Scent Memory

I’m Justin Charles, perfumer and founder of Jean Robert.

It’s been a long, winding road I’ve walked to becoming a perfumer. It starts with my memory of my father, the brand’s namesake, Jean Robert Charles.

When I was a kid, I’d marvel at my dad’s things. He was a high school French teacher from 9 to 5, and on Sundays, he’d labor over his lesson plans for the coming week. He had impeccable penmanship, and he’d write everything out on grid notebook paper in cursive so beautiful you’d think it was written by Tolkien’s elves. He played soccer in college and for his native Haiti’s national team, and kept all sorts of memorabilia: Worn, old, dog-eared team photos and old uniforms with their very 70s-looking collars and itchy synthetic fabric. He took up tennis for recreation, though he was very serious about his fun. To this day, the smell of tennis balls takes me right back to warm days and nights watching him play with his buddies, trash-talking the whole time. But his passion was style, and when I was around twelve, he opened a men’s clothing store, selling mostly Italian designer clothes. He called it Justin’s.

I could go on about his closets and the many beautiful jackets, shirts, ties, and shoes, but what I remember most clearly is that he always smelled good—of citrus, spice, wood, and more. He kept his perfumes on a tray, and I loved to gaze at them, hold them, feel their weight in my hand, and, of course, spray them. He liked mostly classic aromatic, woody, and citrus scents. He took note of my appreciation and got me a bottle of my own. I recall once spraying so much of it on myself that my mother made me take a shower immediately before going anywhere.

I grew up and eventually developed my own tastes, influenced by my dad and the times. My dad got sick when I was 19. He had to close up the store and move to Florida to be closer to his siblings and receive medical care. When I was 21, he died of a cerebral aneurysm. Back then, I wasn’t the most emotionally well-developed young man, but I grieved in my own way, which meant I mostly tried not to think about it. I’m in my 40s now. Over the years, and to this day, I often think about him and the little moments we shared. I think about his store and how proud he was of it. He liked to think of it as being mine one day. Eventually, it occurred to me that perfume was something people made, and it might be interesting to see exactly what that would entail. So, despite having a five-month-old daughter at the time, I found myself a new hobby and bought a little Introduction to Perfumery Kit from Perfumer’s Apprentice, then a Beginner's Aromachemical Kit. I was hooked. I read and watched everything I could online about perfumery, started blending accords, and eventually discovered the Institute of Art and Olfaction. I took every class I could from them and learned a tremendous amount, becoming familiar with my materials and understanding how they interacted in blends. Soon, I was working on my own compositions well into the night. I began to envision what it would be like to share my own creations with an audience. And I wondered what my dad would think of what I made. I thought about how my love of fragrance began with my fascination with his tray of bottles, and I knew that calling this project Jean Robert just made sense.