The Invisible Things

I don't remember the first perfume I ever smelled.

I remember the first one* that stopped me.

There's a difference.

For most of my life, fragrance lived quietly in the background. It was something people wore before work or dinner. A bottle on a bathroom counter. A sample sprayed onto your wrist while you walked through a department store. I liked perfume, but that was about it. If someone had told me I'd eventually spend my nights reading about raw materials or arguing with myself over the smell of iris, I would've laughed.

Then life got smaller.

My marriage ended. Work disappeared. My cat, Jett, who had quietly been there through so many late nights, was gone. Nothing dramatic happened all at once. It was the opposite. The house got quieter. My routines slowly disappeared. Days blurred together until I wasn't really sure what came next.

I wasn't looking for a new hobby. I wasn't trying to reinvent myself.

I was just trying to get through the week.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, perfume found me.

I bought a bottle because I liked how it smelled. Then another. Before long I was reading books, chasing down old interviews with perfumers, and spending far too much time on Fragrantica. Tiny vials started showing up in the mail with names like Hedione, Ambroxan, Iso E Super, and Galaxolide. My desk slowly disappeared beneath them.

Looking back, I probably should've seen it coming.

I've never really had hobbies.

I have obsessions.

Photography wasn't enough. I wanted to know why certain images stayed with me. Design wasn't enough. I wanted to understand typography, publishing, architecture, and the people behind them. Perfume followed the same path. The deeper I went, the more there seemed to be.

What surprised me wasn't how much I learned.

It was how much it helped.

Perfume didn't fix anything. It didn't make grief disappear or suddenly make life make sense again. But for a few minutes each day, it gave my mind somewhere else to go. There was something comforting about slowing down long enough to really smell something. To notice it changing over an hour. To realize it wasn't the same fragrance anymore than it had been ten minutes earlier.

Some days, that was enough.

A photograph reminds you what something looked like.

A scent reminds you what it felt like.

I've thought about that a lot.

A smell can bring back a room you haven't been in for years. A jacket someone used to wear. A vacation you'd almost forgotten. Sometimes it isn't even a memory you can name. Just a feeling that quietly shows up before your brain has time to explain it.

That fascinated me.

It also made me start paying more attention to my own life.

I began writing things down. Which fragrance I wore that day. Where I was. The weather. What I was listening to. Who I was with. Sometimes it was only a sentence. Sometimes it filled a page. I started taking photos of bottles, saving little ideas for formulas, collecting notes that probably only made sense to me.

None of it felt important at the time.

I just didn't want to lose it.

Eventually I enrolled at the Institute of Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles, thinking I'd finally answer some of the questions that had been piling up in my head.

Instead, I left with even more.

The more I learned, the more curious I became. Every raw material seemed to lead to another one. Every formula made me wonder what would happen if I changed just one thing. Before long I wasn't just wearing perfume anymore.

I was making it.

Before long, I wasn't just wearing perfume anymore.

I wanted to understand it. Then I wanted to make it.

What started as a few notes quickly became a habit. I'd write down what I was wearing, what I smelled, what changed after an hour, what I couldn't quite put into words. I'd sketch formula ideas, tape blotter strips into notebooks, save photos, bookmark articles, and leave myself voice notes before I forgot whatever thought had just crossed my mind.

None of it felt organized.

It wasn't supposed to.

I was just trying to hold onto something that had quietly become important to me.

Eventually, there were notebooks everywhere. Formulas lived in one. Journal entries in another. Photos on my phone. Screenshots in random folders. I'd remember writing something down but not where I'd written it. I wasn't collecting perfume anymore. I was collecting the life that happened around it.

That's when I started thinking about a different way of keeping it all together.

Not because I wanted to build a company.

Because I wanted my own system.

Something that felt less like a spreadsheet and more like the way I actually experienced perfume. A place where a formula could live beside a photograph, where a journal entry could sit next to the fragrance that inspired it. Somewhere along the way, that idea became SPILS.

Looking back, it feels obvious.

At the time, it didn't.

I was just following one small curiosity after another, and somehow they all ended up in the same place.

I'm still learning.

I still ruin formulas.

I still buy materials because I convince myself they'll be the missing piece.

I still fill notebooks.

That part hasn't changed.

Neither has the reason I started.

Perfume found me during a season when I felt a little lost. It gave me something beautiful to pay attention to. Something that asked me to slow down, notice more, and remember the small things.

Everything else came later.

Some things never really leave us.

They just become invisible.

I just wish Jett was still here.

Postscript…

If you’ve made it this far, mahalo.
*The bottle, if you’re wondering, was Rauque by Greco/Sheldrake.

SPILS© launches later this summer.

Capture. Create. Connect.
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