Hi there Perfume Posse, Curious is a great name for a fragrance as Britney Spears could tell you. It was the name of Britney’s first fragrance and sold enormously well, still does. I’d like to introduce you to a horse of a different colour. Mandy Aftel, perfumer, writer, teacher and now museum curator has created a fragrance in honour of her fabulous Aftel Archive of Curious Scents.

From Aftelier: Visitors will be able to smell more than three hundred natural essences derived from fruits, flowers, trees, grasses, and other natural sources (and take three samples home). They will be able to compare essences that have been aged for a century to their modern counterparts. They will be able to pore over more than fifty antique books from my collection, retracing the amazing history of fragrance. 

Curious by Mandy Aftel for Aftelier Perfumes 2017

Fragrantica

Fragrantica gives these featured accords:
Tobacco, hay, smoke, orange leaf, woody notes, orange

Curious feels like a dream of a perfect spare afternoon. Imagine, it’s cool outside and lunch has just finished on a Sunday. You’re full and languid and decide to walk the dogs. They are due for their next bath but aren’t smelling yuk yet, merely lived in. In the morning the roads gutters were ablaze with fall leaves but now they are char, a couple still smouldering slightly. As you wander past you can smell the changes of weather from late summer to early autumn. People are chopping wood for their fireplaces (or if in a town they are carting in bags of logs) and you can smell the leaves as you kick them up in unraked yards.

After the walk you come home to the warmth and grab a book, sit in your favourite reading chair which might have been your old pipe smoking Grandpa’s favourite too. The house is warm and you can smell the fresh beeswaxed furniture as it heats up and that combines with the smell of warm dog. You’re home, comfortable, relaxed and happy. There’s no pressure to be anywhere till tomorrow and you can’t think of anywhere you’d rather be.

Though Curious doesn’t smell exactly like this perfect afternoon, it does make my mind go there. Somehow Mandy has tapped into some of my happiest memories from across decades and strung them all together with a fragrance.

Aftelier Perfumes

So how does Curious smell? Check the note list above, blend it and throw in some surprises, then add a whole lot of love. A slightly sweet, smoky wood fragrance with animalic undertones that smells like happy autumns.

Further reading: Ca Fleure Bon
Aftelier Perfumes has a great range of Curious product from $6

How do you like to spend spare afternoons?
Portia xx