Working out of a sun-lit Edwardian house near San Francisco’s Duboce Park, perfumer Yosh Han spends her days grinding spices and blending essential oils for her fragrance company, Yosh Olfactory Sense. On one wall of the airy workspace, an antique bookcase imported from Ireland stands stacked with bottles and beakers. In another corner of the room, Han displays her collection of vintage perfume atomizers. Turkish rugs drape the hardwood floors, and stained-glass windows project shadowy patterns on the walls. Were it not for the hubbub of modern life outside, a casual visitor might feel transported to a bygone era of friars and alchemists.

The 34-year-old Han follows a trail of timeless, exotic scents around the world. Her line of perfumes is made from unconventional, food-based oils like cucumber, lime, fig, honey, basil, and Japanese grapefruit, which Han mingles with citronella, lily, and lilac. “The perfumer’s palate is very similar in vocabulary to a winemaker’s palate,” she says. “We’ll often talk about something as earthy or mushroomy, fruity or floral.”

Han’s eclecticism has served her well, and her ascent in the sink-or-swim fragrance world has been almost unforgivably brisk. Through a job as the manager of Dave Eggers’s 826 Valencia pirate-supply store and tutoring program, Han was introduced to and embraced by San Francisco’s literati. Though Buccaneer, the unusual theme fragrance she sold through the store, did not exactly fly off the shelves (neither did Urban Essence, a eucalyptus- and musk-based perfume Han created to be the “scent of San Francisco”), things picked up in 2003. That’s when novelist Robert Mailer Anderson, who’s also a member of the San Francisco Opera Association’s Board, commissioned Han to create a pair of signature perfumes that would be sold in the Opera House gift shop: one sultry (Box G), and one fresh (Opening Night, a citrusy blend inspired by the soprano Renée Fleming). Not long after, the author JT LeRoy emailed to request a custom scent. Han developed something of a cult following, prompting retailers like the Fred Segal boutique in Santa Monica to come calling. The shop now carries all six of Han’s stock fragrances: Sottile, Stargazer, White Flowers, U4eahh!, Ginger Ciao, and her androgynous cologne, Omniscent.

Sensory experience—especially olfactory experience—has always been paramount to Han. Her mother was an expert in ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, and the Chinese character for “Yosh” means “fragrant.” But it wasn’t until she was a young adult that perfume took on a new significance for Han. While living in Aspen and learning to ski in the early ’90s, she says, she experienced a mystical moment in a perfume boutique. Han walked into the store, saw the hundreds of bottles on the wall, and insisted that she belonged there until the manager finally agreed to hire her as an apprentice. Combining what she learned at the shop with extensive research and some globe trotting, Han founded Yosh Olfactory Sense in 2002.

“Typically we’ve just been told that women should smell like flowers,” Han says dismissively. “I’m not that kind of person. I travel extensively, I love to cook, and so I get my scents from other places. After I went to Turkey, I started using cardamom and turmeric, and I’m also experimenting with hazelnut. Nuts have an earthiness to them, like sandalwood.” Though Han isn’t the first to produce foodie fragrances, few perfumers have translated the idea as literally. She recently collaborated with a Boston chocolatier to create three cocoa-based scents, one infused with ginger and blood orange, another that evokes jasmine, and a third in which the beans have been roasted to smell slightly nutty and smoked.

Even Yosh’s most traditional floral fragrance, White Flowers, has a hint of what is known as a green finish—a sharper note contributed by Siberian fir. “It’s less cloying,” explains Han, who finds strictly flowery scents too sugary-sweet. “[It’s] like having a floral couch, a floral rug, floral wallpaper, and wearing a Laura Ashley dress.”

Though the six stock scents make up the bulk of Han’s business, searching for a person’s fragrance based on one’s psyche is Han’s specialty, and the customizing experience (which sets clients back $750) doubles as an olfactory Rorschach. Han has scripted a lengthy questionnaire that asks for “weird details,” she says, “like what kind of car you drive, and whether it’s your dream car. Are you a PC or a Mac person? I also want to know whether people manicure their nails, if they have a favorite fabric, and what kind of flowers they like, both cut and planted. If they love spicy foods, I want to know what kind, because Thai food is very different from Mexican food.”

Once the client has been fully debriefed, Han helps choose a combination of up to nine different oils—enough to give the fragrance top, middle, and base notes, plus elements known in the trade as bridges, shadows, and accents.

To prepare for making LeRoy’s fragrance, Han read the young author’s book The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, which left her feeling “slightly vulnerable, slightly repulsed, but compassionate.” The resulting fragrance—a mix of bay rum and vanilla—exhibits, as she says, “that same kind of conflict.”