of interest.”
“I’m an artisan, though,” she added, referring to her perfume line, Aftelier. “So an explosion for me isn’t like an explosion for Macy’s!”
Aftel, 62, connects the popularity of natural perfumes to interest in organic gardening and local food. “People are so often in front of their computer screens and detached from the sensual world,” she said.
Synthetic perfumes do a poor job of awakening that connection to green things, according to some natural perfumers. They argue that commercial perfumes can have all the subtlety of the men’s room at Yankee Stadium. And that synthetic fragrances cling indelibly to the body for 12 hours or more, like a one-night stand who demands brunch the next morning.
As Jeanne Rose, 73, a natural perfumer and aromatherapy practitioner in San Francisco who has written on the subject since 1969, puts it: “People are walking around in our Chinatown who smell like fermented watermelons.”
Rose, who teaches classes nationally, and out of her four-story Edwardian home, said the students who enroll do so because “they think people stink.”
That opinion may seem fragrant, but Rose’s spring series of courses on tincturing, distillation and perfuming has been fully subscribed for several years now. She recently added classes in June and October to accommodate more students.
Conventional perfumers, it should be said, would not agree that they are mired in stench. “In the 1980s, perfumes were very potent, over-the-top and long-lasting,” said Mary Ellen Lapsansky, vice president of the Fragrance Foundation, a nonprofit education and trade group in New York. Unlike the commercial perfumes of yesteryear, today’s fine commercial perfumes are “not so
in-your-face,” she said.
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