Illuminated Perfume

Todays inspiration is from the legendary design editor Robert Rufino. Early in his career, he designed windows for iconic New York institutions, from Henri Bendel to Tiffany & Co., a pioneer of the evocative display style known as “street theater.” In the 80’s when I lived in NYC, store windows were one of my favorite art forms, and so accessible since I would walk so much.

If you’ve visited one of my perfumeries, this may be evident. I call it OCB, B for beauty.

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“I love fragrances and everything that my favorite ones evoke but I was truly captivated by Roxana’s Q perfume the first time I experienced it. It evokes something ancient and at the same time very intimate and personal. To me it’s a “remembered” fragrance that taps into the green world of Faerie in the same way that a painting or sculpted image can. When I wear it, which is often, I feel closer to that elusive and magical world.” ~Wendy Froud

It’s International Folk Art Market weekend, one of my fave times in Santa Fe.
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Here are a few photos from back in 2018 when I volunteered and met Solange, before she opened , she’s holding the mate cup in the second photo. First photo is of Vetiver baskets from Madagascar 🤎🤎🤎

Did you witness the moon rise last night? Here in the high desert, it was magnificent, especially as she brightened the sky just before peeking over the mountains
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Rosa, inspired by the wild rose of California, is also named after my beloved great grandmother Rosa, who we would call La Ita Rosita. She reminds me of the great grandmother in the animated film Coco.

I have a small round table at the perfumery where I create an altar to recent perfumes that have been brought back. It feels timely to create the new display for Rosa with the ancestry class this weekend.

As a child, when visiting Buenos Aires, I would drink mate and play canasta with Rosita.
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What smells were your ancestors experiencing in their sensory world?

A scent from my ancestry is a traditional cologne, featuring citrus notes.

In the 18th century, pleasure gardens were designed for the rich in which the smells of different flowers and herbs played a significant part.

Until the late 19th century, perfumes worn by British women were made mainly from natural ingredients; mass production of synthetic perfumes came only, with advances in chemistry, in the late Victorian era.

This weekend is the Ancestral Perfume Two Day Workshop where we:

Explore how geography, ethnicity, religion, and spirituality can be experienced through scent.

Work with colors, textures, images, and landscapes that evoke your lineage, creating a visual key for your blend.
Go on a guided Journey to meet an ancient, healthy ancestral guide. Receive their wisdom, their scent, their blessing.
Using your collage, your journey, and the anatomy of the psyche, formulate a personal natural perfume that encodes your healing.

Learn how to continue your ancestral work after the weekend 👉🏻
https://www.illuminatedperfume.com/products/ancestral-perfume-two-day-workshop

My friend & colleague Cathy Skipper and I share many core traits and guiding threads, one of those is the importance of "feeling" and its relationship to scent. In both French and Spanish, the verb "to feel" and "to smell" is sentir. (Auspiciously Cathy speaks French and I Spanish.)
This tangent in language relates to physical perception of the world that heavily influences our emotions and memories. Feeling bridges the gap between physical touch and emotional states.
Join us in an immersive weekend intentionally designed as an exploration of personal archaeology via ancestry with guided journeying, collage, and the creation of a personal, embodied fragrance. The work is rooted in the deep wisdom of Jungian psychology with threads of alchemy. Read more here https://illuminatedperfume.substack.com/.../fragrance-of... then follow the link to read more and join the circle
https://illuminatedperfume.substack.com/p/fragrance-of-the-ancestors-in-santa

Fragrance of the Ancestors in Santa Fe A Transformative Two-Day Workshop Under the Full Moon

Juniper berries collected from last weekends adventure in the Galisteo Basin. The essential oil from these berries is exquisite and a reoccurring theme in the scents I create. Some examples include Sierra, Chaparral and the Green Knight, although it’s not dominate in those perfumes, it acts as a support note. 🌿🎵

Historically it has a connection with my maternal (Spain) and spiritual (Egypt) lineage.

My friend & colleague Cathy Skipper and I share many core traits and guiding threads, one of those is the importance of “feeling” and its relationship to scent. In both French and Spanish, the verb “to feel” and “to smell” is sentir. (Auspiciously Cathy speaks French and I Spanish.)

This tangent in language relates to physical perception of the world that heavily influences our emotions and memories. Feeling bridges the gap between physical touch and emotional states.

Join us in an immersive weekend intentionally designed as an exploration of personal archaeology via ancestry with guided journeying, collage, and the creation of a personal, embodied fragrance. The work is rooted in the deep wisdom of Jungian psychology with threads of alchemy.
🌿⚗️💫✨

Head over to Illuminated Perfume, then “classes”, its on the second page.
The photos are from when Cathy and husband Florian came out to the perfumery in Los Angeles to host a series of classes and presentations surrounding
their main workshop titled Alchemy & the Medicine of the Soul: The Wounded Healer, A Journey Through the Alchemical Stages & the Sacred Union. One of the related events was distilling white sage from my garden with the new cooper still up in Topanga.

On Friday, the day attributed to the Goddess of love and beauty, I was about to post a few photographs from my upstairs perfume laboratory with the words: “Wafting love, beauty, harmony, bees and bunnies from my upstairs lab at the perfumery” ….and then, and then I felt the presence a silent whisper and scented kiss. I wrote about it over at Wandering the Wonderland. While working in the studio today I realized that if I were to choose a scent to represent her, today it would be the intoxicating warm floral notes of Lyra. -> https://substack.com/