Host Lisa Kiefer speaks with Mandy Aftel, author and natural perfume maker, about her new museum in Berkeley dedicated to perfume and the experience of fragrance, The Aftel Archive of Curious Scents.
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1:Method to the madness is next. You are listening to method to the madness, a public affairs show on k a l x Barkley Celebrating Bay area innovators. I'm your host Lisa Kiefer, and today I'm speaking with Mandy Af [inaudible]. Mandy is one of the most sought after custom perfume makers in the world. Her first book on perfume essence and Alchemy is accepted as a seminal text. She has collaborated on two cookbooks with celebrated bay area [00:00:30] chef Daniel Patterson exploring the connections between food and fragrance. And most recently she has opened a museum, the [inaudible] archive of curious sense right here in Berkeley on Walnut Street. This is a show about innovators and you have perfect story about how you got started.
Speaker 2:I had a practice for 30 years as a psychotherapist in Berkeley and I specialized in artists and writers and I loved my work a lot. I really did. It [00:01:00] was just wonderful. And I wrote a book called the story of your life and it was about how stories work in therapy and in fiction. And I love research. So I read a lot of books about plot and it's just fascinated by, by how people tell stories. And I wrote this book and then after that I kind of knew so much about plot. I wanted to write a novel and that I should make my main character perfumer. And I have no idea why none. I had never been that interested in perfume. I don't know where it came from, but I thought this would be good. This will be kind of sexy [00:01:30] and interesting and juicy.
Speaker 2:And I thought, oh, I can do a lot of research, which is very appealing to me. So I began getting books and I knew that perfume was synthetic now, mostly synthetic, if not totally. And I was very interested in real ingredients and real flowers and real trees and leaves and stuff. So I began to collect books from the turn of the last century and they were so fascinating, so beautiful. So interesting. I just loved them. And so then I thought, well, maybe I should take a class for my research, for my novel. So [00:02:00] there was a place I think north of here that taught a little solid perfume class, which it was in a ramen therapy studio and you could make a little perfume with a wax, bees wax and oil. And I went there with a person who was a friend at the time and I got to smell all of these materials and I just totally fell in love with them.
Speaker 2:And I also felt like for some reason I could kind of understand them. I could kind of figure some things out about how to work with them. So I made this perfume in class and then my friend who I went to the class with, she said, well, let's start a perfume line. [00:02:30] You know, you'll make all the products and I'll do all the business. And um, and we did, which was kinda crazy. And it got picked up by Nieman Martin, Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman. And it was like really amazing. And nobody could be more surprised than me. And I loved it. I loved making this stuff. The business came to kind of unfortunate. And I got taken away from me and I thought I was never going to make perfume again quite honestly. And I also thought it was just awful at business. And then my editor, who's also my best friend and I wrote this new book, um, the art [00:03:00] of flavor with her and wrote also wrote the story of your life with her.
Speaker 2:She suggested this is several books path, right? Something on Pershing because by then I had 200 turn of the century books. I had hundreds of essences cause I'm very obsessed when I like something. And so I wrote this book called essence and Alchemy, which was I think 15 or so years ago. It's kind of the Bible of perfume. It is. A lot of people got their start with it and then kind of, I just sort of, you know, without being too corny, followed my nose and sort of landed [00:03:30] where I am. We're going to talk about where you are now because you just opened the first museum in the United States about natural essences. Yes, yes. It's called the [inaudible]. It's called the aff tell archive of curious sense. And it's located right here in north Berkeley, so it's at 1518 walnut. It's in a converted garage. It's like a cottage behind my house.
Speaker 2:I think it was a garage like 50 years ago. It's on a few doors down from Pete's and we're only opening police. It's right behind chase and it's only open one day a week [00:04:00] on Saturdays by ticket. And it is the best thing I have ever done. I just love it. Well walk me through, if I were to go in there, I know you have what is called an Oregon. Yes. What is that? Oh, it's so cool. It's a a perfume organ is very thin shelves and many of them that you put the perfume bottles on. So when you're sitting beneath that, it kind of looks like an Oregon assence's used for perfume, natural essences, but also synthetics as well are called notes and you put them together and they make chords. [00:04:30] So in perfume, different essences like rose or jasmine or orange or Frankincense, they're called top notes, middle notes or base notes.
