Long before fragrance was bottled and commercialized, perfumery was recorded, studied, and passed down through texts that treated scent as both art and science. Ancient civilizations documented aromatic materials and their uses with surprising precision. In places like Ancient Egypt, formulas for incense, oils, and unguents were inscribed on temple walls and preserved on papyrus, outlining blends used for medicine, embalming, and daily adornment. Early written records like the Ebers Papyrus reveal detailed plant knowledge and aromatic preparations, while in the classical world, figures like Theophrastus authored Enquiry into Plants, one of the earliest systematic studies of botanicals, including their aromatic properties and uses.
As trade expanded, so did the documentation of scent. Knowledge moved along routes like the Silk Road, where resins, spices, and perfumed oils traveled alongside written traditions. In the Islamic Golden Age, scholars such as Avicenna refined distillation techniques and recorded them in medical and alchemical texts, laying the groundwork for alcohol-based perfumery. These weren’t casual observations - they were rigorous, interdisciplinary studies that treated scent as something worthy of preservation, inquiry, and refinement. Perfumery, from the beginning, was not just sensory - it was intellectual, cultural, and deeply embedded in how humans understood the natural world.
Perfumery, at its core, has always been interdisciplinary. It exists at the meeting point of botany, chemistry, anthropology, psychology, and lived human experience. To work within it with any level of integrity, I don’t just study materials - I study context. Where something comes from, how it was used, what it meant to the people who carried it, burned it, anointed themselves with it. That context is what gives scent its depth. Without it, fragrance becomes surface-level - pleasant, perhaps, but disconnected from the lineage that gives it weight.
Books are one of the primary ways I stay in relationship with that lineage. They slow the process down. They offer structure, language, and historical grounding. They remind me that scent is not just something we smell - it is something we have always used to make meaning of the world and our place within it.
Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés draws deeply from folklore, myth, and Jungian psychology, exploring archetypes of instinct and the “wild woman” psyche. Many of the stories she shares originate in pre-Christian oral traditions, where storytelling functioned as a way to transmit survival knowledge, emotional intelligence, and collective memory. In my work, this text becomes a framework for intuition - how to trust perception before it becomes language. Scent often begins there, in that pre-verbal space where something is felt before it is named.
Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses approaches the body from another angle - through sensory ethnography. She traces how different cultures have historically engaged smell not as a secondary sense, but as a vital one. From food preservation to navigation, from mourning rituals to early medicinal practices, scent has long been embedded in how humans move through and understand the world. What this reinforces, especially within perfumery, is that scent is one of the most direct pathways into memory and emotion. It bypasses language, moving straight into the limbic system, where feeling and recall live side by side.
Essence and Alchemy by Mandy Aftel sits closer to the technical and historical foundations of perfumery itself. It traces natural perfumery traditions through ancient resins like frankincense and myrrh, through the development of attars across South Asia and the Middle East, and through extraction methods that existed long before synthetic chemistry. It is one of the few modern texts that treats natural perfumery as both a historical craft and a living, evolving practice. Studying under Mandy shaped the way I approach this work - not as trend or aesthetic, but as something with continuity and responsibility. I adore Mandy, as she was my perfumery teacher & mentor.
In The Way of the Rose, Clark Strand and Perdita Finn explore devotional practices rooted in repetition - patterns that appear across religious and cultural traditions, from Catholic rosary prayer to cyclical indigenous ceremonies. At its core, the book examines how repetition creates a kind of psychological anchoring, an altered state of attention that builds over time. This directly informs how I think about wearing scent - not as a one-time adornment, but as something cumulative. A daily act. A quiet return. Something that, through repetition, begins to shape how you feel in your own body.
Caroline Myss’s Anatomy of the Spirit extends this understanding into the body itself. Drawing from medical intuition and energy psychology, she explores how emotional experiences are stored, processed, and expressed physically. While not a perfumery text, it offers a parallel framework for understanding how scent interacts with us - how it can evoke memory, shift emotional states, and influence the nervous system through its direct connection to the limbic brain.
Modern perfumery often strips all of this away. It reduces scent to note pyramids, marketing language, and aesthetic references - flattening something that has always been complex, cultural, and deeply embodied. But scent has never been simple. It has always carried meaning, memory, and history within it.
For me, studying that history isn’t optional - it is the structure that allows the work to hold weight. It is what keeps perfumery from becoming decorative and instead returns it to something alive, something felt, something human.
Every scent begins there.
x Kathleen