The World’s Most Dedicated All-Natural Perfumer

For Mandy Aftel, who creates custom scents with valuable and esoterically sourced materials, the ultimate luxury is a fleeting fragrance for one.

‘‘OUR TIME IS MORE impoverished, aromatically, than it’s ever been in the past,’’ Mandy Aftel told me last April. We were sitting beneath a fig tree in her Berkeley backyard, at the edge of a rose garden whose flowers had been chosen specifically for their pungent fragrances. The obscenely vibrant blossoms spread to the edge of the property, stopping only at the fence that separates her yard from Chez Panisse, the famous California-cuisine-catalyzing restaurant. Aftel, 67, was sneezing a bit and struggling to speak through snags of dryness in her throat. ‘‘It makes me sad,’’ she said, referring to her spring cold. ‘‘I feel like I’m missing out on a lot of stuff.’’

That ‘‘stuff’’ includes antique ambergris, 100-year-old cassia bark, rose oil from Isparta, vanilla absolute imported from Madagascar via water bottle, iris-root butter, Tahitian gardenia and deer musk, all of which are stored only a few yards away inside Aftel’s two-story Craftsman house, where she lives with her husband and business partner, Foster Curry. Zoological prints hang on the walls (sperm whales, civets); crumbling 19th-century aromatics books line the shelves. Sunlight rakes through the windows, refracting through dozens of amber bottles and dappling the floor with a fawn-printed glow. It’s here that she runs Aftelier Perfumes, a tiny company celebrated with cultish enthusiasm by the obsessive devotees of natural fragrances. ‘‘Most people,’’ she continued, before we headed indoors, ‘‘have only ever had the olfactory equivalent of McDonald’s.’’

THE NATURAL INGREDIENTS that Aftel sources and studies are among the world’s oldest luxuries, scents that have been prized for millennia. They come with exotic provenances and marvelous histories. That she would find them seductive is no surprise. What’s rarer than Aftel’s ardor for the ingredients is her steadfast loyalty to them and her refusal to supplement essences of the natural world with the man-made synthetics that have dominated the perfume industry for over a century.

Brought to the market in the late 1800s, synthesized products are present in every perfume you’ve ever heard of. Unlike a natural essence, which is made up of dozens of molecules (lemon oil contains approximately 20 different molecules; rose oil has more than 100), a synthetic aromachemical is often just a single molecule, which, according to Aftel, makes its scent less complex. Fragrance chemistry began in 1868 with artificially produced coumarin, the main component of tonka beans, which have a nutty, tobacco-like smell. The following year, scientists artificially produced heliotropin, which smells a bit like baby powder and is found in vanilla. Later, chemists figured out how to mimic the scent of ‘‘mute flowers’’ such as lily of the valley and lilac, whose fragrance cannot be extracted because they don’t produce enough oil. ‘‘Without synthetics,’’ says By Kilian founder Kilian Hennessy, ‘‘you don’t have Shalimar, you don’t have L’Air du Temps, you don’t have Chanel No. 5.’’

To demonstrate the differences between synthetics and naturals, Aftel put before me three tiny bottles of jasmine: synthetic, natural and natural aged. I inhaled them in that order, sniffing a swatch of wool between each to offset nasal fatigue, and it was like seeing a graphite sketch transform into a value study that in turn became a fully finished portrait. Had I been given only the synthetic, I would have found it divine — syrupy, sweet, like something I’d like to lap up — but the natural jasmine and even more so the aged natural jasmine made the synthetic seem, in retrospect, simplistic, shallow, somehow relegated only to the front of my nose as opposed to the deep recesses of my throat and tongue. After a series of unbecoming groans and unconscious gestures of revelation, I said as much to Aftel. She nodded, her eyebrows raised into twin arches of I-told-you-so amusement.

Like a chef who only uses ingredients grown within 100 miles of her kitchen, a large part of Aftel’s pride and satisfaction is derived from the sacrifice that comes out of self-imposed constraints. That those constraints result in a limited but more exuberant lexicon is more than just a pleasant side effect; it’s arguably what Aftel’s business is all about — exposing the uninitiated to the world’s most precious products and talking about them.

