Aftelier
Sunday, June 5, 2005 (SF Chronicle)
The alchemist's life/Berkeley's Mandy Aftel creates scents for the stars
Anastasia Hendrix, Chronicle Staff Writer
http://www.aftelier.com/
To look at her, say, in the market or a restaurant, you'd likely not take
any notice whatsoever of Mandy Aftel's nose. The cartilage forms a smooth
column from the bridge to the perfectly rounded apex that's in perfect
proportion to her almond-shaped eyes.
Yet her nose -- or more precisely the well-developed, dime-sized patch of
receptor neurons called the olfactory ephithelium just beyond her nostrils
-- has brought this Berkeley resident growing recognition and celebrity
cachet over the last few years.
With a flair for combining exotic scents with more familiar ones in
complex formulas, Aftel has carved out an enviable niche making customized
natural perfumes for the likes of Madonna and Liv Tyler, as well as
literary luminaries such as the elusive wunderkind JT Leroy (who referred
the Hollywood A-listers) and the writer-adventurer William T. Vollmann.
Vogue, Vanity Fair, Town & Country and dozens of other publications have
purred about the exclusive allure of Aftel's couture creations, which
begin at $800 and involve extensive interviews and smelling sessions to
determine a client's preferences.
Her star brightened further last year, with the release of "Aroma"
(Artisan, 2004), a cookbook she co-wrote with former Frisson chef Daniel
Patterson about how to incorporate essential oils into recipes for fuller
flavor and greater culinary flair.
This month, Aftel's newest book, "Scents & Sensibilities" (Gibbs Smith,
$12.95), arrives in stores. The 96-page guide features descriptions and
detailed instructions on making solid perfumes at home with beeswax,
jojoba oil and essential oils, which is exactly how Aftel -- who at the
time was a practicing therapist -- first discovered her passion for the
world of perfumery more than 10 years ago.
"I took a one-day workshop on how to make solid perfume, made this
unbelievably complicated perfume and people were impressed with it," she
said of the recipe -- which included essences of frankincense, oak moss,
rose, ginger, jasmine, lime, tarragon, tangerine and sweet orange. "I had
no idea I knew how to do it, but I knew what to do from the moment I
touched the stuff."
That scent still sits in an antique cabinet drawer in her home workshop in
North Berkeley, where she's been mingling and mixing essences ever since.
Aftel, who dyes her own shoulder-length hair with henna and grows her own
herbs for teas and cooking, is naturally passionate about using only pure
essential oils in her alchemy -- nothing synthetic -- which makes them
cost at least twice as much but last half as long as the stuff being
spritzed in department stores.
"When it's natural, it has a life in this world and then it goes away ...
but it mixes with your body in an interesting way," she said. "It's very
seductive and very sensual for you and someone who is close to you -- and
also a very pleasurable experience to put your hand on a sensual solid
perfume and rub it on your skin."
She keeps more than 200 natural essences on a five-tiered shelving unit
she calls her organ (because it is divided into top, middle and base
"notes" that make up the layers of a fragrance). Apothecary-style glass
bottles filled with liquids, pastes and resins ranging from the luxurious
and wildly expensive (violet, Tasmanian boronia) sit beside those with
more familiar florals, (tuberose, jasmine) and the truly offbeat and
earthy like Africa stone, an essence made from the petrified excrement of
hyraxes, which are guinea-pig-like critters. Then there's the ambergris,
an ancient, amber and vaguely vanilla aromatic, she describes as "vomit
from the sperm whale," locked away in a safe because it is no longer
harvested or sold.
"Often the odors that are not considered beautiful are an important piece
of what makes something beautiful," she said, explaining one of her
secrets to creating a sophisticated and balanced blend.
Aftel keeps no fewer than five of her signature scents in her bag at all
times to use "whenever people irritate me" or when she's in traffic. Most
of her solid perfumes are poured into vintage pill boxes, emptied pocket
watches or other decorative boxes she finds at flea markets and antique
shops.
