A Perfumer’s Journey to P&G

A collage. The first is Ye Rim as a child, smelling perfume strips in front of an array of perfume bottles. The second is Ye Rim standing in a lush field of lavender, nose to a fan of smelling strips. The third is Ye Rim at P&G, smelling strips in hand

June 12, 2023

Ye Rim OH has pursued a career in fragrance with a singular passion. As a child aged seven, her parents, eager to give her new experiences, signed her up for a perfume making workshop at Parfums Galimard in Grasse, France. It was love at first scent. As she describes it, “I instantly developed a devotion to perfumes”.

While in high school in the US, she credits her chemistry teacher with kindling a lifelong passion for the subject, fuelled further by the recognition that chemistry was the underlying basis of fragrances. She decided to develop a strong theoretical foundation by pursuing chemistry at Waseda University in Japan, while also studying perfumery on the side at theJapan Flavor & Fragrance School (NIFFS).

After graduating, she enrolled as a perfumery student in France to pursue a Master of Scent and Design at ISIPCA, the French School for post-graduate studies in perfume (a prestigious and renowned perfumery school). There she learned the fundamentals and practical aspects of designing a fragrance.

By the end of her formal education, she had garnered an impressive array of qualifications as a perfumer. She had also picked up 4 languages in addition to her native Korean: English, Japanese, French and Chinese (from a year studying abroad in middle school).

As if by destiny, Ye Rim joined the P&G Singapore Innovation Center (SgIC) a year ago, 20 years to the date she began her journey into the world of perfume development. She breezed thru the battery of P&G tests (including a requisite scent recognition test). Having achieved her lifelong dream of joining P&G as a perfumer, she now begins a new stage in her journey: Translating her extensive training into winning consumer products.

Her desire to learn is insatiable. “I’d like to have a deeper understanding of how consumers experience our product fragrances.” She’s also learning how P&G perfumers collaborate with different teams and uses a holistic consumer-based approach to developing new fragrance technologies. To support her journey, she's even created a new community for young P&G perfumers to learn and grow together, inviting guest speakers along the way.

Her goal is to deliver irresistible superiority of P&G products to the consumers, and she’s just getting started.

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