My Journey Into Perfumery

I was a kid who couldn’t stop creating — filling school books with drawings of TV cartoons, hearing a theme once and playing it perfectly on a keyboard, both hands, no training, just by ear. I sketched life-like portraits of my teachers in class and went home after hanging out with friends to recreate a meal I’d tasted at a tiny street food shop in Sharjah. I’ve always been driven by curiosity, trying to understand how sound, flavor, or form come together to create a complete experience.

That curiosity carried me into architecture, where my graduation project focused on decoding urban patterns and expressing them as abstract designs. I spent months observing how people moved through space, learning how structure can quietly shape experience in powerful ways.

Later, I pursued graduate studies in computational design and generative systems, where I learned how small changes can create wide variations, how complexity can be explored, organized, and refined, and how systems can be modeled from a user-interaction standpoint.

Taking those conceptual frameworks, I worked in startups and engineering teams across construction, automotive, and aviation. I had the opportunity to build tools for both large and small teams, for production operations as well as experimentation. This taught me the value of iteration: build, test, refine, repeat. I bring that same process to perfumery, where every release is a step toward a clearer, more precise expression of an idea.

That same mindset eventually drew me into perfumery. I started by buying artisanal blends and often felt the desire to add a few notes I thought they needed. That impulse to adjust and refine quickly became something deeper. I began studying raw materials, experimenting with structure, and realizing how even the smallest tweak could change the entire mood of a scent.

I view creating perfume as a problem-solving activity. I start with a goal inspired by an idea and explore different ways to reach it — sometimes taking the most direct path, and other times experimenting freely, with a subtle influence of optimization and search algorithms guiding my choices.

A blend might serve as an extensible base to be built upon or reinterpreted, or it might be a singular, self-contained composition designed to shift perception — taking the front row in one edition and the back row in another. I’ve tried to bring this modularity directly to the end user through X-editions on my website, creating a system of mass customization where each person can shape and explore their own experience. Each blend becomes a deliberate exploration within a framework — a balance of design, experimentation, and taste.

Even this website, elkhaldi.studio, reflects that mindset. I continuously rebuild and refine it — not just for design, but to make it a better reflection of how I work and think.

That’s my story.

Maher