The Time I Sold Perfume to Oprah Winfrey

AKA: What I learned about lying on your résumé.

Oprah Winfrey on her talk show in 2004, via O.

To land my first job in New York City, I lied on my résumé. If any conventional career wisdom had dazzled my teenage self, it was the familiar adage: Fake it ‘till you make it! I didn’t just want a “side gig,” or something to do in between classes. I wanted something that would actually fulfill me and inform my overall career goals. At the time, I was determined to become the Beauty Director of American Vogue, which is why I created my own major at NYU: “The Philosophy of Beauty.” In hindsight, I was as insufferable as I sound.

Imagine my delight when I saw a mysterious and anonymous posting on Ed2020 by a “luxury fragrance company” looking for a part-time sales associate. I spoke to a nice enough person over the phone, and then went for a coffee with a perfectly lovely French woman who mostly asked me where my passion for perfume was born. I deflected by talking about my internship at a fashion blog, and said I loved that fragrance could “tell a story.” She nodded thoughtfully, reviewing the lies that littered my CV. My only experience was working as a front desk coordinator at a salon in my hometown—however, as a writer (and a homosexual), I have a flair for embellishing details. I “zhuzhed” my résumé a little, adding in minor details about my makeup expertise (after all, I did my own) and luxury retail experience (sometimes people bought shampoo after their haircuts). I hoped she wouldn’t ask for particular details and, thankfully, she didn’t. 

She revealed to me that the brand was called Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle, and before I could get hired, Monsieur Malle would need to interview me personally. I feigned a delighted smile, as though this were very impressive news, and then went home and Googled who the hell Frédéric Malle was. 

For the uninitiated, Frédéric Malle is kind of like The New Yorker of fragrances. This sounds snooty (and it is), but it’s true. Most of the perfume industry, even the luxury brands, operate on a brutal marketing schedule that demands “newness” every season. This creates a need for perfumers, a rather delicate group of artists, to deliver blockbuster scents by the dozen, watering down their ideas to cater to as wide an audience as possible. Most of these perfumers work for, and I’m sorry to say this, the Buzzfeed of perfume—sometimes there’s a beautiful and compelling piece of work, but mostly, there are crowd pleasers. 

It’s rare that a perfumer gets to work on their masterpiece—which I’d liken to a 7,000 word magnum opus for The New Yorker. That’s why Frédéric Malle is so important. He’s the fancy editor who allows these artists the time and creative energy to create the scent nobody else would dare commission. And, let me tell you something: You can smell the difference. I spent five years in beauty departments at various publications, and pretty much everything that hit our desks smelled exactly the same as the last thing. They also don’t have the pretentious appeal of other niche brands, like Le Labo, whose scents became instantly recognizable among the hipster crowd. (Santal still reminds me of cigarettes and well liquor.) He’s just in a league of his own.

For my meeting with Frédéric, who I now knew a couple of things about, I was invited to a mysterious meeting at a café on the Upper East Side, surrounded by women with identical blowouts and identical tiny dogs. Frédéric arrived, seemingly in a hurry, sat down, and got right down to business: “What’s your favorite fragrance by Guerlain?” That one I wasn’t expecting. I didn’t know any of Guerlain’s fragrances at the time. I wondered if I could excuse myself to look up an answer on my Blackberry in the bathroom.

Before I could make up another lie, Frédéric asked another question: “You know nothing about fragrance, do you?”

I didn’t know what else to do, so I smiled sweetly. “Somehow, you made it all the way here and you have never worked in perfume,” he said. He sounded annoyed, but there was a smirk on his face. Even if he didn’t respect me, I realized, he respected the hustle. He grabbed two napkins from the table and stood up abruptly, then went behind one of the potted plants at the front of the restaurant. I saw him spray the napkins with bottles from his pocket. He came back and handed me the napkins.

“Who would wear these fragrances?” he asked. 

