I first heard Elisa Aragón speak at the 2024 World Perfumery Congress in Geneva during a panel devoted to the complexities of sourcing natural ingredients sustainably. One of her observations stayed with me. Speaking about women working in rural communities, she questioned whether standards conceived thousands of kilometers away always understand the lives they are meant to improve.

It was a glimpse into the thinking behind NELIXIA, the Guatemala-based natural ingredients company Aragón co-founded and today leads as CEO. Working across Latin America with some 2,000 producers, NELIXIA sits at the intersection of perfumery, biodiversity, agriculture and social responsibility. Aragón herself moves between Guatemala and Europe, source communities and international fragrance houses, entrepreneurship and advocacy. She also serves as Vice President of the Union for Ethical BioTrade (UEBT) Board.

For Essencional’s series dedicated to Women in the Fragrance Industry, however, I wanted to talk with her not only about what it means to be a woman leading a business, but about the women at the other end of the fragrance supply chain - and about something that surfaced again and again in our conversation: who gets to create value, who receives it, and above all, who gets a voice.

Dear Elisa, first of all, thank you for accepting my invitation to be interviewed for Essencional. I first heard you speak about NELIXIA at WPC 2024, but before we dive into your role as an entrepreneur, could you take us through your journey into the fragrance industry? What first drew you to fragrance and natural ingredients, and when did you realize you wanted to build something of your own?

I grew up in Guatemala in a family where there were both doctors and entrepreneurs, so I think I had these two worlds around me from very early on. My father especially had a very strong influence on me. He was a doctor and did a lot of humanitarian work in very remote communities.

I remember once a woman came to him in tears carrying her baby wrapped in a blanket. The baby was almost dying, and my father managed to save him. When you grow up seeing something like that, of course it stays with you.

At the beginning I thought I might study medicine myself. But my father knew me very well and told me to think carefully about it. He said, more or less, “It doesn't matter what you choose to do, but do it well, and try to give something back to Guatemala.” I think that stayed very deeply inside me.

Aragón eventually moved to France to study perfumery at ISIPCA, where her fascination quickly shifted from finished fragrances towards the natural ingredients themselves - their plants, origins and producers. During an apprenticeship at Firmenich, a patchouli crisis unexpectedly brought those interests back to Guatemala.

One of my uncles told me that patchouli had actually been produced in Guatemala before. I found a woman who was still growing a small crop and went to see her. She wasn't extracting anything: she was cutting the patchouli and sending the material all the way to France to be extracted.

And I thought: why can't we extract it here? Why send the plant to France when we could create that value in Guatemala?

That was really the turning point.

Still alternating her ISIPCA studies with an apprenticeship at Firmenich, Aragón submitted the idea as a business plan through an internal initiative inviting employees to propose new projects. The response was immediate.

I was very lucky because I received so much support from perfumers inside Firmenich. Olivier Cresp was very enthusiastic, and especially Jacques Cavallier. Jacques supported me from the very beginning. He really is a visionary - really, a visionary!

So that was probably where the entrepreneurial idea began. It brought together my love for perfume and natural ingredients, Guatemala, and what my father had taught me: whatever I chose to do, I should try to give something back to my country.

That entrepreneurial ambition eventually brought you back to Latin America to co-found NELIXIA. What inspired you to build a company around Guatemala and the region’s extraordinary biodiversity and the communities connected to it? And how did your own approach to producing and sourcing natural ingredients begin to take shape?

At the beginning it was really this idea of creating a bridge. I had seen the fragrance industry from Europe, working with Firmenich, and at the same time I knew the reality of Guatemala and Latin America. And the gap between those two worlds is enormous.

On one side you have very powerful companies, with enormous knowledge and purchasing power, and on the other you have producing communities that can be extremely vulnerable. Historically, that relationship has been very unbalanced. So for me it was really: how can we create more value at the source? How can we make the people who are actually producing these ingredients part of the value chain?

And transparency was not something I decided to put at the core of the project. It was just natural to me. I didn't even question it. If I am working with a community producing patchouli in Guatemala, why wouldn't I tell the client who is producing it, where it comes from, what they are being paid? Why would I hide that?

Only later did Aragón realize how disruptive that apparently obvious transparency could be in an industry where suppliers, intermediaries and entire supply chains have traditionally remained largely invisible.

