Nathalie Lorson grew up in Grasse, the French town synonymous with perfumery, where her father worked as a chemist at the fragrance house Roure. That early exposure to the family business pulled her toward the craft, and she trained at the Roure perfumery school before starting her professional career.

She joined IFF as a junior perfumer in 1987, spending over a decade building a portfolio there before Firmenich recruited her in 2000. She has remained at Firmenich (now dsm-firmenich) ever since, and in December 2016 the house named her one of its Master Perfumers, an internal circle that numbers only a handful of noses at any time.

Lorson's best-known creation is Yves Saint Laurent's Black Opium (2014), composed with a team of collaborators around a signature coffee-and-vanilla accord that became one of the decade's biggest fragrance launches; the scent earned her Fragrance Foundation honors and a Perfumer of the Year title from French trade press in 2015. Across a career she describes as prolific — she has put her name to well over a hundred fragrances — she has worked across mass and prestige fine fragrance for houses including Lalique, Gucci, Givenchy, Dolce & Gabbana, Chopard, Jil Sander, Le Labo, Amouage and Essential Parfums, alongside celebrity scents for figures such as Dita Von Teese and Lady Gaga.

In interviews she comes across as press-shy relative to her output, describing herself as a 'gold digger' sifting through raw materials for the rare 'nugget' worth building a fragrance around, and framing her job as an act of generosity aimed at moving the person wearing the scent rather than expressing herself.