Spritzing to Success: Annette Green’s Rise in the Fragrance Industry

If you haven’t heard of Annette Green, wake up and smell the perfume. She’s one of America’s leading fragrance authorities and futurists, and the definition of a fearless entrepreneur. Green served as Executive Director and President of the Fragrance Foundation, a non-profit, educational organization, for 40 years. Her memoir, “Spritzing to Success with the Woman Who Brought an Industry to Its Senses,” focuses on the concepts she instituted to help drive the small six-figure industry to its current multi-billion-dollar stature.

Green is credited with inventing the concept of the “celebrity fragrance” (think White Diamonds by Liz Taylor), and in 1994 established The Annette Green/Fragrance Foundation Studio at The Fashion Institute of Technology – the first fragrance laboratory ever to be established in an American University. Green helped to establish the F.I.T.Cosmetic/Fragrance Marketing Bachelor’s Program, where students learn first-hand about how fragrances are developed, constructed, evaluated, tested, and marketing. 

In the 1980’s, Ms. Green created the Scents of Time, a perfume company which specialized in re-creating ancient fragrances, placing the history of fragrance against the backdrop of the changing mores of the societies where fragrances were born. After opening at the Museum of the City of New York to rave reviews in 1988, the Exhibition traveled to Washington D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas. In the Fall of 2006, the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM) Museum & Galleries opened The Annette Green Perfume Museum, a permanent installation open year round.

Listen or read below to hear Annette describe how she was destined for her career (hint: her mother’s water broke in the perfume aisle of a Wannamaker’s), rising through the ranks of the male-dominated fragrance industry in the 1950s and 60s, and how today, over 60 years since her career began, she never stops working, learning, and inspiring others.