Cardamom is a very good example. In Guatemala, it had been moving through a complex network of intermediaries for almost a century. You can have a big company buying from a local supplier, but behind that supplier there is another intermediary, and maybe another one behind him, until eventually you arrive at the community actually growing the cardamom.

Every layer, of course, adds another margin. But it also protects information. If I am an intermediary, I don't necessarily want you to know who is behind me, because if you know exactly where the cardamom comes from and who is growing it, maybe you don't need me - or you don't need all those layers anymore.

With cardamom, it took us around eight years of direct work with the communities to really build traceability. Eight years! Because you have to understand all these layers, find your way to the source and, most importantly, build trust. You don't arrive in a community one morning and say, “Okay, now we work directly together.” It doesn't work like that.

But once you build that relationship, everything changes. You can give more of the margin directly to the communities, you have much better control over quality, and the client really understands where the ingredient comes from, who produces it and under what conditions.

And what is interesting is that I didn't begin by thinking, I'm going to challenge the industry with transparency. Not at all. For me, this was simply the logical way to work. It was only by doing it that I understood that transparency doesn't only show you the supply chain. It can also change how the value is distributed inside that chain.

And I think this is really how the NELIXIA model developed. It wasn't something we designed one day in an office and then applied everywhere. It grew ingredient by ingredient, community by community: first you understand what is really happening at the source, and then you work with the people there to find something that actually works.

Looking more broadly at your time in the natural ingredients business, what have been the greatest challenges you have faced while building NELIXIA and establishing yourself professionally? And looking at them specifically from a woman’s perspective, do you feel gender has played any role in your experience of the industry?

Building NELIXIA from nothing was already a challenge - creating the supply chains, gaining the trust of communities and at the same time convincing very large international companies that this model could work.

But yes, being a woman definitely played a role too. When I started, especially in natural ingredients, I was very often a Latin American woman surrounded by European white men. And I was young, with many ideas, a lot of energy, a very strong vision... so I had to find my place in that world. I realized quite quickly that the same behavior can be perceived very differently. A man can be very passionate about an idea and people say, “He is a visionary.” A woman comes with the same intensity and suddenly she is “too emotional” - or even “hysterical.” I experienced that.

So when you are young and you want people to take you seriously, you start looking at the codes. How should I speak? How should I behave? Maybe I have to be tougher, show less emotion, become a little more like the men around me. You try to integrate. But at some point I understood: no, this is not the way. I don't need to become a man to be credible. And finding other women was very important for me - creating this network, this kind of sisterhood. You start talking and realize, “Okay, you went through this too.” And then you support each other. That helped me enormously.

It still took a lot of time, consistency and work to gain trust and establish myself. But little by little I became comfortable doing things in my own way. I didn't have to reproduce somebody else's model of leadership. I had to find mine.

You say you had to find your own model of leadership. Do you feel being a woman has shaped the way you lead, build relationships or make decisions? Is there, in your view, such a thing as a feminine sensibility in business, and if so, what has it brought to NELIXIA?

I think there are qualities that women have sometimes felt they needed to leave outside the business world - intuition, empathy, care. In my own experience, I had to learn not to suppress those qualities, but to trust them. At the beginning that kind of intuition was difficult for people around the table to accept. Now, after working together for many years, sometimes they say, “Okay, we may not have all the rationale, but we trust that intuition.”

For me, intuition is not the opposite of rational thinking. It is another form of knowledge, and I have learned to trust it alongside analysis and experience. And the same is true of empathy and care. At the end of the day, we are people dealing with people. Especially in the world we live in today, I think we need to be more kind, more mindful, more caring.

Sometimes as women we feel we have to shut down that part of ourselves in order to enter a male business world. I think we should do exactly the opposite. That humanity is part of our strength.

Running a company that works across different countries, communities and supply chains must make considerable demands on your time and energy. And since you co-founded NELIXIA with your husband, I imagine the boundaries between professional and personal life can sometimes become quite fluid. How do you find your own balance between work, family and time for yourself? Has that balance changed as both your career and NELIXIA have evolved?

I am not sure I would say we have found the perfect balance! When you build a company with your husband, the company becomes part of your family life, and the family becomes part of the company life. The borders are very fluid.