Speaker 2:So you arrange on this organ, on these shelves, the top notes together, which are the ones that reach your sense of smell very quickly and disappear like orange or mint or Lyme, things like that. Things are familiar from gardening or eating. Then the middle notes are more complicated. They have more layers like rose and jasmine and they last [00:05:00] maybe two to four hours. And then base notes are the really deep heavy materials that had been in man's spiritual life since the beginning of time, like sandalwood and Myrrh and Frankincense in there from roots and barks and trees and residence and grasses. And so they kind of have different smell registers if you will, light down to heavy all of your ingredients. Some are very exotic. And I wanted to ask you, you know, you probably have a lot of stories. What is the been the most exotic [00:05:30] smell or essence that you have been able to find and how did you go about finding that?
Speaker 2:You know, I really like the hunt and I'm a very passionate human being. So kind of almost everything I have has a hunt connected to it. And one of the things I'd say too about the hunt and finding things is even if I find them, it's not stable, so it's not like I can go back and find that again. So if you marry perfume for someone, then [00:06:00] that perfume is a onetime deal. Yes. So I have Gardenia, which was really a hunt, really, really a hunt and I thought it didn't exist. And honeysuckle, which I also, when I wrote essence in Alchemy, I said they didn't exist. I knew at that point I had never found them. People can render these materials if they want to take the time and somebody wants to spend the money, but natural essences for such very high prices are not really in demand in industry.
Speaker 2:So no one wants to pay the kind of money. I think the story of the Tiara is pretty interesting. [00:06:30] Tre is a gardenia that's in Tahiti. One of my students who was snorkeling I think in Tahiti, ran across this guy who had this gardenia that was just so beautiful, so incredible. She put me in touch with him. I got in touch with him and it's just, he has this stuff. I have a fantasy of his life. I'm sure I'm wrong. I feel like he might be like on a yacht boating. I don't know where I call him cause he doesn't call me back. I believe I'm his only customer only because he's difficult to [00:07:00] pin down and get anything from. It's clear to me, he doesn't care if he sells this stuff, but he has, you know, all the right analysis of his material, his materials, very beautiful.
Speaker 2:When he sends it, you have to follow all these rules. It's very touch and go. Whether it'll actually get to me, which is why I think I could be the only one because I take all the risk on it coming because lots of forms need to be filled out and they always, you know, call us and ask us to fill them out. But it's this very beautiful, voluptuous gardenia smelled. It's just [00:07:30] narcotic. And what form does it come to you comes to me in a form that's called an absolute, which is a solvent extraction, which is a cold process that releases these very volatile, flighty, rich, layered kind of smells that are inside that Gardenia. So it's extremely heavy and very scarily expensive. I mean truly scarily expensive. Like what? Like around 10 $12,000 a kilo, which is 2.2 pounds. I don't buy 2.2 pounds.
Speaker 2:He will sell less to me. So [00:08:00] I buy it in smaller amounts, which means I'm continually, when I run out cause I don't buy very much cause it's so expensive. You know, he sells it to me again, which I'm very grateful for. You talk about the history of sense. Can you tell us a story about any in particular that in history that you uncovered that was an astounding story? Well aren't you I think is a pretty amazing story. [inaudible] is really fascinating. There are these shells, they're very ordinary looking like the [00:08:30] top of a shelter like this big and they're there. They're not gorgeous. Your shells can be really beautiful little shells. And I found that they were in the original recipe for incense that God gave to Moses. And so in the, in the cataract, I'm not positive I'm saying that correctly, but they're in there and they've been using incense tradition for a really long time and they're pretty fascinating.
Speaker 2:I have them in the museum and I have very old, I think from 1600 on handmade paper and hand colored illustration [00:09:00] of them from that far back of the shelves. They're very lowly but they're very famous. And so I pound those up with a mortar and pestle and then I soak them in very, very high proof alcohol and the smell comes out of them and it's a kind of briny sea, slightly animal kind of mysterious kind of smell. And that was like amazing to find and be able to use almost sounds like a sexual, well, there are ones that are really sexual, that ones less sexual. What are some of the, some of the others? Well all [00:09:30] the animal ingredients which are very, have very complicated pass in a lot of ethical issues to them but have very tangled histories with us. And some of them are endangered, so I'm not, you know, suggesting people, you know, run out and use them.
