The Perfume Society

The Perfume Society was founded by journalist Jo Fairley, a co-founder of Green & Black's chocolate, and Lorna McKay, who started her career at Harrods before setting up Liberty's perfumery. Between them they had the contacts and credibility to build what the site calls the world's first organisation devoted to all things fragrant, and it shows: their editorial reaches perfumers, brand founders and industry figures that a purely consumer-facing blog rarely gets access to.

The core offering is The Scented Letter, a regular magazine available as a free digital edition or a paid glossy print subscription, alongside a large archive of articles on fragrance history, ingredients and families, a Find a Fragrance discovery tool, and curated Discovery Boxes of samples sold direct. Jo Fairley handles editorial, Lorna McKay the business side, and the site was still publishing new dated content through 2025 and 2026 at the time of writing, so this is an active, maintained resource rather than a legacy archive.

On trust: this is consumer education first, independent criticism second. The Perfume Society partners with a wide roster of brands for its Discovery Boxes and features, and the homepage mixes editorial writing with brand promotion, so a reader should treat featured content differently from an independent verdict. It is also a subscription-adjacent business, since full access to boxes and print leans commercial rather than purely free content. For genuinely educational, well-sourced background on fragrance and the industry, though, it is one of the most established UK resources going, and its own contributor list, including Suzy Nightingale (also featured in this directory), reflects real specialist depth.