Exploring Fragrance
Our annual luncheon/lecture is coming up October 3rd and you will not want to miss this one. This year we delve into the world of fragrance and perfumery with our guest speaker, Kellie Como, Vice President, Fragrance and Product Development for Inter Parfums USA LLC. Kellie is an award winning fragrance creator with over 20 years’ experience in the fashion and fine fragrance industry. She has created perfumes for Chloe, Karl Lagerfeld, Calvin Klein, BCBG, Marc Jacobs and many more. She worked with Vera Wang on her first bridal fragrance, and last year she worked with Oscar de la Renta to create his last perfume, Oscar de la Renta Extraordinary, which launched this year. Her talk promises to be fascinating indeed.

A bit about Kellie’s background: a chemistry major in college, upon graduation
she got a job with Chesebrough-Ponds as a research chemist, where she developed creams and moisturizers. She met the person in charge of fragrance, who decided what a cream or lotion should smell like, and was inspired to pay attention to scent when creating a cream. Kellie next worked for Gryphon Development and was moved into marketing, where she trained to become a perfumer. That very demanding training, she explains, involved learning all the basic notes in a scent. Scents are organized into families, from heavy to light. Woods and resins are the heaviest and citrus the lightest. When she had learned the scent families, she began to delve into the nuances of fragrances. Getting into flowers, she says, has been the most interesting.
Today Kellie is the general manager of the Oscar de la Renta and Brooks Brothers brands at Inter Parfums, as well as serving as house “nose” for other brand such as Agent Provacateur, Banana Republic, Anthopologie, Betsey Johnson and more. Her work has won numerous awards.
In her talk for us, Kellie will focus on the scents of roses. The rose, she says, is a very emotional flower which can have profound effects on us. She will explore what scent does to people, as particular scents are often linked to memorable events, people or places in our lives. Those scent-based memories stay with us forever. Kellie plans to explain how oils are extracted from plants and how the flowers are processed. Rose oil is so precious because it takes barrels of rose petals to fill a small vial the size of a nail polish bottle with the precious oil. She’ll also share what inspires her. She often visits the Rockefeller Rose Garden to find inspiration. She recalls a rose she found there that smelled like champagne and went on to use it to create a perfume for Vera Wang.
Kellie also plans to show us what the true essence of rose smells like. It may surprise us. She says she always knows when she is smelling a rose because she smells artichokes in it. Tuberose, she says, contains the scents of unripe bananas and wintergreen.
Kellie’s work, she says, is an interesting way to experience flowers…from the inside out. Please join us for a most enlightening experience at our annual luncheon/lecture, October 3 at the Meadow Club in Southampton. Tickets are $80. each for Members and $100. each for Member’s Guests.
This year, Members are welcome to invite guests.
Tickets are:
$70. per person
Non-members may purchase a combined Luncheon and
discounted 1 year Membership to the Rose Society for $100.
To reserve your seat, please click the PAYPAL link below or send a check to the Southampton Rose Society, P.O. Box 1022, Southampton, NY 11969.
You can choose quantity of tickets after clicking Add to Cart button above.