Speaker 2:But they are very sexy. Mosque is the original, very, very sexy kind of aroma. And it's very intense, real Musk. And I do have that also in the museum. In my museum, I have a hundred year old essences, like I have a hundred year old ambergris, I have a hundred year old things and some to be compared to modern ones. So they've aged [00:10:00] over a hundred years and they're extraordinary smelling. And I think I may have the only bottles of them if someone else has them. I haven't run into them yet, you know? And when I bought them, I'd never heard heard of anyone having these very, very old bottles of these things. And so I have one little exhibit in the museum comparing old and modern ordinary oils and not these, these animal ones. But there's an ingredient that is in jasmine and orange flower and an animal ingredient called civit, which is called indoor.
Speaker 2:[00:10:30] It's also in poop. So it's kind of this fecal floral kind of edgy sort of Yin and Yang kind of smell that's really a piece of the natural perfume world in terms of something, not just being sweet or not just being a beautiful flower. So like jasmine, when you really smell jasmine, when you go in Berkeley at night past a real patch of jasmine and it kinda like, you know, knocks you out. It's very sexy and it's got a kind of dirty aspect too. It's not just like this clean, [00:11:00] sanitized smell. It's got that kind of dirty aspect, which makes it sexy and interesting. Well, I have to tell you, I live back east for a while and then came back to the bay area. Yes. And one of the things I really noticed walking around in Berkeley was that very thing, that sort of jazz, mini sweet but stinky, almost like nauseated.
Speaker 2:And I thought, wow, I wonder if she ever does city smells like you know, here's your bottle of Berkeley. You know, it's that aspect of natural aromas that drew me in in the first place. [00:11:30] Their beauty is so complex. It's the, it's the complexity of a really good cooking or gardening. We have really fragrant plants. When smells are really good, they're very complex. They're not just one thread of a smell. They're a rich kind of cocktail of different aromas and I just love that. I love the worlds that open up when you really take the time to inhale and smell deeply.
Speaker 1:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to method to the madness, a weekly public affairs [00:12:00] show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. Today I'm speaking with Mandy [inaudible], founder of f Telia perfumes and the app tell archive of curious sense a museum which explores the natural history of perfume right here in Berkeley. Speaking of cooking, you've done a couple of books with,
Speaker 2:you know, Patterson, the chef of Kwon. Yes. Most recently it was called [00:12:30] the art of flavor. You did a Roma with him. How is it different from what we did, I think about 15 years ago and it really focused on essential oils for cooking and for personal care. So Daniel would have like three cooking recipes for say rose and I would have one personal care thing, a a a body oil or lip balm, a something for your face, bath salts, whatever for each of the ingredients. This book is really different and it was really exciting. Came out art of flavor from Riverhead in August. And so we just have been doing [00:13:00] some things about it. Daniel, first of all is you know, brilliant and amazing to work with and we discovered we'd been friends for many years that our ways of working were the same. When we would talk about how I would create a fragrance and how he would create a flavor.
Speaker 2:We were both thinking our heads were in the same place, thinking about ingredients and complicated ingredients. And so we thought let's do something on flavor. Let's kind of teach this to people because we wanted to. So we want to do something for the home cook that's really simple, that focuses on things [00:13:30] that you have, not expensive stuff. Very simple stuff. And what we found was so much was interesting about how to create flavor because it's, it's like creating perfume. So we focused a lot on shopping with your nose, really smelling ingredients, really thinking about the different shapes of ingredients, the different textures of them, things that I think about with scent. Then we also went on and talked about how your, you're effecting flavor. The minute you start cutting into something and all the cooking techniques, [00:14:00] everything's oriented towards flavor. And then we have a thing in the book, there's a really wonderful flavor compass, which is all the aroma, all the very, very aromatic and very essential oil rich ingredients.
