Eric Buterbaugh has always loved fragrances. When he was just a kid, growing up in the tiny Oklahoma town of Purcell, he kept 50 bottles of perfume in a cabinet in his bedroom. “I loved smelly stuff all my life, so this really was a dream for me, and it happened,” he said during a recent Houston visit to promote the re-launch of his namesake fragrance line at Saks Fifth Avenue. Celebrity perfumist and florist Eric Buterbaugh with Lynn Wyatt. Buterbaugh—known as Hollywood’s “florist to the stars,” he counts Gwyneth Paltrow, Demi Moore, and Nicole Richie among his friends and clients—launched his signature line of floral fragrances in 2015. The Spanish fragrance giant Puig acquired the brand last year and worked with Buterbaugh to brighten up the packaging (it now comes in a colorful box with drawings of tropical flowers and pink flamingos) and introduce several new scents. “ We have 17 fragrances now,” Buterbaugh explained over lunch at Saks’ 51fifteen restaurant before excusing himself to mingle with Houston’s top social titans at a party for the 2020 Sweetheart Icons in the cosmetics department. “I originally launched with eight. Since we were acquired by Puig, it’s amazing going from a three-person start-up to having an art department in Paris and all these things. “We weeded out a few fragrances that weren’t really working and brought in some new ones,” he continued. “We brought in some ouds in the last year and they are performing. Our No. 1 fragrance is Saffron Oud, and we have a Rose Oud that is doing well.” At first, Buterbaugh was resistant to introducing oud, one of the world’s strongest and most expensive fragrance ingredients. “We really wanted to interpret it in a different way, mixing the strongest ingredient you could use with some of […]