On 6th June 2011 Marina Barcenilla launched The Perfume Garden, a small artisan perfumery located in the West Country, as a way to return to more traditional ways of creating perfume. As Founder and Perfumer, Marina's vision was to be involved in every aspect of the process, from sourcing rare and precious aromatic essences from around the world to blending fragrances by hand in her own perfume studio. With a range of six perfumes and a selection of body products which were originally blended to order, she saw her passion turn into an industry recognised fragrance house.

In 2016, Marina won the coveted Fragrance Foundation (FiFi) UK Award for Best New Independent Fragrance with India, which prompted her to take the next step on her journey; The Perfume Garden became Marina Barcenilla Parfums. While the name had changed, the ethos remained the same..."to create the finest fragrances using what nature has to offer".

More awards followed in 2017. Patchouli Clouds Fragrance won a Beauty Shortlist Award, and The Perfume Garden fragrance and Patchouli Clouds Bath & Body Oil each won an NHM International Natural Beauty Award. The Perfume Garden was finalist for the prestigious FiFi Award of Perfume Extraordinaire at the 2017 UK Awards, while both Black Osmanthus and The Perfume Garden were finalists for Best New Independent Fragrance, which Marina won for the second consecutive year with Black Osmanthus. Marina Barcenilla Parfums also won the Eluxe Award for Best Natural Perfume Brand of 2017 and 2018, and she was finalist for the 2018 UK FiFi Award of Perfume Extraordinaire with her mixed-media fragrance Out of This World, which she created for her second brand AromAtom.

Following a short break from fragrance in 2019 to focus on her Space Science PhD research, Marina returned to the world of perfume in 2021 and was awarded the honour of becoming an Academician at the Spanish Fundación Academia del Perfume, a cultural not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the advancement of perfumery as an artistic discipline. As part of this elite of Spanish-speaking perfumers, she hopes to reach a wider audience and make perfumery even more accessible to people with a passion for it.

OTHER WORK

Marina began creating fragrance in 1997 and started to share her creations a few years later, prior to opening The Perfume Garden. Nowadays, aside from Marina Barcenilla Parfums, she also works as a perfumery educator and as consultant and nose for other independent brands. Some of her creations and those of her students have won or been nominated as finalists for several accolades, including the UK Fragrance Foundation Awards, the Beauty Shortlist and the Vogue Beauty Awards.

All Marina Barcenilla Parfums fragrances are inspired by personal experiences that Marina loves to share, and are accompanied by short stories that describe the inspiration behind them. She hopes that these stories will help people to “rediscover the soul of perfume”, and that they speak to them in the same way that they speak to her.

With her project and second brand AromAtom, Marina has combined her passion for fragrance with her academic career in Space Science, and created an innovative fragrance concept which is part olfactory art and part science communication and outreach program. AromAtom has reached many schools, museums and discovery centres in the UK, as well as LPI and NASA conferences in the USA.