Annette Green, who helped turn fragrance from a special-occasion luxury into an everyday purchase and built The Fragrance Foundation into an influential US industry organization, has died at 102.
For more than four decades as the foundation's leader, Green championed the concept of a fragrance wardrobe, encouraging American women to purchase multiple scents rather than reserve a single perfume for special occasions. She also established the FiFi Awards in 1973, developed a fragrance-museum collection, and helped create specialized cosmetics and fragrance education programs at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT).
When Green was recruited to revive The Fragrance Foundation in 1961, the organization was struggling to survive. Industry executives approached her about rebuilding it without compensation, despite warnings that few companies were interested in supporting it.
"I was challenged on every front and told by industry members, over and over again, no one wanted The Fragrance Foundation. Forget it!" she told BeautyMatter in 2020. "For reasons I can't really explain, it was never in my nature to give up or turn away from hard times."
What began as an unpaid assignment would become defining work for her career. Green spent the next 41 years building the foundation’s influence, eventually stepping down in 2002.
Born in 1924, Green’s connection to fragrance began with her mother, Mollie Green, whose signature scent was Lucien Lelong perfume. Her mother worked in the perfume department at Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia, where, as Green recalled, her water broke before Annette’s birth.
Green initially pursued journalism. After graduating from Weequahic High School in Newark, NJ, in 1942, she worked in administrative roles before joining Hearst Magazines as an editorial assistant at American Druggist. Although she had hoped to move to Harper’s Bazaar, the position introduced her to the beauty business.
As teenagers emerged as an increasingly important consumer group, Green was assigned a monthly column advising drugstores on how to market cosmetics to younger shoppers. Determined to understand the market firsthand, she took a weekend position behind the counter at a Newark drugstore. The experience redirected her career toward beauty. She went on to work in journalism, marketing, and public relations, eventually heading the New York marketing, PR, and promotions department for Helene Curtis.
When the company decided to relocate its New York operations to Chicago, Green chose instead to establish her own public relations agency in the 1950s, at a time when female business ownership was far less common.
"At that time, very few women worked on their own," she recalled. "For me, it wasn't a conscious choice. I was determined to do whatever it might take to build my business."
Within a year, the agency was financially established. It was through her industry relationships and earlier reporting on The Fragrance Foundation that Green was eventually recruited to help rescue the organization.
When Green assumed responsibility for The Fragrance Foundation, the American perfume market looked considerably different from the industry it is now. According to Green, a handful of predominantly French fragrance houses dominated the market, typically promoting a single perfume as a Christmas gift. Fragrance was often kept behind glass in drugstores, while many women reserved perfume for special occasions rather than purchasing it for themselves.
Green saw an opportunity in the social and economic changes unfolding across the US, particularly as more women entered the workforce and gained greater spending power. "I set out to figure out how I could get women to buy more fragrance," she told BeautyMatter.
Her answer was to encourage women to think about scent as something that could change according to their mood, occasion, or lifestyle. She introduced the concept of a “wardrobe of fragrance,” encouraging consumers to own multiple scents rather than rely on a single signature perfume.
Green also encouraged the industry to replace the luxury connotations of “perfume” with the broader term “fragrance,” encompassing everything from colognes to scented soaps. The shift opened opportunities for companies to develop new scents, introduce extensions of existing products, and market fragrance to a wider consumer base.
"It took me ten years to turn what was a small $500,000 French perfume business in the United States into the multibillion-dollar industry it is today," Green recalled.
She was also clear that the category’s growth reflected broader changes in American society, including women’s growing economic independence, the emergence of American fragrance companies, industry consolidation, and the evolution of department-store retail.
"There was not one singular event—it was a confluence of many," she said.
As the American fragrance market expanded, Green recognized that commercial growth alone would not establish fragrance as a serious industry. It needed its own institutions, professional standards, and a means of recognizing the people and companies driving the business.
In 1973, she founded the FiFi Awards, creating an annual platform for recognizing achievements across the fragrance industry. The Awards subsequently became one of the industry’s most prominent honors, recognizing fragrance creation, packaging, marketing, and other contributions to the category.
Green also established the first American fragrance-museum collection, assembling hundreds of perfume bottles dating back to the 18th century. The collection helped preserve fragrance’s design and cultural history at a time when the category was increasingly becoming a major commercial business.
Her commitment to professional education extended to FIT, where she played an instrumental role in establishing undergraduate and graduate programs focused on cosmetics and fragrance business and marketing. These initiatives reflected a broader ambition to give fragrance the institutional recognition, educational infrastructure, and professional credibility enjoyed by other established industries.
Green’s contributions also came at a time when women were still navigating considerable barriers to leadership and entrepreneurship. Having established her own agency before taking over the foundation, she became an influential example of female leadership within the beauty business.
Green retired from The Fragrance Foundation in 2002, but remained closely connected to the industry she had helped build. She later documented her experiences in the memoir Spritzing to Success With the Woman Who Brought an Industry to Its Senses, dedicated to her mother. The book received the Perfumed Plume Fragrance Book of the Year Award in 2019.
"When I retired, I got involved with the arts because I love it and thought it would make me stop thinking about fragrance, but I couldn't stop," she told BeautyMatter. "I decided to write the book because it was a way to revisit my experience and share it, but I also felt I had a responsibility to document the history of the industry."
Even in retirement, Green continued to offer observations about the future of fragrance. She was concerned about the growing difficulties facing independent brands and the increasing dominance of corporate players but remained interested in how new retail formats and consumer behaviors could reshape the category.
She was particularly interested in the relationship between fragrance and wellness, anticipating greater attention to scent’s potential role in relaxation, focus, and emotional well-being. "I think we are going to see fragrance become more involved with wellness with benefits like calming, focus, or alertness," she said.
Green also envisioned new experiential spaces where consumers could learn about scent beyond traditional department-store fragrance counters, anticipating the industry’s growing emphasis on sensory discovery and immersive retail. Her influence is visible in many of the conventions that define the fragrance business today: consumers building fragrance wardrobes, brands developing multiple scents and extensions, an established awards infrastructure, and specialized education preparing future industry leaders.
For Green, however, fragrance remained deeply personal, tied to her mother, her career, and the industry she devoted much of her life to building.
"Perfume is in my veins," she told BeautyMatter.
