TEDxMileHigh 2020

Read The Script:

What did ancient Egypt smell like? When Denver Art Museum asked me to create a presentation for their King Tut exhibit, this was my first question. 

Not great, as you can imagine. People in the ancient world lived with their animals, had no running water or bathrooms. So when they found something that smelled good they thought it was sent by God. In fact, They thought it WAS God.

It’s with the Egyptians that Western history begins, and the historical use of fragrance starts with them. They developed sacred scents, anointing oils, and incense made of resins, spices, dried fruits, herbs, wine, and animal fats, to send messages and prayers to the Gods. Per fume or per fumum literally means through smoke. At first, they were only to be handled by the priests and priestesses but eventually, fragrance was so important in their culture that scent was used in everyday life, by everyone, even the enslaved. (In fact, the first slave revolt occurred when there was a perfume shortage, and they weren’t given their quota). For the Ancient Egyptians, ‘having a scent’ was synonymous with ‘having a soul’. Essentially, if you had no scent, you weren’t truly alive. We still embrace these ideas today with the notion of a ‘signature scent’ as our invisible calling card. 

Our sense of smell affects nearly every part of our lives. 

With every breath, every movement, we are taking in the world, smelling it, and communicating something back. 

Smell is the only sense that bypasses your brain’s filtering system. With vision, for example, your eyes take in way more information than what you consciously “see”. You don’t see anything that your brain doesn’t find important. In this way, your brain filters your vision, your hearing, your sense of touch, and taste. 

Smell is different – we experience the effects of smell before our conscious mind even realizes it. 

We’ve all had the experience of walking down the street only to encounter a smell that transports us, through time & space, to some long-forgotten memory. The smell of the jacket your Dad wore when you were 6. Or that first whiff of fresh grass on Field Day in Elementary School. This is the power of scent. 

But now here’s where it gets interesting — aside from putting on deodorant in the morning or lighting a candle to enhance the smell in your house, most of these experiences happen accidentally. 

But what if we were more intentional about the use of scent in our lives? We could shift our mood in an instant. We could slip into a new identity, a better version of ourselves. We could trigger old memories on purpose… 

I have been making multi-sensory art for nearly 30 years and like so many things in life, I didn’t set out to work with fragrance. I didn’t even know it was a job! 

I was in Art School training to be a painter when I started learning about herbs and aromatherapy in the hope that it would help me better handle my asthma. This led me down a winding path to a small perfumery in Boston that created all custom made fragrances.

Of course, as a student, I needed a job so I applied (with no experience and no training). I showed up on my first day to see what I could do. It was a sink or swim moment. I swam.

Through this first job, I realized a few things that would change my work and life trajectory forever:

1. I LOVE scent! Smelling is an incredible source of pleasure.

2. Perfumery is an endless art form. You can never exhaust your imagination. There are always more interesting materials being produced that can be used in novel combinations to your make art and tell your stories through.

3. I’m synesthetic. Which means I smell in colors, textures, shape, and line. For me, every aroma has a unique visual quality attached to it.

Cold-pressed lime oil smells like a cubist painting of lime green, dark green, silver, and black stripes; coming out at you at sharp angles.

Orris Root smells like buttered carrots, violets, and dark chocolate, but it looks like a light periwinkle gauze made of the thinnest silk and cashmere strands floating in the sky.

This last bit has been the foundation of my work as an artist. I can fuse both scent impressions and visual design elements to create my designs. 

This art form takes me to all sorts of places like galleries and art museums to make installations or presentations, but some of my favorite creations are made with individuals; people telling me their life stories to be translated into scent, like ‘bottled biographies’ that you can uncork any time and even share with others. 

People tell me about their closest relationships, the things, people, and places that they love. We smell materials together as we decipher their story and find the aromas that bring it to life. 

Some of my work is autobiographical. When I was 4 years old, I took my first overnight trip away from my parents. It was ‘preschool summer camp’ and as a finale to the experience, we had a camping trip. We all slept outside in a grove of pine trees under the open night sky. 

I didn’t sleep at all that night because I couldn’t stop listening to the trees whispering to one another above my head. I’ll never forget the magic in that night and infused in my memory is the scent of sweet scent of pine sap, cool night air, and the ancient aroma of woods mixed with earth. 

Decades later in my studio, I would have to find just the right pine, fir, and frankincense oils to replicate the sweet sap aroma and combine it with warm cedar, labdanum resin, and sandalwood to create the feeling of the grove. But it’s the top note of green leaf alcohol that gives the cool essence of night air. I call this perfume, “The Voices of the Trees.”

Another favorite is “August Picnic, 1976.” When I was a kid my family would gather for summer picnics at my grandfather’s farmhouse and go swimming in the pond. In my memory, there was always a rhubarb pie or fresh rhubarb to eat with sugar. This perfume, “August Picnic, 1976” tells the story of those humid summer days filled with tall grass, the cedar cabin, and rhubarb. But it’s the sweet sugar note in the background that tells of our bond, the sweetness of playing with my cousins and feeling connected to the older generation.

We know people by their scent, whether they’re wearing perfume or not. We know if they smoke a pipe, drink coffee, or love to garden by the way they smell. And unconsciously we want to be known for our scent, to be remembered. 

One day a woman contacted me to ask if I was familiar with a particular iris perfume from the 1940’s Of course, I was; I’ve been collecting perfumes since I was a kid. Among perfume lovers, it’s both famous and rare. She told me that she’d gotten a small sample from a perfume collector and had fallen in love with it. It made her feel even more like herself. But it was more than that — faced with ‘another’ round of chemo, she needed this perfume to be her scented shield, like a lucky charm, a talisman to ward off danger and give her strength. 

I smelled the fragrance on her skin and matched it in the bottle by mixing tiny, precise amounts of materials. Together we created “Scent of Hope”; a direct reformulation of the original that helped her make it through the chemo. It still brings her joy and brings beauty to the countless others who wear it.

We can all bring this power into our lives. By deciding what we want our world to smell like we can transform it. Modern life can be filled with overwhelm and anxiety, but like the ancient Egyptians, we can become the architects of our own scent-scapes by consciously doing what we’re already doing: breathing, and smelling. We can take a few moments every day to ask: How do I want to feel? What do I need? Pay attention to the scents that give you pleasure, make you feel peaceful, or even strong & powerful, and give yourself more of them. This most ancient sense is the doorway to our deepest selves, the key to our joy, our self-expression, peace, and empowerment. Use it intentionally, and you will find that scent is deeply life-affirming. 

Thank you.

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