My husband is French and I am Guatemalan, and we are also very different in the way we think. We both have a strong vision but bring different strengths: he has an excellent business mind and is very strategic and structured, while I tend to be more intuitive and driven by purpose and the bigger picture. Sometimes that creates tension, of course, but it is also what makes the partnership work: we challenge each other and complement each other. We have also raised our two children while building NELIXIA, so the company has really grown together with our family. There have been periods when the workload was enormous, and I think what helped us was that we were working towards the same life project rather than thinking of the company and the family as completely separate things.

And I think your idea of balance changes with time. When you are building something, there are moments when it takes everything from you. Later you learn better where you need to put your energy and where you also have to protect your own space. We are building the same thing, even if we often build it from very different perspectives.

Rooted in Guatemala, NELIXIA today works with a network of around 2,000 producers across Latin America, giving you first-hand insight into very different rural communities. What role do women play within the communities and supply chains you work with? And what has working closely with these women taught you about the importance of having access to work, an independent income and greater freedom of choice?

In Guatemala we work with communities with a very strong Mayan heritage, and women already have an extremely important role. They have the knowledge to heal, they raise the children, they hold a lot of the knowledge inside the family and the community. They are very strong women.
What is interesting is that this strength does not always mean they are included in business.

When I first went into some of these communities, it took me many, many years to gain their trust. I remember one moment very clearly. In one Q’eqchi’ community they prepare a traditional cacao drink, and when they boil it the cacao butter comes to the surface. Traditionally, that most precious part is served on top of the cup of the community leader. I had drunk cacao with them so many times. Then one day I was sitting at a table surrounded only by men - I was the only woman - and they served my cacao with the cacao butter on top.

I almost cried.

It was a very small gesture if you don't know the code, but for me it meant you are trusted, you have a place at this table. And what touched me even more was that I think it was the women who had made that decision.

Now, when I arrive in the communities, many of the women come when I am there. Once I asked if they were always around and somebody told me, “No, they come because you come.” One young woman told me that seeing me over the years made her think she could become a nurse, perhaps even a doctor.

Sometimes it is simply the example that creates another possibility.

We have also created scholarship programs for girls because early pregnancy is a huge issue in Guatemala. We had a five-year program that helped young women complete school so that afterwards they could at least consider university. The important thing is that they have options.

And within NELIXIA itself, all the heads of our operational departments are women. We are really a very women-driven business.

I learn so much from the women in the communities. They are incredibly strong, they work enormously hard, they solve impossible things, and still they smile. When I come back from spending time with them, my husband says I look illuminated because I come back full of energy.

They remind me that you can build a business with love too - with kindness, with care, with a smile.

At the 2024 World Perfumery Congress, you raised a point that stayed with me: how easily we can judge the realities of women working in rural communities through our own cultural lens. How can we improve working conditions and support women and motherhood while respecting local family structures and women’s actual needs, rather than imposing solutions from the outside?

For me, this is a very important question, and it is something I have reflected on much more deeply since WPC.

When we work across very different cultures, I think we have to be careful not to assume that the way we understand a problem from Europe - or from any other context - is automatically the way it is experienced by the people living that reality.

There is still a North-South relationship that comes from the legacy of colonization. Even in our own minds, we sometimes carry this idea that knowledge comes from the North and that communities at the source simply have to comply.

But when you spend time in communities, you realize how important context is. Family structures, access to services, cultural traditions and the realities of rural life can be very different from what we know elsewhere.

The starting point has to be listening. We absolutely need standards that protect fundamental rights and improve working conditions, but we also need to create space for the women and communities themselves to tell us what they need and to participate in shaping the solutions.

I think that is the balance we need to find: maintaining strong principles while being humble enough to understand that meaningful solutions cannot always be designed from thousands of kilometers away.

Let’s put the nose on NELIXIA’s palette of natural ingredients. Guaiac wood is one of the materials most closely associated with the company, and in recent years its availability and supply difficulties have become a real concern for the perfume industry. What makes guaiac wood so special to perfumery, and what have these recent challenges taught you about securing such a precious natural ingredient while protecting the fragile ecosystem it comes from?

For me, this is exactly NELIXIA’s job: taking an ingredient that is risky and building a value chain where our clients can use it without constantly being afraid that tomorrow it will disappear.

