A Little Cottage Where You Can Smell the Natural History of Perfume

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The Aftel Archive of Curious Scents, in a converted garage outside the home of natural perfumer Mandy Aftel in Berkeley, Calif.

Credit
Aya Brackett

The Aftel Archive of Curious Scents, which opened this month in a converted garage at the Berkeley, Calif., home of the perfumer Mandy Aftel, is not just the first museum in the U.S. dedicated to perfume, but more beguilingly, the first one dedicated to the experience of fragrance. This tiny museum manages to contain the olfactory history of the world: hundreds of natural essences, raw ingredients and antique tinctures gathered from every corner of the globe, and all available for visitors to smell.

Aftel’s obsession with natural essences and their history and ephemera took hold while writing her best-selling book “Essence and Alchemy” some 20 years ago. Her idea was to open up and share the pleasures — and treasures — of natural essences with others.

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Inside the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents

Inside the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents

CreditAya Brackett

Among the sniffable exhibits derived from flowers, roots, leaves, bark, resins and balsams the museum also presents a perfumer’s “organ,” or workbench, a perfume deconstructed into its component parts and drawers of raw ingredients. One of the most alluring aspects of perfume is the use of animal scents, most of which are derived from not terribly alluring-sounding elements like excrement or perineal secretions. Exhibits allow visitors to understand where these ingredients come from, see the raw materials and smell side by side contemporary, ethically rendered animal-derived tinctures and their antique counterparts. Spending an hour in here, which is what one is allotted with the purchase of a $20 ticket, is an emotional journey of inhaling odors that conjure ancient civilizations and one’s own past. Scent is the most direct of the senses, smells reach our brains unmediated, and perhaps that is why olfactory experiences cut so deep — bringing us not just to a secondhand memory of something, but seemingly straight back to it. So while successfully demystifying perfume, the lovely little Aftel Archive also enhances its mystery.

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SOURCE:https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/t-magazine/mandy-aftel-perfume-history-museum-berkeley.html