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LONDON — With his silken shirt, violet diamanté loafers and fingers and wrists laden with heavy gold jewelry, the master perfumer Roja Dove had the air of a magician as he sat recently in the mirrored salon above his Burlington Arcade boutique.

To many of his clients, he is one.

“I cater to customers that lead very extraordinary lives — little in their life is ordinary on any level,” said Mr. Dove, 59, a man widely regarded in the perfume industry as one of the most significant “noses” of this century and who says he can identify 800 scents from single sniffs.

“They want the finest things in the world, love the power of scent and don’t want to smell like anyone else,” he said. “I am able to give them that.”

First inspired as a child by his mother’s fragrance when she kissed him goodnight, Roja (pronounced phonetically like his given name, Roger), began training as a nose at the French luxury house Guerlain after six months studying medicine at the University of Cambridge and a brief period as a fashion model in London. He spent 20 years at Guerlain, working his way up to become the first company ambassador outside the Guerlain family as well as one of the industry’s leading master perfumers before leaving in 2001.

“It was bought by a very large corporation, and I am not a very large corporation type of person,” he said with a wry grin, referring to the company’s 1994 purchase by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. “So I decided to leave on Halloween, which I thought was the perfect date to leave as it appealed to my sense of humor.”

He had decided that it was time to go on his own, introducing Roja Dove Haute Parfumerie, a custom perfume service that opened at Harrods in 2004. Roja Parfums, his fragrance line, debuted in 2011.

Today the line totals about 50 scents for men and women, many with mischievous titles like Scandal, Danger, Fetish and Enigma, and bottle caps encrusted with chunky Swarovski crystals. Prices begin at around 345 pounds for a 50-milliliter bottle, or about $450 for 1.7 fluid ounces.

Making a custom scent, however, takes six months to two years and costs around £25,000 for a 500-milliliter bottle.

Mr. Dove prides himself on using what he describes as the best-quality materials in his perfumes: It takes five million blossoms, picked before sunrise, to produce one kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of his preferred type of jasmine oil, at a cost of £32,000; ambrette, a synthetic musk, costs around £10,000 a kilogram; and ambergris, a secretion from a sperm whale’s intestines, can cost more than £75,000 per kilogram.

As his company is privately owned, Mr. Dove does not release sales numbers or revenue figures — but he says his perfumes have been selling well, with consistent growth.

“We only launched Roja Parfums five years ago, and yet people seem to think we have been around for a long time,” Mr. Dove said, sipping on a steaming herbal tea in his boutique, which opened this year. “But that is only because I have.”

“At the risk of sounding arrogant, we’re the most successful launch in Harrods history,” he added. In perfumes, “we are the No.1 brand in Harrods, which many people don’t realize. I sort of pinch myself with all of that because I think it really does prove that David can beat Goliath.”

Annalise Fard, director of beauty and home at Harrods, confirmed the brand’s success on its introduction at the store and added that it had been exciting to watch customers’ appetites for niche and independent fragrance brands increase in recent years.

“I think we will see the continued growth of luxury and niche fragrances, as more and more clients search for brands and fragrances that aren’t widely available,” she said. “They offer the opportunity to get closer to the idea of one’s ‘signature scent’ — something that is uniquely you or that you at least feel helps you stand out from the crowd.”

Mass-market fragrances appear to be losing their mystique as personalization has become a significant trend on both fashion catwalks and cosmetics shelves; Euromonitor, the London-based research company, confirmed that while global sales of mass fragrances have declined in recent years, sales of premium scents are on the rise.

And, it said, the Middle East and Africa will account for 40 percent of the growth in the world’s premium fragrances market from 2013 to 2018. Mr. Dove noted that he was the leading Western seller of aoud, also called oud, a woody scent that traditionally has been popular in both Asian and Middle Eastern cultures.

Mr. Dove believes that the success of his business lies in the peculiarities of the multibillion-dollar mass fragrance market, which began when houses began to make perfumes in large quantities in the 1980s and major manufacturers began buying perfumeries in the ’90s.

“Scent had become disposable and throwaway,” he said. “Now there is this huge disconnect, where many wealthy shoppers will happily pay thousands of pounds for a bag or dress and the luxury of having something that is the finest and exclusively yours. But when it comes to scent, plenty still wear a cheap, mass-produced product and seem happy to smell like everybody else.

“But there were definitely clients who wanted to find a well-crafted scent that was made to impress and endure. And I believe that no one was catering to this sort of customer” until his business was established.

His customer base, Mr. Dove said, is equally split between men and women, with 130 points of sale worldwide as well as his website. A substantial portion of his sales are to British and American customers — in the United States, his fragrances are sold at Bergdorf Goodman — but he also has many customers in Russia and the Middle East.

“Interestingly, we have done less work in Europe,” he said. “I wasn’t interested in opening in lots of parts of Europe as the European market is tired and oversaturated. Our brand is totally self-funded so wherever we opened we needed to know we would be successful straight away.”

Now, as a gay man with no children, he is increasingly interested in the possible sale of the company to ensure its future. “My mother died in 2009, and her death was something of an inspiration for me to create something that I hoped would last and outlive me, whether it will or not,” Mr. Dove said. “The whole point of this brand was to create a legacy. If I can end up finding a safe pair of hands to own it, where I can also stay on as creative director, then that for me would be nirvana.”