If it seems that it’s taken 43 years for Amouage to become an overnight sensation in the fragrance industry, that’s because time is both a luxury and a vital ingredient for the Oman-based brand.
“If you want to make excellent fragrances, you need to give time for creation,” says Amouage chief creative officer Renaud Salmon. In a tour of Amouage’s recently opened boutique in Beverly Hills—its first on the West Coast of the United States and the 29th in a growing retail network of freestanding stores around the world—he shows exactly how the company does that.
Through studying Amouage’s time-intensive manufacturing process, which entails eight weeks for aging, macerating and maturing a perfume by hand on the Arabian Peninsula, Salmon has pondered the idea of aging ingredients for a longer period of time. “I want to push aging to the extreme,” says the Belgian native who joined Amouage in 2019 after leading Marc Jacobs Fragrances.
Inspired by Oman’s memorable wadis or canyons and featuring resin-coated floors and sharply ridged walls in an earthy palette accented with gold, the 315-square-foot store displays a foot-wide glass wheel encased in light wood. With a gentle spin, Australian sandalwood chips float in perfume concentrate that fills the entire glass container, simulating part of the double-infusion process used to create Amouage’s The Essences collection. On top of infusing the perfume concentrate this way with sandalwood for six months, the company soaks the alcohol that constitutes the majority of its fragrance formulas in oakwood barrels for another six months.
“Craft and creativity work hand in hand,” says Salmon. “Understanding of craft gives me the possibility to create something new that then informs the artistic decisions that I will take.”
Amouage has over 60 scents already available in its portfolio, but Salmon is constantly pondering what will complement them. He juggles as many as 30 in-development perfume projects simultaneously.
“Working on 30 creations at the same time gives me the possibility to spend sometimes up to five years on one creation, and I’m still able to release between three and six fragrances every year,” he says. “When I say I work on a fragrance for five years, most of the time, it’s just about wearing it and trying to understand how it lives and how it evolves.”
Salmon’s excitement for fragrance development extends to scent profiles, including one in the ever-popular gourmand niche and another that is, in his words, “fragile and transparent.” “One downside when it comes to gourmand fragrances is that sometimes they don’t smell expensive,” he concedes. In no rush, he’s tackling a big challenge: “How do you make regal gourmand fragrances?” he says.
To enhance scent profiles, Salmon travels in search of novel natural ingredients. In Senegal, he came upon gowe, a root similar to orris, which happens to be both very expensive and Salmon’s favorite scent. Commonly used as incense in Africa’s olfactory culture, gowe “is not used in perfumery,” he says. “We are building the full supply chain for that ingredient from scratch.”
Since joining Amouage, Salmon has been busy setting high standards for luxury fragrance, which he defines as original, “that you cannot smell anywhere else,” and excellent for longevity and diffusion. Thus far, he’s overseen the development of more than 10 scents, including Guidance, an ambergris-based musk featuring notes of rose, pear and frankincense and concocted by Givaudan perfumer Quentin Bisch. Released in 2023, Guidance has become Amouage’s bestseller, accounting for 25% of its sales.
A year later, Amouage launched The Essences, which contain 30% pure perfume oil. With names like Sequence and Remain, the scents in The Essences are presented in glass bottles encased in softly fluted clay with metal bases made by Swiss watchmakers.
“If you want to make excellent fragrances, you need to give time for creation.”
Interest in the artisanal way that Amouage does business is growing. Last year, French beauty conglomerate L’Oréal took a minority stake in the brand. In the first quarter of 2026, Amouage reported that sales grew over 90% to $190 million. For several years, the brand has registered double-digit annual growth.
“There is really a strong momentum that is driving those numbers,” says Salmon. “Every quarter is not going to be those numbers, but it shows a healthy pattern. Artistic perfumery is a very dynamic segment of the market.”
Amouage is extending its global retail network with upcoming locations planned in London and Singapore. Last month, the Mandarin Oriental unveiled a bespoke fragrance created by Amouage with notes of lemongrass, coconut, ginger and jasmine among 11 elements reflecting the luxury hotel group’s rich history. Called Whispers of the Fan, the scent infuses a range of hair and body products stocked in hotel rooms, including shampoo, conditioner, shower gel, hand wash, hand lotion, body lotion and soap shaped in the Amouage shield emblem.
Fortified by a strong base of clients who’ve been loyal for 20 or 30 years, Amouage attracts three main groups of customers. Salmon describes them as perfumery geeks, socially expressive consumers who like to “stand out in public for their bold choices” and luxury lifestyle connoisseurs. For the last group, he says, “Fragrance is a way to accessorize their look of the day or just amplify their personality.”
Secure in the luxury strata with 100-ml. perfume bottles priced between $395 and $550, Amouage has been able to broaden its reach with new categories and varying sizes. For instance, it offers hair perfume at $130 for a 50-ml. size. In scented body care, lotion sells for $130 for a 360-ml. size and bath and shower gel is priced at $110 for a 360-ml. size. A travel set of two embossed leather sprays goes for $165, whereas sampler sets start at $60 for a trio of 2-ml. samples.
At the moment, Amouage doesn’t offer any candles or diffusers, but moving into home scents is “quite important,” says Salmon. “We’ve been working for a long time on that. They need to be unique. Nobody needs another candle, but people do need a clear point of view in that category.”
Developing skincare would be a stretch for the brand currently, however. Salmon acknowledges that Amouage’s role as custodian of Wadi Dawkah, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that’s home to 6,000 frankincense trees harvested and distilled for its fragrances, opens up the possibility of experimenting with frankincense essential oil.
“It’s used a lot in aromatherapy for its calming benefits, stress relief, but also digestion,” he says. “Actually, venturing into aromatherapy would seem like a more logical expansion.”
The time and financial support Salmon receives to explore his creative ideas at Amouage are unusual in today’s fragrance industry. What could hinder growth is the fact that “our capacity is constrained because we produce everything ourselves by hand in our manufacturing [site] in Oman,” he says. Amouage used to operate a second site in the United Kingdom, but there are no plans to revive it or to open an additional facility outside of Oman.
“We would want to keep everything very tight,” he says, citing the importance of investing in and monitoring processes such as aging perfume. “We need to scale what we are doing. It just means training more people to make sure that we have more people able to manufacture those products, and also expanding the space.”
A portmanteau for amour or “love” in French and amwaj or “waves” in Arabic, Amouage seeks to continue being “the gift of kings” as decreed when it was founded by the ruling Albusaidi family in 1983. The royal family still plays an active role. For the milestone of opening the West Coast store, Amouage chairman Sayyid Khalid bin Hamad Al Busaidi greeted visitors on the first day of business.
Under Salmon’s direction, Amouage is pursuing an uncompromising vision for the future of perfumery. “Commercial opportunities don’t dictate our creative behavior,” he says. “For us, it’s more about standing strongly behind convictions and bringing them to life, because in the end we are talking about artistic or high perfumery. It gives us the possibility to talk to a limited audience with a clear and distinct point of view.”
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