Missing a discontinued perfume? This Nantucket family business can smell it back into existence.

Missing a discontinued perfume? This Nantucket family business can smell it back into existence.

Nantucket Perfume Company CEO Caroline Harding took over her late father’s perfume company at 16. She’s kept his talents alive ever since.
By Angelina Parrillo Boston Globe, Updated August 10, 2026, 5:00 a.m.

Batzi Heger’s signature scent is Wrappings by Clinique, a green floral fragrance first introduced in 1990 and last sold by retailers in the late 2010s. When she realized she’d be unable to replace her dwindling supply, Heger began to look beyond the department store cosmetics counter.

“Clinique would make it just at Christmas time, and I would buy everything they had. Everyone knew me at Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom,” Heger, who lives in Laguna Beach, Calif., explained, “I had exhausted my almost last bottle, but I was frantically looking for it. I mean, it’s that good.” Heger discovered Nantucket Perfume Company, an independent all-oil fragrance store, online. Within its lengthy SKU list was a collection of “Designer Discontinued” oils, and Heger contacted the company’s CEO, Caroline Harding, to request a replica ofWrappings, as well as two other fragrances from her collection. One, Norell, had been released in 1968.

“I have no idea how, but [Norell] is exact. … She’s just remarkable, really,” said Heger. “When you do something artistic … there’s some love that goes into it. How do you put a price on that? And she does, because it’s her business, but it’s more than that.”

The origins of Nantucket Perfume Company begin in the early ‘80s when Caroline’s father, John “Harpo” Harding, discovered his talent for identifying the single scent notes within a fragrance. A Berklee-trained professional saxophonist, he pivoted his career and established his perfume company, Essense, on Martha’s Vineyard. By eliminating alcohol, a carrier ingredient in eau de parfums, John aimed to create long-lasting, but gentle perfumes in an undiluted form, using essential oil blends.

The business led him to his wife, Patricia Harding, who met John as a customer while looking to buy her mother’s discontinued perfume. The pair forged a correspondence through letters that turned into a relationship, eventual marriage, and family. Patricia, who is Caroline’s mother, is the current chief operating officer of the brand. “It’s a very special love story,” said Caroline in an interview with the Globe. “[This business] is the reason my family exists.” After his children were born, John rebranded as Nantucket Natural Oils, maintaining storefronts in Boston and on Nantucket. This eventually became a single shop on the island, which was renamed Nantucket Perfume Company. When John passed away in 2019, Caroline and Patricia stepped into their current roles, later transitioning the store to online only in 2021.

A young Caroline Harding with her late father, John, founder of Nantucket Perfume Co. PROVIDED “I’m still learning every day,” said Caroline, who spent weekends in the shop as her father’s assistant. “I took over the brand when I was 16, after my dad passed. … It was abrupt, but I also spent my whole life shadowing him.”

Currently, Nantucket Perfume Company is one of Seaport’s seasonal pop-ups, open through Aug. 30. Shoppers can sniff, test, and create custom perfumes from oils housed in 300 apothecary-style glass bottles. The store carries single-note oils that range from anise or banana to tonka and cotton candy, as well as house blends inspired by the island. And behind the counter sit several perfume bottles, in various states of age and use level, that have been mailed or left behind by customers for Caroline to recreate. In a 2014 interview with Nantucket publication Yesterday’s Island, John was quoted: “People can bring me an empty perfume bottle, and I can smell all 25 oils.”

Now, Caroline is the nose behind the match.She says she’s able to fine-tune a fragrance using an old bottle or a sample or a list of notes: “I remake a scent that their mom or grandma wore, and it takes them right back to being with them, and it brings tears to people’s eyes, and that makes it all worth it.”

Customers can also request a twist on an old favorite: their mother’s favorite Chanel perfume augmented with a favored scent profile to make something one-of-a-kind. The custom service ranges in price, from $95 to $190. Pre-made house blends start at $90 and $8 samples are also available for the scent shy or curious. Replicas of designer perfume, or “dupes” as they are colloquially called, are not new.

While designer brands and fast fashion copycats can end up in IP limbo, perfumes are a unique category.“ The scent of a perfume isn’t protected by copyright or patent or trademark law, mostly because it’s functional,” explains Alexandra Roberts, professor of law and media at Northeastern University. “Copyright also requires fixation, and it’s maybe an open question whether a scent is something that’s fixed and stable because it differs depending on who’s wearing it.” (Differs meaning how the perception of a fragrance can change based on the wearer’s body chemistry, environment, spraying tendencies, and subjective sense of smell. ) Brands can still safeguard their specific formulations and claim logos, bottle designs, and other identifiers related to the sale of perfume under trademark and copyright law,Roberts says.

“Fundamentally, the smell itself can be copied, so when you’re operating in an industry where the product is unprotectable under these laws, we’re more likely to see companies get creative about what they can protect,” she says. “Is it the bottle? Is it the name? Is it the box?” Caroline says Nantucket Perfume Company’s oil format sets it apart, and the brand remains transparent in its namesake with “inspired by” labels. But even as the industry evolves, semantics haven’t kept the company from maintaining a loyal following of fragrance hunters.

“My dad was in the perfume business for some of his life,” Iris Robinson, a New Yorker, told the Globe. “I grew up with a real perfume background, so to find this place — and they obviously just know so much, and they’re passionate about it — it’s wonderful, and it’s been one of the great ongoing things for me.” Robinson says she’s been a customer of the company for 35 years. The first scent she recreated with John in the ’90s was Bal à Versailles by Jean Desprez, a perfume originally produced in 1962. She has since collected over 70 bottles of different scents from the company, including Dior recreations and customized blends.“I feel like scent is so correlated with memory… and that’s what people want,” explains Caroline, who hopes to chart a similar path to her father, including a permanent retail location in Boston. “They want a fragrance that, when people smell it, they think of them. So that’s why we’re here, and that’s why we do what we do.”