Fragrance is a huge passion of mine and I spend as much time as I can sitting at my perfume organ, creating the fragrances that eventually become part of the Rook Perfumes collection. Relatively speaking though, perfumery is a new facet of my life and what occupies me the most is my work as an emergency doctor. I studied medicine at University College London and graduated in 2010. I spent most of my career working in acute and geriatric medicine but eventually the West End came calling and I decided I wanted to go back to my passion in the arts....
I get many people asking me what is involved in creating a niche perfume company. I will start off by saying that the most crucial thing is a "point of view." Scent is an art as much as music and painting. Similarly to those other mediums, if you don't have a point of view you become drowned in a business which is already saturated. With having a point of view comes the responsibility to stay true to it. Now to the bones of it. The perfume business has challenges at every step. Making the perfume is the fun bit. Creating a...
"Moments" are something talked a lot about when it comes to Rook Perfumes. The spray of a perfume can make you stop in your tracks and transport you to a different time or place. It makes you react spontaneously and truthfully. "The moment" was a concept introduced to me during my training as an actor at LAMDA. It is something something it took me a long time to be able to understand. In the acting world "the moment" is not tangible. It is about allowing the way you feel and the interaction you are having with fellow actors to be decided...
The images coming out of Italy and Spain showed hospitals overflowing with the sick and dying. The patterns in the epidemiology were a warning that London was sitting a couple of weeks behind these countries. This warning set in motion a war plan. The reality is that (thus far) though our hospitals have been busy, we have not really seen hospitals in the UK buckle under the pressure. I thought I would share my observations as to possible reasons why. I can only really speak for my own place of work but I know from friends and colleagues around the...
