At Memphis the three great gods of the city were counted as a family. Ptah, the craftsman who made the world by speaking it, was the father. Sekhmet, the lioness of plague and of the anger of the pharaoh, was the mother. Nefertem was their son. It is an unlikely household, and the strangeness is the point: the Memphite triad puts making, destroying and beauty in a single line of descent.
His mother marks him. Sekhmet's arrows were disease, and the priests who served her were also the physicians, so healing and plague were dispensed from the same temple. Nefertem inherits the double edge. He is a gentle god of scent and of the open flower, he is occasionally shown lion headed, and Egyptian texts can turn him into a protector who takes his mother's part. Where a local tradition names a different mother, usually Bastet or Wadjet, it is still a lioness or a cobra, and the inheritance holds.
Perfume was an industry as well as an offering. Temple workshops compounded unguents from resin, fat and flowers, and a set of seven sacred oils is listed on offering slabs from the Old Kingdom onward, long before anyone wrote down a recipe. Nefertem presided over that work. The lotus is also one of the forms a spirit may take in the Book of the Dead, and small blue glazed amulets of a figure crowned with a lotus were worn in very large numbers in the Late Period.
What he did not have was an estate. He is worshipped inside the precinct of Ptah at Memphis rather than from a great house of his own, which is a fair description of his whole career: less a landowner among gods than something you could smell, carry, and lay on a coffin.