Lady LUX

Kate Growney always knew there was something special about her home, the big island of Hawaii. After deciding it was time to fly the nest and try her hand at a writing career, Kate packed her bags and moved to the Big Apple. As a beauty editor for ELLE, Lucky and Harper’s Bazaar, Kate told LadyLux, “I got involved with beauty through the backdoor. I wasn’t necessarily a beauty girl. One of the things I really loved about writing was learning and meeting people and hearing their stories… finding out what they were passionate about.” She started building a fondness for fragrance and would find herself enthralled in the stories of perfumers instead of writing down makeup tips, like many of her peers. She thought nothing more of her appreciation for perfume until she moved to Los Angeles and a friend coaxed her into taking a stab at the scent biz.

“I was talking to a friend of mine that was a perfumer and she was like ‘You keep talking about all these exotic Hawaiian florals. Why don’t we collaborate on it and I’ll help you make them?’ I thought, ‘No, I’m not a perfumer. I’m a writer’, but then I thought it might be really fun to do something totally out of a box,” said Kate. Then, Saffron James Parfums was born.

Inspired by the exotic scents of Hawaii, she knew she was creating a niche in the market that didn’t exist. While many lotions and sprays can be found at drug stores across the islands, there were no high price points taking advantage of the beautiful floral notes. Kate said, “It was crazy to me that there was no fine fragrance based on the flowers.”

Very proud of her Hawaiian upbringing, Kate wanted her scents to be unique, layered and thought-provoking. “They’re not a single note flower. One of my biggest pet peeves is when you’re wearing a fragrance and someone says, ‘Oh, gardenia?’ and you’re like ‘Great, I smell like a big gardenia’. That wasn’t what I was going for,” said Kate. Using native Hawaiian flowers such as Puakenikeni, Pîkake and Pakalana, Kate clearly has delved deeper than the traditional scents found in the supermarkets of Oahu.

While some artists say they grab inspiration from their own backyard, Kate Growney isn’t kidding. On visits home to see her parents in Hawaii, the first thing she would do is grab some running shoes and charge into the jungle behind their home. “You could smell the blooming ginger, which had this wonderful, wet honey dew quality,” she recalled. The ginger she speaks of was one of Saffron’s first scents called ‘Ume, a ginger floral musk.

Each scent has it’s own personality, Kate says of her four fragrances—‘Ume, Le’a, Puñono, and Nani. While some opt for the soft plumeria notes of Le’a, others take a risk and don Puñono, her most daring scent. “It’s definitely a marker of who you are”, she said of the scent with notes of Ylang Ylang, Pikake, Carnation, Vanilla and Tunisian Opium. “I personally have always loved it.”

There was one question left to be asked after the interview, where did the name Saffron James come from?

“I used to do some freelance writing and was on contract. My boss, Jean Godfrey-June at Lucky Magazine, gave me the name. She called me Saffron Caulder. That was my pet name whenever I did freelance work. I wanted to use the idea of the beauty editor experience. James is my father’s name. We’re actually native Hawaiian, but when he was born, it wasn’t popular to give your children Hawaiian names. Everyone in our family has a difficult-to-pronounce, Hawaiian name… except my father. In honor of his missing Hawaiian name, I decided to put his name on there.”

If you’d like to purchase Saffron James, it is now available at Anthropologie and Nordstroms. However, you can always visit her web site at SaffronJames.com for any information regarding her four fragrances.

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