As with all magical things you only need a minute amount to perform miracles - a drop for one or two ounces of perfume.”) It prowls through a blend, transforming each of its elements and giving the whole extraordinary depth. (In Essence and Alchemy, Aftel writes of civet, “There is no ingredient with which civet does not blend beautifully. Almost all great perfumes of the past, after all, contained natural animal notes. As a perfume lover, however, having only sniffed their synthetic versions, I wanted to know what the fuss was all about. As an animal lover, I am glad those notes in their natural form have almost entirely been replaced by synthetics in modern perfumery. She had told me earlier she had 100-year-old animalic base notes like civet, castoreum, musk, and ambergris.

'What would you like to smell first?' Mandy asked. When we moved on to her perfume organ and its magical contents, it wasn't long until we began doing what two perfumaniacs do best: We started sniffing.

I felt awestruck and reverent like the antihero of Patrick Suskind's novel-turned-film Perfume (minus the virgin-murdering impulses) the first time he enters perfumer Giuseppe Baldini's atelier and sees a real perfumer's materials. Lined up against the perfume organ's dark wood was bottle after bottle of natural perfume notes, some marked 'old' and 'antique,' all calling out to be opened up and sniffed. 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.

Essence and alchemy a book of perfume