I took a whiff of the first one, bringing my nose right up to the cloth, and immediately recoiled. “I see chest hair,” I said, as though I were peering into a crystal ball. All I knew was that the fragrance sort of reminded me of my dad’s bottle of Calvin Klein Obsession I’d once sprayed—and then promptly regretted. “It’s a suit and tie, and designer shoes. He’s a businessman.” 

Frédéric deadpanned. There’s nothing more terrifying than a French man with a poker face—except for a British woman with a poker face. I smelled the second napkin, and was immediately reminded of my mother. I told him it smelled like makeup and roses; that it was for a woman unafraid of her femininity. 

“We’ll be in touch,” he said, without a trace of a smile, and left the restaurant.

To my complete surprise, I was hired later that week, with the very important caveat that I’d have to go through a month’s worth of fragrance training before I could ever speak to a customer. As soon as I got my hands on testers of the Editions de Parfums collection, I instantly recognized the fragrances from my interview: French Lover was the sturdy and classically masculine scent. The other was Lipstick Rose, inspired by vintage violet- and rose-scented cosmetics. After all my lies, I’d absolutely nailed it. 

I had no idea at the time, but I was to be part of the opening team of the Frédéric Malle New York flagship store, a boutique nestled between 79th and 80th streets on Madison Avenue. Walking by it, you’d have no idea it was a perfume store; it looked more like an art gallery or a design studio. I was told that this was more or less the point: If you had to ask, you weren’t on the inside. Prominently featured at the front of the boutique were three large glass tubes that looked like they’d been imported from NASA. They were, I was told, smelling columns, where we’d spray the fragrance, dramatically pause, then allow our clients to “poke their heads in” to capture the scent. We insisted it was what someone would smell as if they were walking past you on the street—your sillage, if you will. Customers loved it.

At Frédéric Malle, I learned that everything I knew about fragrance wasn’t just wrong—it was barbaric. The shopping experience was nothing like that of a typical department store, where passersby are bombarded by eager sales associates who spritz a wall of perfume that no one asked to smell. Instead, we were tour guides of a prestigious and luxurious collection, trained to ask clients personal and intimate questions about scent and how they’d like to be perceived. Then, we’d suggest just three fragrances for you to choose from.

I regret to inform you that I was pretty awful at this job. In my defense, though, I really tried my best. I consulted my training manual every single night before bed, memorizing the colors and adjectives Frédéric associated with each fragrance—the lilac one is green and soft while the tuberose one was green and torrid. (I Googled “torrid.”) I read a book called The A-Z of Perfume by Luca Turin & Tania Sanchez, which took me ages to get through. I made index cards with the names of ingredients on the front, and the fragrances from the collection that comprised them on the back. My European coworkers, who each had an encyclopedic knowledge about perfume, quizzed me judiciously, wanting desperately for me to improve. 

I did get better at identifying fragrances, but unfortunately for me, that wasn’t the difficult part of the job. No matter how hard I tried, there was nothing about my teenage, flamboyant self that could ever master the art of French subtlety. My Pauly D blowout and religiously-applied self-tanner stuck out like a sore thumb in my posh surroundings. Once I was inside those Parisian surroundings, it just so happened that everything I did was wrong. When Yoko Ono came in to shop with her son, Sean, I called her “Ms. Ono” and was promptly pulled aside for a talking to. Identifying famous people could make them uncomfortable, I was told, and we wanted to make everyone feel welcome. The Upper East Side clientele would come in, time after time, and I’d somehow manage to say just the wrong thing to steer them away from making a purchase. My colleagues would watch intently and offer their advice. They explained, for example, that many women react negatively to the word “feminine.” Then, they added, many women also react negatively to the word “masculine.” If a client says they don’t like florals, it doesn’t actually mean they don’t like floral notes—rather, they just don’t like a traditional-smelling “perfume.” And, one of the biggest killers of a sale: practically nobody knows how to properly identify a “sweet” fragrance, but they just “don’t like” them. 

