![]() ![]() The first thing you notice when you walk into Aftel's Berkeley studio is the heady scent of essential oils from her perfume organ: they hit your nose the way multiple notes held down at once on a musical organ would hit your ears. I was lucky enough to get a chance to meet her recently for a tete-à-tete nez-à-nez to talk about all things perfume, but with an emphasis on her vintage collection. In addition to being a perfumer, Aftel (as anyone who has read Essence and Alchemy knows), is an avid collector of vintage perfume books, bottles, essential oils and ephemera like the perfume card shown at the bottom of this post. Her Aftelier line often veers toward the exotic: her perfumes might contain ingredients such as shiso leaf, sarsaparilla, agarwood, and Australian Fire Tree, a base note that even Luca Turin, famously indifferent-to-unfriendly about natural perfume, describes as "practically a perfume in itself." ![]() Believing that natural perfume ingredients impart an olfactory and emotional depth that synthetics lack, Aftel creates artisan perfumes from 100 percent natural ingredients gathered from the best botanical sources she can find. Perfumer, educator, and author Mandy Aftel is widely considered a pioneer of natural perfumery. ![]()
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