But the complexity afforded by natural essences — which often transform across the duration of even a single inhale, differ from supplier to supplier and change, like wine, from year to year — comes with a cost. Their sillage (the industry term for a scent’s trail) is weak; perfume made without synthetics tends to fade quickly on the skin, becoming perceptible only to the nose-to-the-wrist wearer. And by refusing to work with synthetics, perfumers limit their options for ingredients tremendously. ‘‘By four-fifths,’’ estimates Francis Kurkdjian, a French perfumer famous for creations including Le Male by Jean Paul Gaultier, My Burberry and Narciso for Her. Like many others, Kurkdjian sees abstaining from synthetics as an arbitrary kind of atavism. ‘‘Synthetics bring new colors to the palette, and I don’t think there’s any reason to go back,’’ he says.

Aftel disagrees. Though synthetics can be made into scents that don’t already exist in the world, she prefers the ephemeral qualities of natural fragrance, the intimacy of a scent that only the wearer and those in extremely close proximity can smell. ‘‘The things that make a perfume last all day are also what make it radiate in that obnoxious way for everyone else,’’ she said. ‘‘I think that’s actually kind of unsensual.’’

EACH CHRISTMAS, Aftel opens her house up for three days and invites people — many who come from out of state — to do their holiday shopping. Otherwise, Aftelier is online-only. She currently stocks 18 scents, which sell for $180 to $400 per quarter ounce — up to three times the price of department-store perfume. Leonard Cohen is a fan, as is Lucinda Williams.

Aftel compares perfumery to working with fine jewels, in the sense that she is making a luxury product from valuable and esoterically sourced materials. ‘‘You have to love this stuff. Nobody needs perfume. It’s not like it’s the cure for cancer.’’ She sees herself as a champion of an underloved dimension of the world, a human conduit leading her clients to an aesthetic awareness they didn’t even know they were missing. Eighteenth- and 19th-century European philosophers who argued that sight was the perception most integral to reason are in large part to blame for the West’s demotion of smell to the lowest rung in the hierarchy of the senses. In other times and places, it’s been central to culture: Musk was added to the mortar of Byzantine mosques to make the walls themselves aromatic; the aboriginal inhabitants of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal organized their calendar year according to the fragrances emitted by flowers.

‘‘Your sense of smell is connected to so much of what makes life pleasurable: eating, gardening, drinking,’’ Aftel said. ‘‘It’s a shame that the world of larger commercial perfume is the biggest experience people have with these very, very beautiful smells.’’

Though giant fragrance conglomerates including LVMH and its company Sephora have approached Aftel, she’s always turned them down. Aftel buys essences in small quantities, often from suppliers who don’t have enough of any one thing to permit more than a few hundred bottles’ worth of fragrance, and she throws out batches that aren’t precisely what she wants.

‘‘I’m in a position to use the absolute best ingredients,’’ she told me. And the best isn’t cheap. High-quality oud is $44,000 per kilo; boronia is $14,000 per kilo. She has one fragrance in which four ingredients each cost in excess of $10,000 per kilo. Mainstream perfume purveyors typically allot much less (about $60 to $120 per kilo) for the ‘‘juice’’ and spend more on advertising and packaging and distribution. Meanwhile, Aftel has almost no overhead. She has the freedom to spend her days sourcing new scents and finding more vivid versions of ones she already owns, and teaching small workshops in perfume-making out of her house. She writes books, and is in the early stages of converting her garage into a scent museum.

Aftel has an unusual biography for a perfumer. Born in Detroit to upper-middle-class Jewish professionals, she associates her childhood with the artificial aromas of suburbia: asphalt, detergent, chlorinated swimming pools. She attended the University of Michigan, married her first husband, moved to Berkeley, took up weaving and, as she put it, ‘‘kind of fell into writing a book about Brian Jones.’’ She kind of fell into perfume, too. She’d been working as a therapist to artists and writers for 30 years when she began writing a novel and decided to make the protagonist a perfumer. ‘‘I have no idea why,’’ she said. ‘‘I thought it sounded sexy and interesting; I didn’t really think about it.’’ In researching the book, she became entranced by scents, took a class in making solid perfume, and within a few short years quit her therapy practice and started a natural-fragrance line with a friend that was subsequently sold at Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman. The company dissolved, but Aftel continued concocting scents, and also began writing about them.

