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 […]
fragrance
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 […]
Cataloging Scents, Cataloging Selves – Places
Part 2: Places My spreadsheet lasted exactly five minutes. The original plan seemed perfectly sensible. Brand. Fragrance. Notes. Rating. Done. Instead, I found myself writing things like: Tea House. Rainy Afternoon. Silk Road Library. At first I thought I was simply being whimsical. I wasn’t. I was discovering that “fragrance notes” answered the wrong question. […]
What Does a Bond Girl Smell Like? New Avon Bond Girl Fragrance
So what do YOU think a Bond Girl smells like? Avon is having a go at figuring this out for us, apparently. According to Now Smell This, quoting an Avon spokesperson, “Bond Girl 007 is a sexy cocktail of velvety florals, cool freshness and warm woods; the notes include white peach, orange blossom, jasmine, calypso […]