One of the things that I’ve found myself interested in over the past year or so has been the art of scent – perfumery. I’ve always had an interest in the way that things smell. I often catch whiffs of people’s deodorant or soap or something that smells good and make a mental note in my mind that that person smells good. This makes me sound more creepy than I actually am. Note: if you use Irish Spring, I will probably think you smell good.
I have enjoyed the smells of different things: rain, books, vanilla, cookies, the scent of a newly opened house, trees, lavender. I did my undergrad thesis on chemosensation in C. elegans, which basically involved the response of the worm to how different bacteria smelled to them. In O. Chem lab, we extracted limonene from orange peel. These are the things I’ve done with scent.
I have a few different perfumes, too. I mostly have oils from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab – I like these because they’re pretty subtle (or you can make them so), natural, and smell like interesting things. I have (or had) a bunch of Bath and Body Works lotions/body sprays/etc. Recently (and the actual cause of this post), I acquired a set of randomly sampled perfumes from Surrender to Chance.
I don’t know much about how smells work. I also don’t know much about perfumes. I know that there are different layers to each scent. I feel like I’ll be reading about this and about the chemistry behind scents in the next few months…
sequencereader 