I thought I was organizing perfume. Nope. Not that this is an unfamiliar situation . . . I begin with a perfectly ordinary household project. A drawer. A closet. A shelf. Several hours later, I am standing in the middle of the room surrounded by objects, holding a dirty rag and a bottle of Mr. […]
fragrance
The Question Changed
For a long time, I thought learning about fragrance meant learning ingredients. The notes. The perfumer. The concentration. The history. Where the rose came from. Whether the oud had been sustainably harvested by moonlight from trees that had only whispered to passing monks. (Fragrance marketing can get wonderfully imaginative.) While those things are interesting, they’re […]
Hospitality, Not Ownership
One of the strangest things has happened during this project. The more I have come to love certain fragrances . . . . . . the easier it has become to let others go. That sounds backwards. Shouldn’t evolving from a Collector into a Librarian make me more attached? Instead, it has made me less […]
The Little Free Library
There are two Little Free Libraries on my drive out to the highway. You’ve probably seen them. Tiny wooden houses with glass doors, standing on posts at the edge of someone’s yard. Take a book. Leave a book. Read it. Return it. Or don’t. The point isn’t ownership. The point is circulation. Stories keep moving. […]
Vanille Supermassive: Every Day Deserves a Proper Ending
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Cataloging Scents, Cataloging Selves – Motion
Part 4: Motion By the fourth pair of fragrances, I thought I understood where this project was going. First, fragrances became places. Then they became people. Apparently, I assumed that was enough. It wasn’t. The next discovery wasn’t about where a fragrance took me. Or who I met there. It was about what happened next. […]
Cataloging Scents, Cataloging Selves – Characters
Part 3: Characters Until this point, the project had been behaving itself. Fragrances became places. Moods. Tea houses. Libraries. Rainy mornings. Comfort. Curiosity. That all seemed perfectly reasonable. Then one of them became a person. Actually, two of them did. And that’s when things started getting weird. L’Eau des Immortels arrived with notes that sounded […]