It starts as a faint whiff of horse sweat and stables. On Spring nights when I walk home from the subway through our compound in Shanghai, I can map where I am in relation to the jasmine vines surging over the rockeries. Under lantern light, these boulders look as though they are capped with snow. From twenty feet away, the scent is seductive – a mix of barely-ripe banana, paperwhites, and pony muzzle. Ten feet away, it’s intoxicating. Especially if …
Tag: Fragrance
Basenote Bitch * Elizabeth Renstrom * Fragrant Photos + Image Descriptions
Hello, it’s Leona, Aromatica Poetica’s founding editor here. I was delighted to lead a verbal description tour and conversation with the artist Elizabeth Renstrom at Olfactory Art Keller last weekend. I wanted to share some of that fragrant, nostalgic fun with you! For the image descriptions, I chose four of the eight fragrant works and organized them chronologically: Fahrenheit (1988); Dream (1995); Country Apple (1997); and Love Spell (1999). For NYC friends, you can check out the Basenote Bitch exhibition …
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“Cabinet of Curiosities” * Excerpt from ‘The Museum of Scent’ by Mandy Aftel
Choosing which chapter of Mandy Aftel’s gorgeous The Museum of Scent: Exploring the Curious and Wondrous World of Fragrance to publish here was both pleasurable and painful. The pleasure was in lingering on passages and pictures that I loved, painful because we couldn’t excerpt the whole book! I highly recommend this generously illustrated book to the aromatically wise and naïve alike. The Museum of Scent was published last October and is a natural and cultural history of scent that was …
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“Final Flourish” and Other Poems by John Muro
Final Flourish May’s final flourish and the lilacs have given up their priestly purple for a crestfallen brown, colors lifted and carried by minstrel winds to beds of irises, allium and meadow sage. With summer’s cruel advance, I imagine the hoarding of their fatigued fragrance in the tangled thrust of roots, abiding a cooler darkness until the earth first warms, breaks apart the frost, and calls upon the miracle of creation so they can once again extend their lazy heave …
6 Micro Poems by Margarita Serafimova
1 After the dark, the stairs up smell of future. 2 I remember when you disappointed me for the first time. Almonds were blossoming, I was south near the border. They were as exquisitely fragrant as happiness. I learned to stand up straight as a person pursuing it. 3 I was in the water, the water was inside of me. I smell of sea. I am going where the ones who first came out of the ocean are. …
The Olfactory Report 2: Armpits, Ribaldry, and Animalic Perfumes for Your Valentine, too! * Catherine Haley Epstein
Filthy, Stinky, Sexy Sex hormones come out of our armpits. These apocrine sweat glands do what is called emotional sweating. These hormones affect our behavior and physiology. We know the armpit sex hormone begins after puberty (when we actually begin to emit a smell from our armpits), and they are also located in the areola and nipples of the breast, ear canal, eyelids, wings of the nostril, perianal region, and some parts of the external genitalia. All, one could argue, are erogenous zones. I’ve also written recently about …
“Love Stings” * Flash Fiction * Samantha Meddaugh
I impatiently burst through the opening of our stuffy home where we have been secluded for several long months and take in the fresh air. The sun shines so brightly and beautifully in my compound eyes. My yellow stripes gleam like sunlight, my black stripes dark as night. My name is Phoenix, and I’m a young female worker bee. Spring is almost over, and summer is making its move, filling the days with a welcoming warmth. As my antennae take …
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The Marvelous, Unplanned Life of Mandy Aftel, Author, Perfumer, and Museum-Creator * Interview
“Everything I’ve done, I’ve just followed what I’ve been interested in. I’ve never had a plan, I have had no plan about any of this.” – Mandy Aftel Mandy Aftel started making natural perfumes almost 30 years ago. Her passion and artistry have won Aftelier Perfumes many awards and accolades. She’s been featured in countless magazines and blogs from Vogue to Forbes, Now Smell This to Bon Appetit. In 2003, Mandy launched Chef’s Essence, which supplies natural flavor oils and …
“An Artist’s Introduction to the Fine-Fragrance Landscape of Esxence” by Catherine Haley Epstein
I am a conceptual artist who began using scent in my practice ten years ago. By conceptual artist, I mean that I use any medium whatsoever to engage in questions I am asking in the studio. Alongside paintings, drawings and sculpture I use scent, words and photographs to obsessively make sense of things. Last fall, I was asked to be on a panel about scent and writing at the Society of Illustrators in New York City. Someone in the audience …
Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” A Tale of A Boy, A Girl, Her Flower & It’s Poison
Aromatica Poetica is delighted to present “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in 1844, and later collected in Mosses From An Old Manse. We were alerted to this stunning gothic tale by Jim Endersby in his fun cultural history of the Orchid, in which he analyzes it as “one of the earliest killer plant stories.” As you know from reading “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid,” we love killer plant stories! But whereas H.G. Well’s story is lighthearted, Hawthorne’s …
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