Edition #6
The IAO in the NYT, an unmissable rec, and a spa-worthy find
At long last.
The truth is that my mind has been focused on keeping a very tight grip on a few simple pleasures these past few weeks. And gratitude for the moments — especially in contrast to the news in the world. Below, you’ll find some thoughts on a Times scoop very dear to my heart, a signature scent recommendation I’ve waited years to ask for (from editor Fiorella Valdesolo) and - for fear of sounding too clickbaity: at the bottom of this newsletter is my #1 productivity hack.
These are some things occupying my mind and that I would gush about if we met for coffee this week.
If you missed the last newsletter you can read it here.
You’ll also notice I have a new logo and banner. Utmost gratitude to artist Se Young Au for even considering my request. I could not be more honored and feel more seen, a translation of the sensory world into a visual feast.
Scent
Read: Can Scent Be Democratized (gift link - let me know if it works)
Last weekend, my dear friend Betty Hallock wrote a piece for the New York Times about the Institute for Art and Olfaction, its founder (the wonderful) Saskia Wilson-Brown, and the many students who have flocked towards its programming in LA—and now, online. The article is sweeping in its reporting on the many facets of the institute, and utterly rhapsodic in tone (just try writing like Betty, just try). It could easily be a preamble to a book. Betty herself felt she just scratched the surface of what this “bodega-sized” place means to so many: artists and chefs, death doulas and open-source crusaders, musicians and academics, flavorists and fiction writers, and yes, candlestick makers. The piece illustrated vividly how the IAO sits in the cross-currents of so many peoples’ lives and work, experimental or otherwise, related to creating with the senses.
It was at the IAO that I met Betty and several other of her interview subjects cited in the article, notably the founder Saskia, Ashley Eden Kessler (director of education there), and Se Young Au (an artist, who incidentally designed the new banner for this very substack.) Meeting those people, in that environment, was a discovery that has never lost its power to marvel. And my nose led me right to them.
I remember it was three months after I decided I no longer saw a future for myself as a fashion stylist, the career I had been building for a decade. Aside from being a mother and teaching myself how to cook, I felt useless. Charles was working seven days a week. Being with a toddler left me sticky with the details of each day, but feeling blunt and dulled as the days passed. Charles nudged me to look at classes at the IAO, located in LA’s Chinatown an eight-minute drive from our house. I picked a 12-week course that met late Tuesday nights, it was ambitious, but not related to any ambitions.
In our first class, there were about 10 of us sitting around a large table, and when prompted for introductions, I think I rambled and sputtered and announced I was potty training a two-year-old. I couldn’t really say why I was there, other than that I was grateful to be somewhere. I had no idea what to expect and showed up to explore something sort of rarified and invisible. Beyond those intros, the only time we ever spoke about ourselves or our experiences was within the context of scent.
It was very serious work. Fragrance materials are divided into categories, and within those categories, there are the natural ingredients and then a trove of synthetic ingredients that mimic or riff on individual facets of naturals, and represent them as single-molecule materials. For example, we studied various citrus ingredients one week, and then in the next week, we would study their lab-developed alter egos.
Each class would be proportionally a lot of silence (punctuated by deep inhales and note taking). We’d go around the room and discuss our impressions of what we were smelling on a scent strip, to start to commit these materials to memory. It was in these sort of admissions that started to color in our personalities, and strangely allow us to get to know each other. Our teacher likening black currant bud to some heinous “compounding-over-years cat piss in a dark closet” but also, “laquered” and “alluring” helped set the tone for rollicking descriptions and wacky associations.
Sitting around that table was a woman who started a candle line in Pasadena, a flavor scientist with a booming laugh, a city librarian, an agency experiential designer, and a teenager who I later found out was flying in from San Francisco each week just for this tuesday class. And there was Se Young, usually draped in silk, who had moved from New York City and made her way to the institute to deepen her vocabulary for, what I believe to be, her synesthetic gift - I’ve never heard her claim it but I have no other explanation for her ability to interweave music and color and art mediums and fabric and food and emotion and scent.
At the center of it all was Ashley, our teacher, a classically trained perfumer. My line about Ashley was that she could have been teaching me accounting and I would have felt my life’s purpose uncovered. Ash has that mix of a grace so timeless, a wit so sharp, an ability to make failure feel exciting, and the type of self-deprecating humor you expect to overhear at Katz's deli.
Later, in the second 12-week session of the materials course, I would meet Betty and be profoundly amazed by her deep field of references — as an established food writer and cookbook author — but also as a multidisciplinary artist. She has an intimidatingly precise mind (and outerwear selection) and it took me a long time to garner the guts to introduce myself to her. When Betty would assess a material, my neck would hurt from nodding so vigorously - yes, yes, I'd scribble, yes it does have a hint of tamarind!
You don't often get the opportunity to be in a space with people to linger on details completely extraneous to your life. To tackle one tiny ineffable problem; this invisible thing begging you to match words to an experience. It is a luxury in the truest sense. Suddenly the entire world was a place to re-explore and translate.
What’s more, you also don't often have access to the inner libraries of others, outside of group therapy. When people discuss their reaction to scent, they are relying on vocabularies and references mined from their lives, or their fears, or their fantasies. It’s fascinating. And for friendship and collaboration, what a way to bond. (I’ve heard the same said about freestyle rapping)
This crew and I, several years after sitting around that table on Chung King Road, are building something and sharing it with the world late this year.
To see Betty’s piece about the IAO transmit to the world the special nature of this come-as-you-are place, along with Institute’s radical mission and its intellectual breadth, felt like a triumph for all. I’m excited for all those who get to discover it, and themselves in it.
Fragrance Recommendation
Fiorella Valdesolo is the Editor in Chief of Gather Journal and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, T, and many other publications. To say she is discerning is an understatement. To say she smells good every time you step into her orbit is also an understatement. It is downright beguiling: earthy and subtle and enveloping! I’ve always wanted to ask, but her scent is so distinct and personal that I’ve almost felt it was a violation to prompt her to reveal its source! Til now. Thanks Fi!!
Olo- palo Santo
I first smelled palo Santo wood, known also as holy wood, burning on a trip to South America in 2013 or 2014. It was warm and inviting. And I was immediately focused on finding a way to get that scent on my skin. I searched for a while, even went through a period of burning palo Santo sticks and trying to somehow get the smoke to stick to me; that was a failure. I happened upon Olo, a small independent fragrance brand based in Portland, and I’ve been wearing their version ever since. Though its blended with white champa flower and Siam wood it’s the most deliciously accurate incarnation of the Palo santo I first smelled almost a decade ago. It wears close to the skin and creates a little golden aura around me perceptible to those in close proximity. Applying and reapplying it has taken on a ritualistic quality for me. My kind of religious experience. - Fiorella Valdesolo
This One Thing
As with most good things in our household, Charles found this foldable bathtub and pulled the trigger while I complained about it (”It’s ugly” “Where are we going to store it” “We already have a tub”).
I was wrong.
So wrong.
And yes, I know it looks like a big condom.
Being able to braise in water up to your neck is a revelation. This is the spa experience I work towards every damn day. And my number one productivity hack for working late nights. Would you click to read more, lol? Normally I’d pitch it to The Strategist, but I’m happy to write more about this lifechanging $50 purchase in the next newsletter.
Thank you for reading. More to come. I’ll leave you with this dispatch of Omri meeting FAGE for the first time.
Stay safe, healthy, and attuned to the gifts in the world.
