03 Mandy Aftel

Mandy Aftel is a natural perfumer and author living in Berkeley, California. Mandy has been creating exquisite natural fragrances for thirty years and in many respects is responsible for igniting a renaissance of natural aromatics around the world. Her seminal book, Essence and Alchemy, A Natural History of Perfume, has been translated into fifteen languages since its publication in 2001. On a personal note, Mandy’s approach to blending and formulation was the guide to our beginnings as novice tea and herb blenders, and continues to be the method we use every time we create a new blend. Her masterful and intuitive way of working with natural essences is all her own. Lucky for us, one of Mandy's deepest joys seems to be opening the door to her world so others can step inside and experience the magic that she surrounds herself with, and creates. Anna spoke with Mandy on a late summer's day over zoom. We're so happy to now share this conversation with you.

A  There are so many layers to what you do in the world of scent. You formulate, you teach, you write, you illustrate.

M  I like what I do. I feel very lucky to like what I do. I like my life. When I was young I couldn’t have said that.

A  And you were a psychologist before you became a perfumer?

 M  I was in private practice for thirty years. I specialized in creative people. I loved my clients, I loved my work. I’d written a book on narrative in therapy and after I finished that I thought I’d like to write a novel and make my main character a perfumer. I have no idea why I wanted to write a book about perfume, but I started going to old book fairs and buying up books about perfume. I loved the books. I loved reading about the lore, about the plants. I thought it was all so interesting. Then I took a perfume class with a friend where you could make a little natural perfume and I fell completely in love with the materials, and I found that I had a bit of a gift for them. My friend said to me, "Let’s start a perfume line and I’ll do all the business and you do all the creating." So we quickly had this perfume line called, Grandiflorum Perfume. I think it was the first natural perfume line in the world. We debuted it at Bergdorf Goodmans. The business and the friendship came to a really quick end and it was suddenly all over and it was a mess. But I was still in love with the whole thing, so my best friend (a book editor) said to me, "Why don’t you write a book for me on the history of perfume?". At the time I was very involved with alchemy and how it fit with perfume, and I had collected all these old books and was living inside of them. So I wrote my first perfume book, Essence and Alchemy, and things kind of went from there.

M  I love it here. I love that Berkeley has gardens in the front yard and I love that the streets and houses aren’t perpendicular. I like all the little footpaths. It is changing quickly, but it’s okay because I mostly live in my head. I don’t think I’m totally on this planet.

A  You mean, you live in your imagination?

M  I do, more so now than ever. I’ve been lucky to be able to manifest the things that are so deeply true to me and not have to make compromises. So I kind of live in a world of my own making. I’m shy and introverted but I’m good one on one and I feel very lucky that I’ve been able to pursue the things that are meaningful to

A  I'm so curious now, when is your birthday?

M  March 2nd. I'm 76. A pisces. 

A  What was your relationship to plants before you discovered your gift with natural essences?

M  I gardened, I’m a maniac gardener. I was also a weaver in my early life and I feel in some way perfume is connected to weaving, threading things together. But I don’t think I had an extraordinary relationship with plants that was noteworthy. It took me a long time to be able to have the creative life I wanted to have, and I didn’t have the confidence for it earlier on. I was a single parent, so I had a lot of constraints on my life and a real lack of confidence. It took me time to grow into the things that I wanted. It was always very clear to me that I wanted to have an artistic practice and write books but when I landed on perfume and natural essences it was like meeting an old friend. I don’t know how it happened or where it came from. I always felt a little guided by things. I don’t understand it at all but I don’t override it.

A  It’s very inspiring to hear. I can relate to that feeling of trying to find how your gifts are most appreciated by the world.

M  I think it was most appreciated by me. I feel like natural essences and perfume have this unbelievable depth to them and although perfume is at the far end in its commerce, the world of aromatic plants stretches into every race, every sexuality, every period of time, every nationality, even every thing alive from bees to dinosaurs. Everybody’s into it. It has this universality that’s profound. And once you get involved with plants you realize you’re touching on this profound spiritual thing that’s in the world. I always feel transported when I work with plant essences because I feel they just have that to offer. I feel incredibly lucky that I was able to go my own way and create my own little world with fragrance because I don’t really fit into the larger world.

A  In simple terms, how do you build a fragrance? At this phase in your career, how much of formulation is technical and how much of it is intuitive?

M  Well, here’s how I teach and this is what I believe in. Natural essences are in their nature entirely complex. They are much more complex than synthetic essences are. The most important thing to understand is the blending capacities of each essence. Its character, facets, which register and family it is in. Every essence has a main aroma and then side aromas that come off from it. For example, cepes (which is porcini) has a chocolate facet. When you put this essence in motion in a perfume, if another essence has a chocolate facet, the chocolate aroma will grow. So I teach my students to look for those facets. I teach them to look at the intensity, the shape, the texture and the emotional resonance, which only natural essences have. And all of this applies to flavor too.

A  On that note, tell us about your line of chef’s essences and your relationship with the chef, Daniel Patterson. How did you two meet and how did your relationship evolve?