Speaker 2:So it's citruses, herbs, spices, and flowers. So we talked about how to use those ingredients because they're very complicated in a way that you wouldn't think about. So like when you're using Bazell, why would you use Bazell instead of tear gum? We wanted to empower people to make good decisions. Why use lemon instead of line? [00:14:30] But in the book there's no real using of essential oils. You're using these essential oils that are in the plant. So it's in the leaves of the man and you're talking about Basal medium that is best to use to extract that. No, you don't need to do any of that stuff. With our book, we basically say smell these ingredients like smell Thai Bazell. If you're in a store, rip off a little leaf and smell it or drip off a little flower and smell it really smelled the end of the the care Rick really smell the things [00:15:00] you buy and then use them and be smelling all the way as you're cooking so you don't need to render anything because he essential oils will leave.
Speaker 2:That's what you're really getting the flavor from. It's the essential oils in mint that make for the mint flavor. The minute you start to crush it or cut it up, the oils coming out. Same with Bazell or if you're with an orange and you just push your finger nail into the peel of an orange, that's the oil. So I have to do is use the zest and some of it is in the orange juice of the lemon juice. [00:15:30] Or if you're clove, if you pound it up or you stick your finger in there, there's the oil oil is right there. So we wanted to make it very easy to use those oils right there in the plants. We talk a lot about that and it's just book I'm really proud of. I'm very excited about what we discovered because if you think about it, people tell you what to put together in food, but they don't tell you why.
Speaker 2:So you're empowered to do it on your own. If you're in a farmer's market or you're in Safeway or wherever you are and you see something, you think, well, I've got these kind of crummy carrots at [00:16:00] home, what could I put with this to make it good? We talk about that. So simple and very special. And you have your own f Tele, a perfume company, and um, you do perfumes for individuals. You know, when you go into department stores or really any big stores that sell perfume, it's such a [inaudible] of horrible, I don't even wear perfume anymore. My customer is the person who doesn't wear perfume. What is the difference between synthetic perfume and natural essence? Perfume is big business [00:16:30] and you can make a lot of money in perfume with the big, big brands and things like that. And so they moved almost a century ago to using synthetics.
Speaker 2:And those are manmade chemicals. So the natural essences are still there. They're still around and they have, they're really, really different in the first way they're really different is they don't last. So if you put on a perfume of mind, I probably wouldn't be able to smell it from here. They're very personal. You need to be very close to the person [00:17:00] and also they evolve with your skin and so they change on each person and just fade away. So my big selling line, if someone calls me, it gets me on the phone is how would you like to buy a perfume that costs a whole lot more money that doesn't last and the bottle is tiny. Does that sound good because of this? Sounds good. I'm your perfumer. So it's a reeducation of people to not expect something that's cheap in a bottle that it has no real relationship to the earth and [00:17:30] so when you wear it, it's a really different experience and it's what I fell in love with.
Speaker 2:There are people who love synthetics and there's also people who work with both naturals and synthetics and working in artists in a way. I just love natural essences, all that complexity, all that tangled history with us as a species. All the places around the world that they come from. It's local, but it's really exotic. I like all that. So that's why I like to work with. If you have a client that comes in, I can imagine that you maybe [00:18:00] unwittingly call on your psychotherapy skills to help a person determine, I don't, you don't have such a disappointment. It's like such a great like I am and I'm not, I mean it's there but it's not know how you think. So let me explain that. Most people who do custom perfume have a questionnaire which I don't have and they ask psychological questions, which I also don't have like, you know, do like winter.
Speaker 2:Do you like spring and can you tell me a memory that you, you know, that happened that was important and [00:18:30] what's your favorite color and a lot of stuff like that. I don't ask anything. So nothing at all. You come in to my studio, but I do pay a lot of attention about people. The main thought for me is that it isn't your conscious mind and your identity to the world that helps you decide what smells you like. And that's what you would tell me in those questionnaires. I feel that's not what's true. What's true is what you resonate with when you smell the ingredients. [00:19:00] So I give you the opportunity to smell all these different top notes and middle notes and base notes and you pick your favorites. I give you lots of bottles of things to smell, not to overwhelm but to kind of get a sense of your taste.
Speaker 2:And when you smell the individual ingredients on their own, then you get to make a decision that you may not have made otherwise. I've done a lot of custom perfumes for men. They pick a lot of florals. So you would think by questionnaire and psychology, they wouldn't pick florals, but they do. And women pick lots of woods [00:19:30] and resins and so on. So I find the sexual stereotyping to be completely out the window. And also very early in my custom career, that part of it, I remember this woman came to see me and she was very corporate, you know, and I made a real snap decision about how she looked and who she was and whatever. I was very prejudiced. She picked the sexiest, wildest, unconventional style. And that was like a life changing thing for me. Cause I thought you or your presentation is totally [00:20:00] different than what's going on with you.
