Céline Barel grew up in Grasse in the 1980s, when the smell of the town still changed with each season's distillations. She never went to ISIPCA. She studied business and marketing and interned at Chanel, Dior, Vuitton and Mane, where she decided to become a perfumer. She joined IFF in Milan, studied raw materials there for two years after hours, then won a place in IFF's reopened perfumery school, training at its centres in the Netherlands, New York, Paris and Grasse.
Her own taste runs to amber and big white flowers, yet her two Aesop perfumes are green. Aesop Tacit, her first for the brand in 2015, rests on basil and citrus and became a bestseller. Aesop Aurner followed in 2025, setting magnolia leaf, refined by fractional distillation, against Roman chamomile and cedar. She has also created for Jo Malone, Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss, Lancôme and Loewe, plus Maison d'Etto Durban Jane and Canaan.
Zoologist Squid began on a beach in Dubai, where she hurt her foot on a large squid bone, liked its smell and had it analysed by headspace. That bone accord sits in the base under a salty floral heart and frankincense, with the ink drawn in resins and balsams. It is a marine amber at 20 per cent, with synthetic ambergris and musk, and won Perfume Extraordinaire of the Year at the Fragrance Foundation Awards 2020.
