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Meabh McCurtin

An Irish perfumer from County Clare, Meabh McCurtin works in fine fragrance at IFF in Paris. A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon trained by Dominique Ropion, she created Róisín Dubh for Cloon Keen, honored in 2019 by the UK Fragrance Foundation. She co-created Givenchy's L'Interdit Elixir in 2026.

Career

Originally from County Clare, Meabh McCurtin works at IFF in Paris. She graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon and was trained by Dominique Ropion, IFF master perfumer. She notably worked in New York before settling in Paris.

Passionate about poetry, cooking, taste and smell, she sees endless curiosity as a perfumer's foremost quality. “Perfume is a very emotional thing,” she says, and the story it tells matters as much as its formula.

Róisín Dubh and Ulysses

With Margaret Mangan of Cloon Keen Atelier in Galway, she created Róisín Dubh, “little black rose” in Irish, originally titled Ghost Writer. In 2019 the fragrance won the UK Fragrance Foundation's award for best independent fragrance, a first for an Irish house.

For Bloomsday, the Irish embassy in Paris invited her to create six olfactory landscapes devoted to Joyce's Ulysses, with the specialist Christine O'Neill.

L'Interdit Elixir

In 2026 she co-created Givenchy's L'Interdit Elixir with Dominique Ropion and Anne Flipo. Givenchy describes the line's white bouquet, orange blossom, tuberose and jasmine sambac, with an oak wood extract, rum, davana and vanilla. She also created Vetiver Primavera for Horace in 2025 and Ibiza '87 in 2026.

Creations by Meabh McCurtin