About
Sarah McCartney, perfumer at 4160Tuesdays, set up her first craft business aged seven, making bracelets for her friends. She was brought up in a household of musicians and makers in the northeast of England and played baritone saxophone semi-professionally while still at school, going on to study maths and anthropology, then marketing and corporate strategy.
Following 20 years in copywriting, she wrote a novel about a problem-solving perfumer and in it described fragrances which reminded her characters of happy times in their lives. Unable to find anything similar to these imagined perfumes in shops, she decided to make them herself, discovering on the way that it is a world of secrets and myths.
Sarah found that she had an aptitude for perfume making, partly because she hears the sounds of different aromas, and her musical training helps her to arrange the notes into harmonious chords. Her reputation reached specialist Hollywood fragrance store The Scent Bar, so she qualified to ship dangerous goods, enabling 4160Tuesdays’ particularly quirky British fragrances to reach an appreciative audience in the US.
Her innovative scents are sold in specialist scent shops worldwide and found at Brityard in London. She is regularly invited to speak on BBC Radio dispelling myths about “pheromone perfumes” and speaking out against copycat “dupe” fragrances.
Sarah believes that everyone should have the opportunity to experiment with scent, a hidden craft which is often made deliberately mysterious. In 2019 she set up an online learning community, The Scenthusiasm Scent School on Patreon, so that students worldwide can learn perfume making affordably. She runs occasional live workshops at her Hammersmith studio, and annually with Rose Overdose in Bulgaria, at the ALSO festival and Barnes Fragrance Fair.
Sarah has made fragrances for Oxford Botanic Garden, Aura of Kazakhstan, Black Cliff Barbados and Samsung. She has collaborated with the Courtauld Learning Centre, ballet choreographer Marika Brussel, and opera producer Ted Blackburn.
In May she will have an exciting new collaboration to reveal; studio visitors to the studio will be able to try two fragrances, still secret at the time of writing.