The jasmine/licorice combo is a particular favorite, though she is
fearless about applying many scents in all kinds of combinations if the
mood strikes her, defying the conventional wisdom that too many scents can
make a stink. It's hard to go too wrong when using natural essences, she
explained, because they blend with your skin's natural chemistry, unlike
commercially made counterparts that sit on the skin.
Even if she's not wearing any perfume, just being around her potions has
an almost magical effect on her, she said, and some days she still can't
believe how the power of her fragrance has literally transformed her life.
Born in Detroit to parents who were more country club than counterculture,
Aftel (who first expressed her artistic tendencies through elaborate
textile weavings and a love of rock 'n' roll) graduated from the
University of Michigan with degrees in English and psychology, married at
21 and moved to Berkeley when her husband enrolled in law school.
She divorced a few years later and became a therapist to earn a living,
building a practice that specialized in helping musicians, writers and
artists realize their creative potential. (Fascinated by the mysterious
death of Brian Jones, she published her first book, "Death of a Rolling
Stone," in 1982.)
She had a daughter, Chloe, while married to her second husband, a
psychiatrist, whom she raised alone after the marriage ended.
"In my work as a therapist, I was always encouraging people to live
creatively, and I really can't believe I get to do this stuff now," she
said. "I still get thrilled to find a new oil I can use."
She started her first company, Grandiflorum, with a partner but later
split off on her own and created her eponymous line, Aftelier, which is
sold at L.A.'s beauty emporium Fred Segal and more than a dozen specialty
boutiques around the Bay Area and across the country (as well as through
her Web site www.aftelier.com).
Aftel created her initial collection after poring through hundreds of rare
and vintage volumes on the history of perfume -- books she began
collecting as part of her research for a novel she planned to write whose
main character would be a perfumer.
Before long, Aftel had become a perfumer and the novel vaporized into thin
air.
She distilled her research into "Essence and Alchemy," (North Point Press,
2001) which Publisher's Weekly hailed as a "most extraordinary treatise on
the history and making of perfume."
Bits of her collection of antique perfume ephemera and historical texts
are so rare they were included in a recent exhibition titled "The Foul and
the Fragrant: Creating Perfume" at the University of Southern California's
Doheny Memorial Library. When Aftel gave a talk at the library about
modern aromatics and how she works with them, her passion for her subject
mesmerized the audience, remembered Taylor Gaskill, the library's
exhibition director.
"She's like a savant," he said. "When she focuses on perfume, she's just
so into it, nothing can distract her -- and she's literally in her own
world.
"I link her in with Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, emphasizing organic
materials and nature," he said. (Aftel's Craftsman home sits directly
behind the legendary restaurant, and she made a custom scent for Waters.)
Even though Gaskill said he was enchanted by the idea of natural
fragrance, the public may not be ready to give up the convenience and
predictability of commercial fragrances.
"But the exhibit definitely hit a real zeitgeist," he added. "This
movement toward things that are natural definitely seems to be picking up
steam." Which is exactly why Deborah Paul, who worked with famed British
perfumer Jo Malone, recently hired Aftel to create three fragrances for a
line of new luxury products she's developing that are inspired by Scottish
traditions and gentry.
She first heard about Aftel from an acquaintance involved with the London
spa scene, looked her up online and was taken by Aftel's expertise from
the first time they spoke over the phone, and even more so when she came
out and met her in 2002.
When Paul and her partners began searching for a perfumer to create the
fragrance base for their line of bath and body products, they went to
Paris and interviewed many, but none captured their imaginations as well
as Aftel.
"What I love about working with Mandy is that you can give her mood words,
imagery, and she gets it," Paul said from her home in London. "She's got
that innate feeling of how to translate language into smell, because she's
a true artisan.
"I can say I'm looking to capture the feeling of walking through a forest
in Scotland in the morning when the sun is coming up and the air is crispy
and the smell of the earth is rich and damp," Paul added. "She created
three versions for us. The third one was mossy and beautiful, it just
rocks."
Paul said she's encouraged that Aftel also teaches her own series of
workshops and writes books on the ideas and expertise she brings to the
dying art of blending natural perfumes.