M  I wanted to be connected with a chef who might be interested in scent because people seem to care about ingredients in food but not in fragrance, so I wanted to make a better connection with someone in food. A mutual friend introduced us. When we met Daniel had no idea you could use essential oils in food, but his way of making food and my way of making fragrance was very similar so we just hit it off. We did a slow food dinner at his restaurant (about four restaurants back) and we included essential oils in each dish. From there we wrote a book together about using essential oils for flavor and fragrance called, Aroma, and then we did a book called, The Art of Flavor, a few years ago. We’ve just gone on working together. Our chef’s essences get used by a lot of people who make ice cream, chocolate, and drinks. We’re small and so when our clients get big we kind of get rid of them. Actually, when anyone gets big we get rid of them. I like everything to be very very small. I don’t want to supply anything in quantity. I have a very strange business model because I do everything myself. There’s no allure to me in getting any bigger. 

A  We talk a lot about quality of ingredients and sourcing with what we do, and I’m curious how you went about finding your sources?

M  First of all, I’ve been doing this for thirty years so I’m kind of the grandmother of the industry. I only work with naturals, and I’ll spend the money. I compare a lot of essences and when I find one I like I buy all of it. I used to use a Moroccan rose which I really liked until I found this Turkish rose, so then I started to buy all my rose from this man in Turkey. When I switched I had to reformulate all my perfumes that had rose in them because the Turkish rose was so different. But I didn’t mind. I’m most interested in the quality. I typically can always get what I need. And I also like the journey. I don’t mind if it takes me forever to find something or get something, which is why I stay small. If I was big I’d have to cut corners. It’s a lot of work and I like doing it. It fits for me. If you have really good ingredients, as you know, you really don’t have to do that much.

A  What fragrance do you wear, if any?

M  I tend to wear the last thing I make but I do have some favorites from my line. The last one I made is a favorite, actually. I grow over 100 roses in my garden. I have this one rose that I think is the best smelling one. It’s called, Jude the Obscure, after the Thomas Hardy book. The rose is a gorgeous old fashioned rose. It has a translucent beige, almost peachy color with millions of petals and it smells like a nectarine or peach with rose in it. I brought it into the house for days and days to try and copy the scent. The perfume itself is called Hey Jude. It’s a very peachy, apricot-y rose with a little bit of animalic musk underneath. Another one I love is called Sepia, which I made inspired by the ghost towns in California because I like the gold rush. I have no idea why. Probably because I grew up watching westerns in Detroit. The whole west coast is kind of magical to me. Sepia is like wood. Kind of rotting, not fresh wood. Wood with depth and character. And then I have a solid perfume called Antique Ambergris. I was copying my 100 yr old ambergris and I really like wearing that one underneath something or on its own. It’s just very sexy and rich and otherworldly. 

A  I remember years ago you used to infuse teas with essences. Are you still doing that?

M  I still do that, I just don’t sell them. I used to sell teas but now I just give them as gifts. I have two teas that I infuse, a tie guan yin oolong infused with rose and ginger, and then a frankincense one that I make from the resin, hojari frankincense. I mash up the resin and then I tincture it and infuse it in a gaba oolong. Both of them are different every time you steep them.

A  Our interview series title, Medicine Bag, comes from the notion that we each have things that we’ve collected over time that we keep close to us: objects, plants, books, totems. And these things inform how we are in the world and from where we draw our clarity, strength, inspiration. Mandy, what do you keep in your medicine bag?

M  Foster’s given me so many gifts I hardly know where to begin. 1) An old book he gave to me. He folded all the pages. I keep it on my scent organ and put scent strips inside as I use them to hold them in place. 2) My 100 yr old ambergris. Ambergris is whale poop and it washes up on the beaches. It smells ungodly good. One of the most otherworldly smells. I went through a lot to get this. I ran after the man who had it for years trying to get it, and finally he sold it to me. 3) The first book that I researched and loved. A book from 1595. It’s called the Book of Secrets. It’s all about the natural world by an alchemist, Alessio Piemontese. It was the first book I got that was old like this. It’s filled with very very interesting stuff, it’s all recipes. Some stuff you wouldn’t want to try. Some, witchcraft, some perfume, some cooking, some just plain weirdness. I love this book and I love the world that this book is about. I love how alive magic was in nature then, as it is for me. I got into this through the books. That was where I began and I thought that the way people connected with nature, with myth, with so many things.

4) This purple scarf is a gift from my beloved special daughter, Kristy Hume. I introduced her to her husband. I’ve known her for thirty years. I love her. She’s a wonderful person. 5) This is a necklace with a single diamond. My father gave it to me on his deathbed. I had a very complicated relationship with my father and we had a major coming together when he died. Him giving me this diamond was really significant to my healing process. 6) I made perfume for Leonard Cohen for many years. He wore my perfume everyday, Oud Luban. He kept it in his glove box. We wrote back and forth for twenty years. He gave me many gifts. In this print of his he hand-wrote the words to his song Hallelujah for me. I wouldn’t take money from him which caused problems, so we ended up exchanging gifts and I treasure all of them.