Stripe Press

Tacit: Christophe Laudamiel, Master Perfumer

In Tacit, we spend time with Christophe Laudamiel, master perfumer at Osmo, and the creator behind some of the most recognizable fragrances of the past few decades, including Polo Blue, Abercrombie & Fitch Fierce, and Tom Ford’s Amber Absolute.

Perfumery is a field built almost entirely on tacit knowledge. While formulas and chemical structures can be written down, knowing how a material behaves in heat, how it changes over time, or how a composition will settle on skin cannot be learned from text alone. That knowledge develops over many years and thousands of small judgments, many of them unconscious, shaped by experience and repetition.

Christophe’s work shows how mastery emerges through sustained engagement with complex systems. Tacit is a series about that kind of mastery, and why it matters.