The Genius of Perfume
Writer, DJ, and olfactory artist Maxwell Williams on scents raves, starting over, and the power of DIY fragrance.
Hi everyone,
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about scent. Not just how smell is the sense most tied to memory, yet the least understood, but also its incredible ability to shift our perceptions. Lavender oil can rocket you back to a sun-drenched vacation or memories of a beloved family member. A whiff of tuberose on an overheated city day can transport you over continents and decades. As David Seth Moltz of Brooklyn’s D.S. & Durga put it: “Perfume is armchair travel.”
I’m not the only one who got into collecting perfume samples and kits during the pandemic. And I won’t bore you with the many statistics showing that the perfume industry has exploded in popularity over the last few years. When we were locked down, forced to eat our own terrible cooking day in and day out while facing an uncertain and terrifying era we are only beginning to unpack, scent was one of the few ways to escape the confinements of daily life and stretch our “legs” a bit.
Today we have an interview with journalist-turned-perfumer Maxwell Williams of UFO Parfums, whose work focuses on the ways we interact with and are driven by scent. Their work challenges the notion of what a perfume can be and the context in which it lives in.
I hope you enjoy, and as always, if there is a creator you think we should be highlighting, hit me up at slowghost@substack.com or in the comments.
~Laura
Image: COME TEES x UFO PARFUMES, