The Story of a Perfume
I open the bottle with pure essence of my perfume, Adelina’s Dreams. A hit of something familiar and intimate runs through my body and I relax with a sigh. The fragrance wakes me up to who I am somewhere deep inside. A part of me that I never really met feels at home, as the perfume soothes needs that I do not remember.
The open drawer I am looking at has many colorful bottles with all the scents I collected over the years. A couple of small artisanal bottles are empty, the ones with the thermal-printed label saying “Adelina’s Dreams”. They were holding the diluted eau de parfum created from the original essence.
The Base
It feels not so long ago. I am sitting at Odilia’s table, facing the window to her beautiful wild garden. Hundreds of small essential oil bottles organized on layered trays and categorized by rules known only by her. She expertly presents a selection of bottles. We are starting with the base notes. I am to smell first, no reading labels. Let it not be a creation of the mind.
I smell resins and woods. I breathe in, then follow the sensation. Does it stop at the heart or does it go lower? Does it stir me up or calm me down? I take my time. The base is important.
The strong resins are not for me. I don’t want to be stirred up. I finally find a couple of delicate smells. I didn’t know how lichens smell. Turns out subtle, quiet, ancient.
Lichens are a partnership between fungus and bacteria. They inhabited the land before any plant did. And it turns out oud fragrance is from a tree with a fungal infection. It is a response to a wound.
Beautiful things sometimes come from wounds. They say it is where the light shines through. Adding also a sweet dry wood oil.
I read later that smells go straight to the limbic system. To the animal in us. The animal in me recognized these smells as comforting. It is how reality smells when the identity of being a person is not trying its tricks on awareness.
The Middle
The next layers must come. Start adding, carefully. Some scents take more space than others. Just like people. They complement each other, make each other shine, or suppress each other. I smell the current mix, then smell each new candidate and assess compatibility. I digest each feeling slowly.
My system does things slowly.
The subtle flavors that I like need more room. I want space for my openness, so I want to keep the mix open. Tender. I want a body too, to give me power and courage to believe in myself, but to direct gentleness on myself. To quote an altered state anthropologist: I want to tap my world lightly, not squeeze it out of shape.
The Top
I like all the flowers it seems. “Choose quickly and just go with your first intuition at this stage.”
The slow intro of the base is gone and we are soaring through passion flower, frangipani, blackcurrant, and a surprising dill.
I stop as if trying to remember a dream. Something moving under my awareness. I wait, but it doesn’t surface. The feeling of waking up from a dream — like I am still in the dream despite not remembering what it was about. “Does it smell like something from your childhood?” Somehow, that’s not it.
We continue with Neroli and angelica. I am sitting by the window with my journal. I feel my nostrils stinging and take another sniff of coffee to reset my senses from the abundance of smells. Next another surprise: pepper. Then an accident with the lily – 4 drops slipped through as one. “It was God’s will”.
The Waiting
It all smells like an explosion. “It will settle”. In a few weeks. The scents will negotiate between themselves and blend into each other. She shakes the two little bottles where she had been adding, drop by drop, each scent that I chose. “What shall we call it?” The entire experience runs through my mind, so rich and intricate. But no headline comes to mind. “We can call it Adelina’s Dreams”. The dreamlike feeling I had that one time during the process suddenly fell into place and felt right.
__________________
I open the empty bottle and use the remaining trace of oil to rub against my wrists. I close the drawer and I go on a search through my old journals. I relive old truths scrolling through pages upon which many layers and versions of myself poured their restless turmoil. And finally I find it! It turns out two years have already passed. The details of the process come back to life through the cryptic scribbles and I remember I wanted to write an essay about it. I bring my wrist to the nose and I fall again into that place where dreams come from.
A shared exploration of scent and creation with Odilia Carmen
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