"It would be so hard to re-create her from scratch," Paul said. "I would
hate to see this art form lost, because she's taking it back to a level
that started hundreds of years ago in Paris, pulling it out of history and
transfusing it into the modern age."
Perhaps the most recent example of this would be "Shiso," the newest
addition to Aftel's scent collection, which was inspired by Japanese
geishas.
Just last month, Vollmann -- a writer known for voluminous research --
asked to borrow a flacon of the scent to take with him on a trip to Japan,
where he was conducting interviews for his current project about geishas,
Noh theater and the Japanese concepts of female beauty.
"I wanted to see if people who spent a lot of time in the geisha world
would recognize it," he said. "They smelled it; they said it was
authentic, and they were happy that she got it right."
Vollmann, also a longtime friend of Aftel's, said he had fun picking out
the scents that were eventually blended together in his signature
fragrance --
blond tabac -- a combination of hay, blond tobacco, Virginia cedarwood and
lime.
"It was interesting to learn that I liked some of the most expensive
ingredients, which either confirms my good taste, or that I'm wasteful, or
both," he said, still bemused by the recollection. He admitted he doesn't
tend to wear fragrance that often, but said his 6-year-old daughter often
requests a whiff from the bottle.
Aftel has several books on her to-write list as well -- including a memoir
about "My Life as a Nose" -- but her next project is making a perfume-
making kit for kids, which, like "Scents and Sensibilities" emphasizes how
easy it is to make your own scent.
She says that most beginners fare best when blending only two or three
essences, because the formula becomes exponentially more difficult to
balance as more scents are added. Some of Aftel's creations combine as
many as a dozen aromas.
With her unique expertise, Aftel has been asked to speak to sommeliers
about the many components and dynamics of natural scent. She also donates
her time teaching perfume-making workshops to those less likely to
encounter the world of redolence on their own -- like teens in a lockdown
detention facility and the homeless. During one recent session at a San
Francisco shelter, Aftel brought ingredients and led a group in crafting
their own solid perfume. One woman delightedly named her creation "Pimp
Juice."
Though she's made hundreds of scents over the years, "I'll never, ever
forget that one," Aftel said.
The alchemist's life/Berkeley's Mandy Aftel creates scents for the stars
Anastasia Hendrix, Chronicle Staff Writer
http://www.aftelier.com/
To look at her, say, in the market or a restaurant, you'd likely not take
any notice whatsoever of Mandy Aftel's nose. The cartilage forms a smooth
column from the bridge to the perfectly rounded apex that's in perfect
proportion to her almond-shaped eyes.
Yet her nose -- or more precisely the well-developed, dime-sized patch of
receptor neurons called the olfactory ephithelium just beyond her nostrils
-- has brought this Berkeley resident growing recognition and celebrity
cachet over the last few years.
With a flair for combining exotic scents with more familiar ones in
complex formulas, Aftel has carved out an enviable niche making customized
natural perfumes for the likes of Madonna and Liv Tyler, as well as
literary luminaries such as the elusive wunderkind JT Leroy (who referred
the Hollywood A-listers) and the writer-adventurer William T. Vollmann.
Vogue, Vanity Fair, Town & Country and dozens of other publications have
purred about the exclusive allure of Aftel's couture creations, which
begin at $800 and involve extensive interviews and smelling sessions to
determine a client's preferences.
Her star brightened further last year, with the release of "Aroma"
(Artisan, 2004), a cookbook she co-wrote with former Frisson chef Daniel
Patterson about how to incorporate essential oils into recipes for fuller
flavor and greater culinary flair.
This month, Aftel's newest book, "Scents & Sensibilities" (Gibbs Smith,
$12.95), arrives in stores. The 96-page guide features descriptions and
detailed instructions on making solid perfumes at home with beeswax,
jojoba oil and essential oils, which is exactly how Aftel -- who at the
time was a practicing therapist -- first discovered her passion for the
world of perfumery more than 10 years ago.
"I took a one-day workshop on how to make solid perfume, made this
unbelievably complicated perfume and people were impressed with it," she
said of the recipe -- which included essences of frankincense, oak moss,
rose, ginger, jasmine, lime, tarragon, tangerine and sweet orange. "I had
no idea I knew how to do it, but I knew what to do from the moment I
touched the stuff."