My downfall came unexpectedly. One particularly curious shopper came in on a Sunday while I was in the shop alone. Things were going well enough, and it seemed like I’d chosen a fragrance she actually liked. I sprayed it on her wrist, and she moved to the velvet sofa to contemplate her decision. After five minutes, I sat down next to her and asked what she thought. Her wrist was circling in the air as she tried to capture the words to define her fragrance, so I lightly touched her arm and smelled how it was working on her skin. In a hurry, she gathered her things, horrified. The next week, an article detailing the entire experience was published in Women’s Wear Daily—my customer was a secret shopper, the famous and sharp-tongued fashion columnist Bridget Foley. I can’t find the original article online anymore, but I remember Ms. Foley wrote that I planted my “flowerlike face” onto her wrist. It was a clever sales trick that may work on the women of the Upper East Side, she wrote, but not her! I saw the review in print and, I regret to tell you, my first inclination was to blush that I’d been called flowerlike. 

It seemed my fragrance career was doomed, so I did a quick scan of job openings for the major department stores. Saks Fifth Avenue was hiring. I went in for an interview, and this time, I gave them a résumé without lies. I was offered a job as a stylist on the fifth floor—women’s contemporary—and was assured I’d make lots of money selling clothing on commission. (This time, I was the one being lied to, but that’s another story for another time.)

I decided to contemplate the offer over the weekend, and made my familiar trek back to the boutique to give luxury perfume one more try. It was a slow but incredibly beautiful Sunday, the kind you want to spend doing anything but sitting inside. My manager announced she’d be taking her lunch break in the park, which sounded nice. As soon as she left, I went to the break room in the back to check my Facebook. (Remember when we were excited to check Facebook?)

I rolled my eyes as soon as I heard the shop’s front door open, but then froze in place. “I loooove this stuff!” someone yelled. I knew that voice, but I couldn’t place it. It was definitely someone famous, I told myself, so I took a deep breath and tried my hardest to look incredibly fancy and nonchalant. I emerged into the main area of the boutique and there, in the middle of the store, was Oprah Winfrey. She had her arms outstretched just like she was onstage giving away free cars. Behind her was an incredibly large and foreboding man—she’d brought security. 

Oprah had just finished a walk for breast cancer in Central Park when she’d passed by the store. “This is one of my favorite things!” she said to me, excitedly, as though I were not surrounded by these exact same perfume bottles almost every single day. In hindsight, I realize that what she meant to say was: “This is one of my Favorite Things™!” (Frédéric had landed on her coveted Christmas gift list just the year prior.)

What I remember most about Oprah is that she had the kind of energy that could knock you flat on your ass. And I mean this as a genuine compliment, because I don’t believe she was acting. After all, why would Oprah be putting on a show for me, some kid with a bad fake tan and a bad haircut in a perfume store? She was utterly magnetic, taking in every inch of the boutique with bright, wide eyes; clasping her hands together as though someone had just brought her a freshly-made birthday cake. She whisked over to the line of perfumes, and told me her favorite smelled of citrus. 

“Bigarade Concentrée,” I said nonchalantly, just as I was taught. The entire time she was in our store, I behaved as though I was not having a one-on-one conversation with Oprah fucking Winfrey. As a matter of fact, I was suddenly so chic that I didn’t even watch daytime television! I walked over to the perfumes with my hands behind my back, removed the top from the bottle, and sprayed it into the “smelling column.” Then, I told Oprah a story.

Bigarade Concentrée was created by Jean-Claude Ellena, the longtime house perfumer for Hermès. He is one of the most storied and prolific “noses” in the business—in fact, he once revealed in an interview that his wife finds him troublesome, because even some unscented laundry detergents irritate his delicate sensibility. Ellena’s compositions for Frédéric Malle are quite like beautiful poems; they are complex but not complicated, layered but not verbose, and emotional but not overbearing. Bigarade is a brilliant masterpiece, inspired not by the orange fruit so much as by its rind—as though you’d just peeled it open and the effervescent juice had splashed your nose. He rounds the vibrant citrus with cedarwood, a clean base that recalls the charm of closet doors and getting ready in the morning. It’s a sophisticated and excellent choice.