A formally trained ‘‘nose,’’ which Aftel is not, typically apprentices with established perfumers and undergoes courses in organic chemistry; traditionally, many noses spent time in Grasse, France, but the industry no longer has a precise epicenter — there are creative offices in New York and Paris, as well as labs in New Jersey. Aftel, however, is a self-taught nose whose entire schooling has taken place in her home.

A FEW HOURS into our conversation, Aftel led me to her organ, the industry term for a perfumer’s workstation. Aftel’s is made from Douglas fir, custom-built and lined with hundreds of vials. She thinks of the oils, she said, ‘‘as friends.’’ Top notes, which are the light-colored distilled essential oils that reach your nose first, take up five shelves on the left. By and large, they’re the least expensive of her ingredients: citruses, herbs, light woods. The middle notes, which are stored in the center of the organ, last about two to four hours on the skin. They’re darker in color and consist of the spices and heavier florals. The right wing of the organ is devoted to the thick, sometimes even resinous base notes. These are the precious, famous things — patchouli, sandalwood, oud, myrrh.

Aftel sat me down and instructed me to take off my glasses. It was time to make me a perfume.

‘‘You need to respond to the materials in a way that’s 100 percent yes,’’ she said. ‘‘Do not be polite.’’ I nodded.

We began with citruses, the only essences stored not on the organ’s shelves, but in a fridge. She put a tiny bottle in front of my nose. It smelled like. . . citrus: zingy and fresh and immediately identifiable as sour if eaten. I would have liked to eat it, but I did not want it on my body. I shook my head no. Aftel gave me another. If it had been the first I would have described it, too, as merely ‘‘citrus,’’ but now it was wildly different. Again: edible but not wearable. She repeated this again and again; already my palate was becoming more sophisticated. I finally gave an enthusiastic yes to an oil that smelled like tea; it was somehow deeper than the others, less abrasive. ‘‘This is yellow mandarin,’’ Aftel said. ‘‘Yellow mandarin is like a tangerine, but it’s got a very floral back note to it.’’ She dipped a paper strip and planted it into a book with an accordionlike structure that served as a holder. We were done with the citruses.

‘‘This smells piney to me,’’ I said, upon receiving the next scent.

‘‘It’s a wood,’’ she confirmed.

I disliked it, and told her so, and we moved on without discussing what it was.

This volleying continued for another hour. She gave me blood cedar and pencil shavings from Virginia. There was an olive extract and something I thought was grapefruit but was really juniper berry. Saffron, mushrooms, cranberry absolute, tarragon, petrified rock-badger poop, partially crystallized sarsaparilla, castoreum (a beaver secretion), roasted seashells, orris butter (‘‘it can go toward old lady in a hot second’’), something that smelled like the reptile room at the Bronx Zoo. Strangely, I couldn’t identify the smell of coffee blindly, and I had to swab my nose with rubbing alcohol after somehow dunking it in lavender oil.

By the end, I had in front of me a fan of dozens of glistening paper strips, including some dipped in oak moss (the smell of lichen, like a wet forest), jasmine, siam wood, the ‘‘very expensive and very hard to get 4-vinylguaiacol’’ (a leathery derivative of guaiac wood, once used to treat syphilis), and, my favorite, indole, which I’m ashamed to report that, though present in certain flowers, also appears in human feces.

Aftel separated the strips into top notes, middle notes and base notes, and asked me to organize them on the organ from favorite to least, so she could record my ranking. I left feeling dizzy and a bit drunk.

A few weeks later, a UPS package arrived. Nestled inside a padded foil envelope was, as a heavy ecru card indicated, ‘‘Alice’s Perfume,’’ in several forms: bottles large and small, a beeswax solid. I sat on the floor, tore away the paisley tissue paper, freed the largest of the bottles, unscrewed the cap and inhaled. It was almost nauseatingly rich; my throat contracted, and my eyes watered with pleasure. The fragrance was loamy, primeval, a tiny bit putrid. I’ve worn it nine months now, and each morning when I spray it on my wrists, I’m overcome with a feeling of awe at my own good fortune. I think of something Aftel said under that fig tree, that ‘‘luxury is sold as general, but it’s actually very specific.’’ It’s true: What could be more luxuriously specific than being granted access to a pleasure you had never even thought to pursue?

SOURCE:http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/03/t-magazine/mandy-aftel-all-natural-perfumer.html