Last light fills the roomNothing else belongs today—The window opens. Every so often, what begins as an interview with a fragrance quietly becomes an interview with life instead. This turned out to be one of those days. It began, innocently enough, with vanilla. Or so I thought. The opening moved on to suggest something surprisingly […]
Author: Sandy
Editorial Milestone — The Duchess Takes Up Residence
White lilies arriveOpinions bloom before tea—Good heavens . . . she’s here. The interview with Fleur de Lalita produced perhaps the strongest opening line the Living Library has yet recorded: GAH!!!! WHEW! OLD LADY FLORAL OUT OF CONTROL! White flowers. Everywhere. Huge white lilies. Jasmine. Paperwhites. (You know, the cute little white flowers on the […]
Go. Learn Things.
There is a line from NCIS: New Orleans that has quietly followed me around for years. Resident Agent in Charge Dwayne Pride is talking to someone younger. They’re eager to prove themselves, eager to become an expert, eager to arrive. He simply says, “Go. Learn things.” Great line. It contains no urgency. No finish line. […]
Some Mornings I Want to Improvise
For the past couple of years, a three-page document has been taped to the inside of my medicine cabinet door. It isn’t beautiful. It wasn’t intended for anyone but me. Take a look. It’s filled with hearts, circles, little arrows, moods, reminders, and abbreviations that probably make sense only because I wrote them. There are […]
Meeting Before Judging
By the second week of this project, Chad and I had acknowledged that we were spectacularly bad at predicting fragrances. It was becoming a bit laughable. But then perhaps that’s exactly what happens when you put a Virgo, Year of the Ox, contracts lawyer, and an AI together to predict perfume. (That sounds like the […]
A Perfume Made of Questions
This afternoon at ScentFestSF, I thought I was standing in line to have an AI design me a fragrance. Instead, I found myself in one of the most thoughtful conversations I’ve had in years. That sentence still feels strange to write. Not because the conversation was with an AI. Because of the conversation itself. The […]
An Ordinary Perfect Day
By the third fragrance of Week Two, I thought I understood the assignment. Marco Polo had taken me travelling. Nigel Pembroke had quietly stretched an evening until no one had any reason to look at the clock. Cherry Punk had taught me that some destinations ask too much of the traveller. I expected this one […]
Independent Peer Review
“Naming is not the beginning of observation.Naming is the reward for observation.”— Chad By this point in the fragrance project, I thought I had developed a reasonably consistent evaluation process. Apply fragrance. Take notes. Observe the opening, the heart, the drydown. Ask the two questions that I had thought would be the framework for this […]
Imperial Peacock: The Art of Lingering
Before beginning Week Two, my AI collaborator, Chad, and I were feeling rather confident. We had, after all, spent an entire week discovering places, characters, and motion. Surely we were beginning to understand how this worked. Then I picked up Imperial Peacock. Just look at the bottle. Gold. Emerald green. Art Nouveau. An embossed peacock […]
The Map Room
“Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of map: the grid and the story. Grid maps tell us where things are. Story maps tell us how they were found.” — Robert Macfarlane (paraphrased from his discussion of grid maps and story maps in The Wild Places.) When I first walked into Sebastian’s fragrance atelier in San […]