I opened the column’s glass door and invited Oprah to smell. She did so with her eyes closed, as if she was remembering something. Then, right on cue, she smiled. “That’s the one,” she said.

She asked for a few bottles, and then inquired about the body products. There was a Bigarade Concentrée lotion and a body wash, I told her, so she requested multiples of each. This was when I started to panic: All of our products were individually placed in cushioned boxes, then wrapped with made-to-measure paper and tied with a bow. There was a very specific process to all of this: We could use no tape (it showed sloppiness) and the bow had to lay flat (to avoid looking “fancy”). The wrapping of Oprah’s purchases would take me at least 20 minutes to complete. I apologized as I explained this to her, and offered her something to drink while she waited. She declined politely, and took a seat, continuing to look at her surroundings in amazement.

It was rude to leave clients unattended, so I did my wrapping in the front of the store. To my horror, Oprah came over to watch. As I begged my hands not to tremble from the pressure, she told me she had a school for girls, and that she tried to teach them that sometimes it was the small things made the biggest difference in life. She kept saying “Wow,” every time I finished one of the bows. I realized that she may have been under the impression that I was going to such great pains because she was Oprah Winfrey, but I wasn’t: this was standard practice for all of our customers. In my opinion, it was the least we could do after selling you a $250 bottle of perfume. However, Oprah had been my only client to actually say she appreciated it.

When it was time to pay, her bodyguard swiftly approached me, removing a large wad of cash from his pocket. He gave me the exact amount of bills and thanked me. Then, he picked up Oprah’s shopping bags and she turned around to thank me one last time. When the door clicked shut, I laid myself down in the middle of the shop floor and screamed: “Oprah WINFREY!” 

I spent one short year in that job, trying my best to master the art of perfumery. I made a lot of dumb mistakes, but seeing Oprah’s joy when she smelled her favorite fragrance made all of them feel completely irrelevant. Looking back, I understand what it meant to sell “more than just fragrance”—that it had little to do with the raw materials or the top notes. The products were never really the point: What mattered most was that we were in the business of selling something completely abstract. What smells “good” or “floral” or “sweet” or “feminine” is entirely subjective, as is how a scent (and by proxy, its seller) makes someone feel. 

It was hard to make anybody feel anything, let alone special, when I felt inadequate each time I walked into the workplace. I lied on my résumé, sure, but I also lied every time I stood at the sales counter. I was not chic or reserved, nor could I tell you about the artist who made the exorbitantly expensive blue mug on the sales desk. (OK fine, her name was Muriel Brandolini, and I hate that I remember that.) But weekend after weekend, I kept walking through the door, ready to brave another failure, ready to learn something new. Of course, now it’s easy to tell that I went to all of this trouble because I had something to prove—I was the ambitious, overly thirsty kid with his first big city job, and I was willing to do whatever it took to “make it” in the industry. Unfortunately, I would do so even if it meant contorting myself into somebody else entirely, something I absolutely wasn’t: chic, experienced, nonchalant. I wanted so badly to belong, when it was clear from the minute I lied to get the job in the first place: I didn’t. 

I accepted the job at Saks the following morning. When I returned to the shop the next weekend, I was handed a card by my beaming manager. “You left quite an impression,” she said. There was a note addressed to Frédéric by Oprah Winfrey, explaining that she’d had outstanding service by his employee, Phillip, and wanted to thank him. I gave the card back with a huge, wide smile. Later that night, I offered my resignation. 

If I’m being fair, I may never know if I was the problem, or if my trying too hard was the problem. It’s entirely possible that I was hired because Mr. Malle—with his keen and deciphering nose—smelled the bullshit of my charade, but liked me anyway and wanted to give me a chance. Maybe, in attempting to model myself after him, I’d actually let him down. He asked to see me after my resignation, and told me that I could call him if I ended up hating my next job. Six months afterwards, when I realized that my paycheck had been practically halved, I almost picked up the phone to beg him for my job back in tears. But I didn’t. By then, I had something else to prove—this time, to myself.