Story of a perfumer

On an average day, you’ll find master perfumer, Tammy Violet Frazer in her Cape Town factory selecting, testing and mixing raw materials for her burgeoning line of bespoke fragrances.

Tammy is the founder of Frazer Parfum, creator of organic and natural perfume products. She sources all the raw materials from often remote parts of Africa, either by learning about someone doing an interesting distillate, or by contacting local universities and finding an academic who can put her in touch with someone working with essential oils.

“Africa’s raw materials inspire me because I get a chance to glimpse a time passed.” Tammy says, adding that she was recently inspired after meeting the Himba on a sourcing trip to North West Namibia. “They have been perfuming themselves for thousands of years!”

Tammy grew up believing that she could achieve anything she put her mind to. Not surprising when you learn that her grandfather was Graham Wulff, the founder of Oil of Olay and the creator of the famed pink “beauty fluid”. Today, someone buys the brand’s moisturiser every two minutes.

“Nothing has ever felt impossible to achieve, because someone so close to me had done just that. I’ve always been very driven and I attribute that trait to him. Certainly it was a good legacy to start from, and I found I was welcomed into the industry because I came with an element of context.”

However her path into perfumery has been entirely organic, starting eight years ago when she gave up her job and threw herself wholeheartedly into starting her own range. “I always felt I needed to prove myself in a corporate way, for some reason,” she explains. “It was only after I’d completed my Masters degree that I felt I could give myself permission to be ‘creative’.”

Now Tammy and Frazer Parfum are incorporating art and design into the creation of bespoke fragrances. Spearheading African luxury in eclectic retail spaces in Europe, North America, UK, Ukraine, Nigeria and South Africa.

Tammy is also a columnist for the South African Mail & Guardian newspaper and the curator of Skin Portraits, the first-ever scent novella at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, made up of an exhibition of photographic portraiture and their accompanying scents inspired by notable South Africans.

“It was inspired by the traditional portraiture of Lucian Freud. He was able to show the emotion of a person in the colours used to paint the skin and I wanted to spend time researching skin in order to better perform at composing signature fragrances for individuals.”

The Skin Portraits exhibition is now on permanent exhibition at the Frazer Parfum boutique and factory: 3 Rose St, Cape Town, South Africa.

Find Tammy through her website frazerparfum.com or on:

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Words by Emily Pettit-Coetzee
Images: Frazer Parfum