That scent still sits in an antique cabinet drawer in her home workshop in
North Berkeley, where she's been mingling and mixing essences ever since.
Aftel, who dyes her own shoulder-length hair with henna and grows her own
herbs for teas and cooking, is naturally passionate about using only pure
essential oils in her alchemy -- nothing synthetic -- which makes them
cost at least twice as much but last half as long as the stuff being
spritzed in department stores.
"When it's natural, it has a life in this world and then it goes away ...
but it mixes with your body in an interesting way," she said. "It's very
seductive and very sensual for you and someone who is close to you -- and
also a very pleasurable experience to put your hand on a sensual solid
perfume and rub it on your skin."
She keeps more than 200 natural essences on a five-tiered shelving unit
she calls her organ (because it is divided into top, middle and base
"notes" that make up the layers of a fragrance). Apothecary-style glass
bottles filled with liquids, pastes and resins ranging from the luxurious
and wildly expensive (violet, Tasmanian boronia) sit beside those with
more familiar florals, (tuberose, jasmine) and the truly offbeat and
earthy like Africa stone, an essence made from the petrified excrement of
hyraxes, which are guinea-pig-like critters. Then there's the ambergris,
an ancient, amber and vaguely vanilla aromatic, she describes as "vomit
from the sperm whale," locked away in a safe because it is no longer
harvested or sold.
"Often the odors that are not considered beautiful are an important piece
of what makes something beautiful," she said, explaining one of her
secrets to creating a sophisticated and balanced blend.
Aftel keeps no fewer than five of her signature scents in her bag at all
times to use "whenever people irritate me" or when she's in traffic. Most
of her solid perfumes are poured into vintage pill boxes, emptied pocket
watches or other decorative boxes she finds at flea markets and antique
shops.
The jasmine/licorice combo is a particular favorite, though she is
fearless about applying many scents in all kinds of combinations if the
mood strikes her, defying the conventional wisdom that too many scents can
make a stink. It's hard to go too wrong when using natural essences, she
explained, because they blend with your skin's natural chemistry, unlike
commercially made counterparts that sit on the skin.
Even if she's not wearing any perfume, just being around her potions has
an almost magical effect on her, she said, and some days she still can't
believe how the power of her fragrance has literally transformed her life.
Born in Detroit to parents who were more country club than counterculture,
Aftel (who first expressed her artistic tendencies through elaborate
textile weavings and a love of rock 'n' roll) graduated from the
University of Michigan with degrees in English and psychology, married at
21 and moved to Berkeley when her husband enrolled in law school.
She divorced a few years later and became a therapist to earn a living,
building a practice that specialized in helping musicians, writers and
artists realize their creative potential. (Fascinated by the mysterious
death of Brian Jones, she published her first book, "Death of a Rolling
Stone," in 1982.)
She had a daughter, Chloe, while married to her second husband, a
psychiatrist, whom she raised alone after the marriage ended.
"In my work as a therapist, I was always encouraging people to live
creatively, and I really can't believe I get to do this stuff now," she
said. "I still get thrilled to find a new oil I can use."
She started her first company, Grandiflorum, with a partner but later
split off on her own and created her eponymous line, Aftelier, which is
sold at L.A.'s beauty emporium Fred Segal and more than a dozen specialty
boutiques around the Bay Area and across the country (as well as through
her Web site www.aftelier.com).
Aftel created her initial collection after poring through hundreds of rare
and vintage volumes on the history of perfume -- books she began
collecting as part of her research for a novel she planned to write whose
main character would be a perfumer.
Before long, Aftel had become a perfumer and the novel vaporized into thin
air.
She distilled her research into "Essence and Alchemy," (North Point Press,
2001) which Publisher's Weekly hailed as a "most extraordinary treatise on
the history and making of perfume."
Bits of her collection of antique perfume ephemera and historical texts
are so rare they were included in a recent exhibition titled "The Foul and
the Fragrant: Creating Perfume" at the University of Southern California's
Doheny Memorial Library. When Aftel gave a talk at the library about
modern aromatics and how she works with them, her passion for her subject
mesmerized the audience, remembered Taylor Gaskill, the library's
exhibition director.
