The Making of Rowdy Boy

Meet the perfumer: Gus Romero, Avoke House of Fragrance

Rowdy Boy started as an Instagram direct message to Ben Birdwell, who owns Ralph's Ranch, a working farm outside Oklahoma City. I sent the brief to the team at Avoke, whose in-house perfumer is Gus Romero, and it was short. Hay drying in the field. Cut-flower rows. Horses. Heat. And marigold. The farm loves them and grows a lot of them.

Gus studied chemistry in Buenos Aires, was a fashion stylist in New York, then trained as a perfumer. Rowdy Boy is the first composition he has built entirely from naturals. I asked him six questions about how he did it. The answers are his.

The Conversation:

The brief was a working flower farm in Oklahoma. Hay drying in the field before it is baled, cut-flower rows, horses, heat. What was the first material you reached for, and why that one?

Hay absolute and oakmoss. Those two were on my mind, and honestly in my dreams, from the moment I started conjuring the idea. Hay gives a warmth that's infectious, coumarin at the core, but the absolute carries much more with it: dried fruit, tobacco leaf, honey. Oakmoss brings the salinity and the moisture, that damp forest-floor quality that vibrates on the skin and keeps the dryness from going flat.

I grew up in Argentina, where going to the campo on weekends is part of a child's life. That's where I learned the odors, the stillness, the love for the natural world. It all started there. So an Oklahoma flower farm wasn't a foreign brief. It was a memory with a different accent.

This was your first time composing something 100% natural. A fougère normally leans on synthetics, and working this way takes those away. What got harder, and what did you use in place of what you'd usually reach for?

With aroma chemicals it's much easier to create space. That's difficult to explain to someone who isn't a perfumer, but it's the whole job. A single molecule is one voice, and you can put it exactly where you want it. A natural is hundreds of chemicals packed together, arriving all at once, and you're managing every one of them whether you asked for it or not. You lose the ability to open a gap.

So I built the aromatic spine out of lavender oil extended with natural linalool, with clary sage and rosemary doing the herbal lift. The sweetness that would usually come from synthetic coumarin comes from hay and tonka bean. And labdanum absolute, the biggest presence in the heart, carries the amber warmth and most of the fixation.

Hay absolute, tarragon, marigold. None of those are common. What is each one doing in the formula?

Marigold. They're abundant in Argentina, they grow like weeds. The oil is green and fruity with herbaceous, apple and citrus facets, but it's the bitter-green stem quality that makes it read as a cut-flower row rather than a bouquet. It goes in at a trace. It still does the job. That's how potent it is.

Hay. Warmth, and the tobacco-like sweetness you get from anything carrying coumarin. It goes in as a dilution. The note people will name first is the one carrying the least weight in the bottle.

Tarragon. Yes, anisic. The oil is mostly estragole, and it's a classic trace modifier in chypres and fougères. Leafy, sweet-anise, fennel, with a celery edge. It lifts the lavender and stops the hay from settling into pure sweetness. A little more and it takes over the whole thing.

Most people don't know that oakmoss is much more restricted now. How do you work with it under the current limits and still get what you want from it?

People assume the restriction means you can't use it. You can. You just work at the ceiling instead of near it. What's regulated is atranol and chloro-atranol, the sensitizers in the extract, so you buy a compliant low-atranol grade and dose it honestly. Oakmoss is in Rowdy Boy, and it's in at a level that fits the limits without argument.

What is one note, or two, that you put in Rowdy Boy that you hope people find on their own?

Neroli. Not many people expect orange blossom in a hay fougère, so it reads as "something bright," and most won't place it. I camouflaged it between the lavender and the labdanum.

The other is fir balsam absolute. It's doing the building itself: resin in warm timber, a cold sappy edge running under the heat. Most people fold it into the moss. I'd love for someone to pull it out on its own.

You studied chemistry in Buenos Aires, styled in New York, then trained as a perfumer. What did styling teach you that you still use at the bench?

If I'd gone directly into perfumery when I was younger, I don't think I would have developed the same aesthetic sensibility I have today. My years in fashion and styling taught me to think visually: to understand proportion, texture, contrast, tension, and balance. You learn that something beautiful doesn't necessarily come from adding more. Often it comes from knowing what to remove. You develop an instinct for when something needs an unexpected element, when it needs restraint, and when it is simply finished.

I find myself approaching fragrance in much the same way. I think about materials almost as I once thought about color, fabric, shape, and texture: how they sit next to one another, where you want contrast, where you want harmony, and where a little imperfection can make the whole composition more interesting. Beautiful individual elements are not enough. They need to create a point of view together.

My path into perfumery wasn't a direct one, but I think the detours were important. An early fascination with chemistry gave me a curiosity about materials. Fashion taught me how to shape them into an aesthetic.

Wearing It:

One of the joys of owning Leland Francis is that I get to test things long before they launch and during the trial phase. I have worn Rowdy Boy for months now. Cold spring days. A heatwave in Provence. Boat trips in Greece. It works everywhere I have taken it. I love this fragrance so much that I have gone through three bottles of Rowdy Boy and just opened my fourth.

Hay first, then the green of the stems, then the moss underneath holding it all in place. Gus built a farm I recognize.

Dillon