The Magic of
Fragrance & Natural Perfume
BY SUSAN MEEKER-LOWRY
F
ragrance is one of the languages of Earth. To open to it is to open all the cells of our body to the unique chemistry of its language. Fragrance bypasses the intellect (even as we are aware of it), finding its way directly to our emotions, touching memories, and activating spirit. It nurtures our soul while grounding us in our Earth body. Some fragrances — the deeper, heavier, resins, spices, unguents and pastes — return us to mystery and offer hints of our ancient past and also, I sense, of what is “yet to be.” Fragrance has long been associated with the divine, and used very consciously by priests and priestess through the ages right up the present to aid in shifting consciousness and awareness of other realms besides the material world in which we spend most of our time. Babies have a highly developed sense of smell — it is how they recognize their mothers — long before their eyes can focus on her face. In her book, Essence and Alchemy, natural perfumer Mandy Aftel writes, “Fragrance has the instantaneous and invisible power to penetrate consciousness with pure pleasure.” One whiff of a fragrance has the power to immediately transport us to a memory, a loved one, or different time and place, and the experience is so much more profound than a memory using just the mind to take us there. Up through (and even beyond) the 17th century, perfume was intimately connected to alchemy. Aftel writes, “Perfume as we know it could not have taken shape without alchemy.” After science and reason predominated, Aftel continues, “the practical legacy of the alchemists 20 Spirit of Change | FALL/WINTER 2021
passed to the chemists...the spiritual legacy…to the psychologists....Only the perfumers inherited both strands of the alchemical tradition.” The modern perfume business has its roots, strangely enough, in the making of perfumed gloves in France in the 1500s. The history of perfume
“Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived. The odors of fruits waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening fields far away.” — Hellen Keller
and fragrance is fascinating; it will take you on a journey through the Orient and the spice trades, through times when fragrances combined with herbs and talismans could protect, attract and hold a lover, ensure fertility, even cause the death of an enemy, or enable far-seeing.
In many ways, it still does all these things (except, I hope, cause death). There are many ways we can bring fragrance into our lives. We can burn resins, woods, herbs, pastilles and incense wands, gently releasing their scents/healing energies into our homes; we can revel in the beauty of perfumes; call on aromatherapy to heal, soothe, awaken; we can walk in a pine forest after a rain and drown in the sweet powdery scent of new mown hay carried on the wind. For me, making natural perfumes started with a dream. I have always loved perfume, and gravitated to the older, classical scents — the formulas of which today vary as regulations prevent some ingredients from being used, and as aroma chemicals have taken the place of natural essences. When I started making herbal skin care products, I used essential oils for specific healing/skin-loving qualities, and also so they would smell beautiful. My collection of essential oils grew, along with my curiosity. The heavy base note fragrances that don’t find their way into skin care, captivated me: oakmoss, cedar moss, labdanum, ambers, dark, aged patchouli, beautiful sultry attars. I was not impressed by the first natural perfumes in the early 2000s. They had very little subtlety or nuance and didn’t smell like “real” perfumes at all. Then in 2012, I had a dream that was sensuous, dark, erotic. I was in an open market (much like one I experienced in Athens) when, in the way of dreams, I found myself in a small room that called to mind a Parisian opium den. The space was close, the air slightly smoky, reddish, and dense. I could smell the odors of sex and roses and narcotic florals, and mosses and musk and woods. It was intoxicatingly beautiful and almost unbearably erotic. My whole body absorbed it, vibrated with it, and exuded it like all the others in the room with me: sweat, sex, heady perfume, smoke. I touched and was touched, dancing and loving and just feeling with every cell of my body. And when I woke up, still drunk with the experience, I knew that I had to create a perfume of that dream. It was the first perfume I made, called Dreamscape, and I still make it today. Days later, like magic, a magician appeared (J.K. DeLapp, now an award-winning perfumer, among other things) offering a perfumery course through one of my essential oil suppliers. I was one of the first students to take it. As they say, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. JK compared perfumery to cooking with herbs, something that resonated with me, as I grow and use herbs in my products and pretty much every aspect of my life. Chemistry was not my strong subject but I trusted I had found the right teacher and dove in. I’m still happily swimming in those fragrant waters!
What Is a Natural Perfume?
Most perfumes on the market today, even the classics, are formulated using aroma chemicals created in the lab. Virtually all the fragrance in products on supermarket and drug store shelves contain these chemicals. They are so prolific in our environment that many people have developed sensitivities to them. People can also be allergic or sensitive to natural ingredients of course, but it is less likely. Many natural perfumers use natural isolates, which are chemical components isolated from the whole. I have purchased some but have never used them in a perfume. To me they are too linear; they don’t take you anywhere. Natural perfumes shift and change depending on your
