Magic of Scent

I really do love what I do. The scents, the formulating, the calculating, the wonder when it all turns out right, the absolute shock and disappointment when it does not. I love walking into my cluttered little studio and picking up a whiff of dark, aged Indonesia vetyver from the drop that slid down the side of the bottle and solidified there; brushing the dust from the "goodies" box and opening it to reveal a vial of champa concrete, the lip of which wafts the odd sweet floral minty~ness into the air; the air-dried green goo along the edges of a glass stopper plunged firmly into a near-full bottle of Peaseblossom, giving off snaking fingers of scent redolent of a classic fougere tinged violet. Bottle upon bottle of dark mossy green, pea green, gold, amber, yellow and crystalline colored tinctures glittering in the dim studio light.

I love that these elements speak to me; that I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about an old bottle of boozy dark patchouli that smells of a thousand first rains on a thousand dusty roads, or the last milliliter of a particularly beautiful season of rose otto aging to buttery rose perfection, tucked away in a dark box, or the crate of luban resin in which I hide muslin bags of cash in hopes that the luban will bless it with fortune.