The Start of a Scent-sational Journey

Hello, dear readers!! First blog of senior year, wow. I’d never even thought this year would pass so quickly, but here we are—and I’m super excited to take you guys on an adventure with my Senior Project: A Symphony of Scents: Crafting Art-Inspired Perfumes.

How It Started—And My Inspiration

I guess I could say it really started when a beautiful perfume made by Melanie Martinez, a beloved singer-songwriter of mine, caught my eye. To this day, I still hope to experience the Cry Baby (an album of hers) Perfume Milk in person, but unfortunately for now, bottles are being sold for up to thousands of dollars because the perfume got discontinued. 

Anyways, because of such high demand, multiple individual perfumers and duplicate (dupe) perfume companies have been selling dupes of the Cry Baby Perfume Milk online, with the most well-known being Miim.Miic’s, which smelled like HomeGoods—a total disappointment for me—and my favorite being Oil Perfumery’s. 

What fascinated me through this exploration of perfumes (I would scroll on Fragrantica, the Wikipedia for perfumes, for fun), was how all of the dupes were inspired by the same perfume but had unique twists due to the different perfume-making processes and interpretations of the original fragrance. I was also interested in how notes, or different layers of scents in a fragrance, came together in different perfumes.

It made me wonder if and how art could be translated across the senses for a more multisensory experience, and afterwards I discovered Buly 1803, a French fragrance brand, and its eight art-inspired perfumes at the Louvre (https://perfumesociety.org/buly-1803-at-the-louvre/). Lakenda, one of my wonderful advisors, also told me about the soon-to-be-released Nose Music, a set where music is turned into fragrance, by Art and Olfaction. I’m thinking of reaching out to them (or similar projects) later to see if I can learn more about the unique process of turning one form of art into another by converting one sense to another.

Expectations

In my blogs, I’ll be giving rundowns of my progress and my reflections for this project. By the end, I hope to have blended one or more fragrances inspired by specific artwork(s) and surveyed how well they were able to amplify or replicate the vibe of the artwork(s).

This project aims to infuse the world of perfumery with the arts and aromachology with the creation of new fragrances. I hope to learn about the world of perfume-making as well as more about how smell affects how one experiences art through a multifactorial lens.

Project Discussion

The Initial Survey and Choosing Artwork(s)

Before I even get started on the process of perfumery, I’m planning to use a survey to gauge the emotions, visuals, or vibes evoked based off of specific artworks, in order to figure out what feelings to go for in the fragrance(s). 

Obviously, I also need to choose the artworks, too. I know I could probably be basic and go for a more well-known work, but for now I want to find one, or multiple, that I feel speak(s) to me more. If I end up creating more than one fragrance, I can take two paintings, or one painting and one song, or maybe even two songs as inspiration—I think the contrast would be pretty interesting to see.

Also, both my advisors take a spiritual or more intentional route with creating perfumes, which is something I’m considering including and learning from them as well. Kind of like how specific Chinese fragrances meant different things, even way back in time.

Getting Familiar

Of course, like Lakenda advised, I can use certain notes when creating a custom scent, but even then, a developed artistry is needed to create a formula of complexity in a perfume. Currently, I’m reading The Fragrant Mind—Lakenda’s recommendation—to learn more about how scents and essential oils can affect our emotional and physiological state.

Additionally, I’ve been looking through and exploring the many resources my other amazing advisor, Yosh, kindly sent me, both in person and online. Although most likely I won’t be blending fragrances too soon because I have the survey to do first, I think I’m going to try to familiarize myself with commonly-used notes beforehand and study fragrance families and the structure of perfumery (the top, middle, and base notes) to gain a deeper understanding on what it takes to blend a more complex scent. 

Afterwards

With the creation of the perfumes, I will conduct surveys (whether the participants for this survey are going to be the same participants from the initial survey or not, I haven’t decided) to test the increased emotional response of an additional sensory input, the fragrance, combined with the original artwork, and to see how accurately I was able to convey one art form into another.

Until Next Time

I hope you enjoyed this glimpse into my Senior Project and the world of perfumery. Thanks for sticking by!

See you later,

Alina : )