Every ingredient has a different problem. Peru balsam and styrax, for example, are being directly affected by climate change and we have to develop strategies to maintain volumes. With guaiac wood the issue is different. It is much more about regulation and how the wood has historically been sourced. That is one of the reasons we opened operations in Paraguay in 2019.

Guaiac wood grows only in El Chaco, which is the second largest native forest ecosystem in South America after the Amazon and has extraordinary biodiversity. And what makes the tree fascinating is also what makes it so difficult: it grows in clusters connected over very large distances and only along particular saline veins in the soil. So you cannot simply plant a guaiac plantation somewhere else. Reforestation is extremely difficult.

Historically, part of the guaiac wood supply to the fragrance industry has been linked to land clearing. Forests were cut to create cattle farms or soy plantations, and the guaiac trees that were cut were then distilled. It may have been legal locally, but for us it was not legitimate as a sustainable model.

CITES called for the industry to move towards management plans, an approach that requires significant technical work, long-term planning and investment. Aragón decided to take that path. NELIXIA now works with around 5,000 hectares of standing native forest, inventorying the guaiac population and calculating how many mature trees can be sustainably removed. Its management plan divides the area into twenty plots on a twenty-year rotation, with complete traceability and the roots left intact to allow the trees to regenerate.

What I find fascinating about this project is that it sounds counterintuitive: sometimes you have to give economic value to a forest in order to protect it.

If that forest has no value for the people who own or live from it, the alternative may be to clear it for soy or cattle. By extracting a very limited number of trees sustainably, we can give value to the standing forest and protect thousands of hectares.

It is the same with resins. People collecting resins need the forest to survive economically, so they become the guardians of the forest.

Sometimes people think the solution is simply “do not use wood.” But sustainability is more complicated than that. If banning the ingredient removes the value that protects the ecosystem, the result can actually be worse.

We say all the time at NELIXIA: the hard way is the only way. It is more difficult and more expensive, but it shows that a genuinely sustainable natural ingredient is possible.

As CEO of NELIXIA and Vice President of the UEBT Board, the organization promoting ethical sourcing of biodiversity, you have the unusual opportunity to look at sustainability and ethical sourcing from both sides. How has this dual perspective shaped your understanding of what really works on the ground? And how can global standards translate into meaningful change within very different local realities, while giving producers and their communities a voice in shaping the frameworks that affect them?

Standards are important. We need frameworks, we need protection, we need people to ask difficult questions. But what I have learned is that a standard cannot replace understanding.

Sometimes we create standards in Europe and then expect somebody in Guatemala, Paraguay or Honduras to apply them exactly as they would be applied in France. But the culture, the family structure, the economic reality, even the relationship with the land can be completely different.

Being on the UEBT Board while also having to implement these standards on the ground as CEO of a company makes this very visible to me.

A standard becomes useful when it provides a clear direction and protects fundamental rights, while allowing the solutions to be built with the people who live the reality every day.

I think we need much more of that in sustainability: not somebody at the top saying, “This is how you have to behave,” but communities having a voice in deciding how the principles are translated locally.

Because at the end, if you want a system to last, the people at the source have to believe in it too. You cannot create sustainability only through compliance. It has to be co-created.

Last but not least, if you could change one thing about the fragrance industry, what would it be? And looking to the next generation, what would you like a young woman growing up in one of the communities NELIXIA works with to be able to choose for herself that perhaps her mother or grandmother could not?

I think what I would like is to redistribute value better - and I don't mean only value as money, but also voices.

If I can manage that, I can die happy.

Today the value is not properly shared through the supply chain. I am not saying everybody has to receive exactly the same value, but if we manage to move just a little more of it back to the source, we can change so many lives. And value also means being heard. For a woman in one of the communities we work with, what I would like is for her to have a voice and to have a choice. That she can say no. That she can set her own rules.

Because for too long, people at the source have simply had to do things in the way somebody else tells them to do them.

If she can say no, if she can choose and if she can help define the rules herself, then her voice is being heard. And for me, that is when the value really starts to be better distributed.

Thank you, Elisa Aragón, for sharing a journey in which fragrance, nature and people remain inseparable - and for reminding us how much can change when those at the source have a place at the table.