"She's like a savant," he said. "When she focuses on perfume, she's just
so into it, nothing can distract her -- and she's literally in her own
world.
"I link her in with Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, emphasizing organic
materials and nature," he said. (Aftel's Craftsman home sits directly
behind the legendary restaurant, and she made a custom scent for Waters.)
Even though Gaskill said he was enchanted by the idea of natural
fragrance, the public may not be ready to give up the convenience and
predictability of commercial fragrances.
"But the exhibit definitely hit a real zeitgeist," he added. "This
movement toward things that are natural definitely seems to be picking up
steam." Which is exactly why Deborah Paul, who worked with famed British
perfumer Jo Malone, recently hired Aftel to create three fragrances for a
line of new luxury products she's developing that are inspired by Scottish
traditions and gentry.
She first heard about Aftel from an acquaintance involved with the London
spa scene, looked her up online and was taken by Aftel's expertise from
the first time they spoke over the phone, and even more so when she came
out and met her in 2002.
When Paul and her partners began searching for a perfumer to create the
fragrance base for their line of bath and body products, they went to
Paris and interviewed many, but none captured their imaginations as well
as Aftel.
"What I love about working with Mandy is that you can give her mood words,
imagery, and she gets it," Paul said from her home in London. "She's got
that innate feeling of how to translate language into smell, because she's
a true artisan.
"I can say I'm looking to capture the feeling of walking through a forest
in Scotland in the morning when the sun is coming up and the air is crispy
and the smell of the earth is rich and damp," Paul added. "She created
three versions for us. The third one was mossy and beautiful, it just
rocks."
Paul said she's encouraged that Aftel also teaches her own series of
workshops and writes books on the ideas and expertise she brings to the
dying art of blending natural perfumes.
"It would be so hard to re-create her from scratch," Paul said. "I would
hate to see this art form lost, because she's taking it back to a level
that started hundreds of years ago in Paris, pulling it out of history and
transfusing it into the modern age."
Perhaps the most recent example of this would be "Shiso," the newest
addition to Aftel's scent collection, which was inspired by Japanese
geishas.
Just last month, Vollmann -- a writer known for voluminous research --
asked to borrow a flacon of the scent to take with him on a trip to Japan,
where he was conducting interviews for his current project about geishas,
Noh theater and the Japanese concepts of female beauty.
"I wanted to see if people who spent a lot of time in the geisha world
would recognize it," he said. "They smelled it; they said it was
authentic, and they were happy that she got it right."
Vollmann, also a longtime friend of Aftel's, said he had fun picking out
the scents that were eventually blended together in his signature
fragrance --
blond tabac -- a combination of hay, blond tobacco, Virginia cedarwood and
lime.
"It was interesting to learn that I liked some of the most expensive
ingredients, which either confirms my good taste, or that I'm wasteful, or
both," he said, still bemused by the recollection. He admitted he doesn't
tend to wear fragrance that often, but said his 6-year-old daughter often
requests a whiff from the bottle.
Aftel has several books on her to-write list as well -- including a memoir
about "My Life as a Nose" -- but her next project is making a perfume-
making kit for kids, which, like "Scents and Sensibilities" emphasizes how
easy it is to make your own scent.
She says that most beginners fare best when blending only two or three
essences, because the formula becomes exponentially more difficult to
balance as more scents are added. Some of Aftel's creations combine as
many as a dozen aromas.
With her unique expertise, Aftel has been asked to speak to sommeliers
about the many components and dynamics of natural scent. She also donates
her time teaching perfume-making workshops to those less likely to
encounter the world of redolence on their own -- like teens in a lockdown
detention facility and the homeless. During one recent session at a San
Francisco shelter, Aftel brought ingredients and led a group in crafting
their own solid perfume. One woman delightedly named her creation "Pimp
Juice."
Though she's made hundreds of scents over the years, "I'll never, ever
forget that one," Aftel said.
posted by JT LeRoy at 12:32 PM
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