Speaker 2:So that for me, the essences have personalities. So when you pick them, I learned about you but not the other way around. So if a magazine calls me to say, Oh, you know, it's Valentine's Day and we have a really sporty mom, or we've got one that likes to go clubbing a woman, you know what suggest a perfume. And I would always say, God, I have no idea because I mean cause she likes to go clubbing this, you know, or she's driving her kids around, you know, on a station wagon to send, tell me what perfume she'd like. I can't help. [00:20:30] So it's very different for me. So you have had some very interesting clients, one of which one of my heroes of all time. Leonard Cohen. Yes. I would love to hear about that interaction. Well I had a, a relationship with him for 20 years.
Speaker 2:I was very afraid to meet him. So, so we wrote back and forth when I made stuff for him, we wrote back and forth and I was kind of incredibly, I was very lucky that he loved my work and that was like [00:21:00] beyond, I mean really beyond, beyond the, beyond to me. Um, cause I idolized him and I was just too fearful to ever meet him until right before he died. I knew he was ill and I knew I needed to like either get over it or regret it. So I did go and and meet him. But we had been in touch, we were in a lot of touch over the years with many different things I made and we had a kind of gift giving relationship. I think I frustrated him a lot by not letting him [00:21:30] pay cause I could see it disturbed him.
Speaker 2:And every once in awhile I would say, I'm going to charge you for this. But the thought of him paying, I wonder if he ever wrote a song about, he has fragrance in a lot of his songs and he was a very, he was just loved smells. He like smells that had a very deep, like the Anja from the Kettering. When I got involved in that, he sent me one of the formulas for the Kettering from some Kabbalah group he was interested in. So he was very interested in the things that [00:22:00] I made from head. Very ancient materials in them and he loved that and he wore it whenever he went out. And that was kind of unbelievable too. I mean, still still utterly unbelievable to me. Did you listen to his last hello? Oh my God. Yes. Well, when we went to finally go meet him, he asked if I'd like to hear a song and he played the whole album for foster and I in his living room and talk to me about it.
Speaker 2:And it was like one of the most amazing experiences of my entire life. So I want to talk to you about the business. [00:22:30] Okay. You say you aren't really a business person. I love business. I love business, but I like it my way. Well, let's talk about that. You really followed your passion. Yes. Without any kind of business school. Oh my God. [inaudible] classes are these. So tell us about your business structure and um, well this is my favorite. I just love my business, our business. I do it with my husband foster and we're partners in it together. Our business is so unusual and [00:23:00] we love it so much. We barely can go to sleep at night. We work a lot, really a lot. Um, I am the sort of person who has always has not fit in certainly from my background in Michigan and I'm just eccentric would be a nice word.
Speaker 2:I'm just kind of different and I lost my first business so I thought I was really bad at business. And um, we have this very unusual business model that we made up. Just kinda like the museum. I mean all of it we kind [00:23:30] of concocted. I remember being there making the museum day after day after day for three years and thinking, you know, people go to school for this, you know, like display or any of this stuff we were doing and we did a lot wrong. We were very willing to like do it wrong and do it again. I mean you can tell we, we are people that have no boss cause a boss would have probably fired us by now because you know, if we get it wrong we just start all over again. We just forget where are you profitable, you're profitable. We were profitable pretty early.
Speaker 2:We are profitable, [00:24:00] we're very profitable. So to me that says like if you do what you love, guess you're going to make it. Is that an assumption? That is, I think, I think that we're so lucky to be profitable and I think that, um, I do do what I love. I believe in what I'm doing. I work really hard and sodas foster and we spend a lot of time thinking through how we could improve because it's fun for us. So we, we pay attention. And I, one of the things [00:24:30] I've said a lot about businesses that anyone can get a customer, it's getting a repeat customer that makes a business and a repeat customer that tells their friends. And that's, that's our base. So people that come to us are by and large very happy with their experience with us and we're happy with it too.
