on the system of knowing the general vicinity in which something is hiding.
Then these students send me photographs of their beautifully organised perfume organs and, honestly, some of them are spectacular.
And that precision carries into the work.
For me, the really extraordinary part is seeing students I first met at the beginning of the Diploma arriving here.
You remember their first attempts at describing materials. You remember their early formulations. You remember the questions.
Then suddenly you are looking at somebody working with confidence and precision and you think,
"Wow. This is really making a difference."
One of our newest Diploma graduates has already moved straight on into the Advanced work. Other Advanced students are currently working from Seoul to the Bay Area.
So if you already have the required perfumery foundation and have been thinking about joining, this is a lovely moment to come in.
Join the Advanced Perfumers Workshops & Masterclasses
And if you want the full route from foundation through Advanced, the Diploma + Advanced bundle currently saves 25%: €1,627.50 paid in full, or €135 per month for 12 months.
Then Instagram gave me another little buzz
This morning we saw that Oiseau Bleu by Elganaur has won the Jury Prize at Premio Aromata 2026 in Rome.
Elganaur is the Swiss botanical perfume house of Muriel Mansier Ottavi, who completed our Advanced Perfumers Workshops & Masterclasses this year.
I evaluated four of Muriel's perfumes during her Advanced work. I remember them extremely well.
And now one of them has won an international perfume award.
That is quite a thing to see while you are sitting in Galway drinking your morning coffee and opening Moodle.
Premio Aromata brought together 25 olfactory creations in Rome from 8–10 October, with Oiseau Bleu taking the jury's first prize.
Muriel is also one of the perfumers now featured in our growing NPA Hall of Fame.
If you are wondering where studying natural perfumery can lead, have a look through that page.
There is no single outcome.
Our graduates have gone on to create perfume houses, teach, formulate professionally, build artisan businesses and develop completely individual bodies of work.
That is exactly what we want.
At the other end of the journey
Alongside all this Advanced work, I am correcting assignments from students who are just beginning.
One of the first Diploma essays asks the question - Why natural perfumery? And after eighteen years, I still love reading the answers.
That beginning energy is infectious.
And every one of those assignments is read and marked with joy.
Questions are answered. Work is reviewed. Feedback is given. If I don't know an answer, I find the person who does.
That happened today.
A student had a detailed question about traditional attar formulation that I wasn't qualified to answer properly. So I took it to Ane Walsh, our lead tutor and master natural perfumer, whose knowledge of attars is far deeper than mine.
Ane came back to me this morning with the technical answer, and that will now go back to the student.
That is part of the job too.
So is checking suppliers before we add them to our recommended resources. We have upgraded this free resource.
And so is listening when students tell us something needs improving.
Two perfumes are waiting beside me
I also have two final Diploma perfumes here for professional evaluation.
Each final perfume assessment takes place over a full 24 hours.
I record the opening carefully, return at intervals throughout the day, evaluate its development and return again the following morning.
Then the observations, the student's final work and their brief are brought together into the completed assessment.
After that comes the signed certificate.
And the physical certificate goes into the post.
There is quite a lot happening behind that photograph of somebody holding their Diploma.
Today there are two people very close to that moment.
A few other things happened in October…
We held our October Open Studio this week; our private monthly space where Diploma and Masterclass students can bring whatever they are working on, ask questions and simply work in company. Make a note of it for next month, last Monday of the Month, windows are 11 am to 2 pm and 6 pm to 8 pm (Irish Daylight Saving Time)
I also resurrected something rather unexpected from the Academy archives - a scented soap opera I wrote while studying natural perfumery back in 2008. Nearly nineteen years later it became our newest podcast episode, . It was published on 20 October.
And our newest YouTube lesson went up yesterday:
| Step-by-Step Botanical Perfumery
It follows the building of a Green Canopy accord using petitgrain, galbanum and Haitian vetiver and gives you a little window into the kind of thinking that sits behind formulation.
Subscribe to the Natural Perfume Academy Channel on Youtube
And one pilot price is nearly finished
Juliana Oliveira da Cruz's Build Your Artisan Business Online course has now reached the final stage of its pilot.
Juliana is herself an NPA graduate, a perfumer and the founder of Arqué Cosmética in Brazil. She created this course for perfumers, makers and independent artisans who need the practical business side: branding, online shops, photography, pricing, customer systems, SEO, sales and the machinery behind running an artisan business properly.
The final feedback systems, certificates and course structure are now in place, which means we are very close to moving it from pilot into full launch.
The pilot price is €175.
The full launch price will be €245.
So if you have been meaning to take it, I would take advantage of the pilot price while it is still there.
Join Build Your Artisan Business Online at the pilot price
So, from a cold Galway…
That is more or less what the Natural Perfume Academy looks like from my desk today.
Beginners discovering materials.
Advanced students building immaculate perfume organs.
A graduate in Switzerland winning an international award.
An old piece of Academy history becoming a podcast.
A specialist question travelling to Ane and coming back with an answer.
A supplier being checked.
Two bottles waiting for me to begin their final 24-hour assessments.
And, somewhere among all of that, another person is probably looking at the Diploma page and wondering whether they should do it.
If that person is you, you can start now.
The Diploma is self-paced and you have lifetime access to the course materials. The Advanced Workshops are self-paced too. The people who are doing this work now once had exactly the same moment when they had to decide whether to keep thinking about perfumery or begin learning it properly.
Begin the CPD-Certified Natural Perfumery Diploma
Join the Advanced Natural Perfumery Workshops & Masterclasses
See our graduates in the NPA Hall of Fame
Perhaps this winter is when you begin.
Anyway.
I have two perfumes to smell. :D
Ruth
Natural Perfume Academy
Established 2008