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 […]
the perfume guy
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 – 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. […]
Cataloging Scents, Cataloging Selves – Background
Part 1: The Inventory That Escaped Some projects begin with grand ambitions. This wasn’t one of them. My goal was embarrassingly practical. Figure out what I owned. Figure out what I liked. Stop buying duplicates. That was it. Instead, I accidentally started writing a series about memory, travel, identity, emotional geography . . . and […]