Speaker 2:So we write, for example, I write a note to everyone who buy something and we call everybody back immediately. If we do something, you know, we've send the wrong stuff, we send other stuff. On the other hand, we educate [00:25:00] our customer to what we have. So we have no free samples. We're never open. We, we have, you know, we're not, don't fight. I mean people expect free samples in the perfume world, but we feel that our, it's called the juice. Our, our thing is very valuable to us. It takes us a long time to make it so we don't want to give it away because we want people to value our work. Have people tried to buy you? Yes, but I don't have any interest in being yes. But I see a few times, but I don't have any intro. [00:25:30] I'll tell you, I had this incredible experience with this very wealthy man who's now dead in Los Angeles is very interested and I was interested, I mean, some of this stuff, I was interested in these things because I needed to see them to realize they weren't for me.
Speaker 2:So it's very easy for me, which I think is a big key to business to say no. Like I'm not seduced very easily at all because so many things just look bad. You know, I feel like what I'm doing, [00:26:00] I love and want to protect. So having lots more money is not interesting to me. Doing work for, you know, tons of people or whatever. I, I don't want to grow. I don't want to be bigger. I don't want to do the things that most people want to do. So it's of no interest. So it's very easy to stay on track. It's not, I'm not struggling with anything. So when people have tried to buy me, they have this, this is very telling when to this man and, and he was really loved my work and stuff and he [00:26:30] wanted me to know, for example, my cost of goods, which is I think what people know.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I don't know. I still don't know. I think people like think I'm lying, but I don't, because let's say I buy a kilo of rose or a pound or whatever I buy, I have my old one there too, and then my old one cost a different amount of money. Or maybe I got it somewhere else. You need to know the price per drop, but I can't figure that out. Then I sell some of it. So I have a little bit of my business is my overflow [00:27:00] of my oils that I love and I source. So people who like my taste or other perfumers sometimes buy from me, I make a profit on that. Not a ton, but I make a profit. So then I'm completely, cause I'm dyslexic, confused about what that drop of rose must cost since I've sold some off and made some mix them together.
Speaker 2:So when I went to this man and he wanted to buy me, I had to give him the cost of goods. I spent a lot of time trying to work it out like what a drop of rose cost me or whatever. [00:27:30] And in the end I thought this is a sign I can't, I can't do this if this is what you do in a real quote, real business because we think of our businesses, kind of a toy business. I wasn't going to get there. So I feel like a lot of things people do for business kind of rips the heart and soul out of what you're doing. And I just don't want to go that way. It sounds like that your best advice is if you don't love something, forget about it. Yes, and so we're, we're very tiny. We, we work together with foster son Devin.
Speaker 2:It's three of us that [00:28:00] WHO's really there. I greet when I'm there. I greet every person who comes in the museum. I love what I do. I feel so lucky. We're lucky to have you right here in Berkeley. And how can people reach you if they want to take a tour of your museum or buy your book or buy your perfume? Oh, I would love that. The museum is open on Saturday. A. First of all, you can go to my website, which is www.ftelia.com which is a like Adam F, like frank t like Tom, e, l I e r.com. Or [00:28:30] if you can't remember that, just look my name up and hopefully my website will show up also, uh, there at the website. If you go to www dot [inaudible] dot com forward slash archive it would take you to the museum, which I hope everybody will come.
Speaker 2:And what's the name of that museum again? It's called the AF tell. Archive of curious sense. It's located at 1518 walnut street between cedar and Vine Open on Saturdays we, we usually have eight people an hour, so we can't have a lot of people. So, but if we can have people we do [00:29:00] and then I have my stuff on my website or you can just call us up if you want to call us up and ask a question and want to buy something. (510) 841-2111. And if I wanted to have a perfume made, perfect, my having a perfume made is the most expensive thing I do. So it's a lot of money. It takes several hours to come and sit with me. It's kind of like a portrait. Speaking of the psychology. So I've had people come back over the years and it changes because I of course look up what they picked before and what they're picking now as [00:29:30] their life changes, their taste and smells changes, and you get a whole, you know, you get like four or five different things. It's really pleasurable. You learn all about the different aromas that go into your preference, a very
Speaker 3:personal purchase to really one of a kind experience that I love doing it. It sounds beautiful. I really want to thank you for being on the program.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to method to the madness can find all of our podcasts [00:30:00] on iTunes university.
Speaker 4:[inaudible].
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