Nestled at the base of the Berkeley Hills in Northern California sits a Craftsman shingle house, where a 76-year-old woman with flaming-red hair and pool-blue eyes might be creating your next favorite perfume.
Dominating what was probably once a living room is Mandy Aftel’s “fragrance organ,” a bulky series of shelves holding hundreds of neatly organized essential oils, arranged with top, middle, and base notes from left to right. And while each of her fragrances declares itself with an obvious opening blast, the other players, in Aftel’s telling, give a more thorough understanding of the final blend.
Take, for example, my current favorite, Velvet Tuberose. “It contains grand fir, a particularly twinkly fir that has a kind of cheerful fruitiness,” Aftel says. “It has pink grapefruit, which, of all the citruses, it’s the most woody one. It also contains mitti attar, which is a co-distillation of Mysore sandalwood with a special kind of dirt they have in India. They call the smell of that sandalwood ‘wet rain on dry earth.’ So you’ve got a boatload of expensive tuberose with the rain-like sandalwood underneath. I wanted that softness, that velvety, smooth piece of tuberose to be accentuated.”
If you’ve never heard of Aftelier Perfumes, Aftel is fine with that. Not that the small-batch perfumer isn’t thrilled with new converts. She’s just busy: creating liquid, lotion, and solid fragrances; cooking up flavors for chefs; teaching classes to perfumers, armchair or otherwise; scenting venues for Google and teaching perfume to the Apple design team; and writing her next book (so far, there are nine).
It was a book, in fact, that led Aftel, a former marriage-and-family therapist, to perfumery. She was imagining a novel and decided the main character would be a perfumer, “for absolutely no good reason whatsoever,” she admits. Once she began her research, “I just fell in love with the natural essences, which felt to me like they were in every culture in the world, in every meaningful experience you ever had about sexuality or health or rituals or having a garden or cooking,” she explains.
On a recent visit to her home, I tried to stay out of the way as Aftel bustled about, opening several tiny drawers within a large Chinese apothecary cabinet until she found a bottle of Oud Luban, a blend of eight oud varieties mixed with frankincense and blood orange, for my husband.
“This is what I sent to Leonard Cohen. It became his favorite scent,” she says, with no hint of boasting or pride. Just a fact.
Aftel, an admirer of Cohen, wrote him a fan letter, adding that she’d like to give him a perfume. He replied, extolling the virtues of ancient incense, so she began sending him various fragrances. Thus began a 20-year correspondence. She sent more fragrances, including Oud Luban, which became his signature scent; he returned the favor with art prints inscribed with song lyrics and poetry.
“He loved the stuff that resonated with old history, like resins. He never wanted anything in alcohol. He always wanted it in oil. He also wanted to pay me. How could I take money from Leonard Cohen? His songs have gotten me through my life!”
The correspondence continued for years, with the occasional invitation to visit him in L.A., which Aftel always declined. When she knew he was nearing death, she made the trip.
“I was so shy, so frightened, so overwhelmed by his genius, but he directed the conversation all about me, which was an extremely kind gesture.”
On that visit, she brought him a teaspoon of pure oud. “The kind you’d kill for, really high quality,” which costs about $23,000 per pound, she adds. “He took the top off the bottle, smelled it, and said, ‘I like yours better.’”
Cohen’s drawings and poems are framed in Aftel’s house and the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents, next door, which she opened in 2017 and for which she charges $25 for entry. It occupies an airy, one-room cottage and is filled with artifacts: a century-old French perfumer’s kit, illustrated reference books on fragrance notes (one from 1595), a taxidermied civet cat, drawers full of woods and resins, and more than 100 essential oils.
Recently, Aftel turned the archive into a book, The Museum of Scent. It covers the history of perfume and perfume-making and includes an extensive glossary of plant ingredients with Aftel’s illustrations, along with photographs of perfume labs from the early 1900s, ancient maps and scrolls, and a few perfume recipes. Velvet Tuberose and Oud Luban are notable for their absence. She’s not giving away all her secrets.
Jane Larkworthy, the longtime beauty director at W magazine, is a Massachusetts-based writer
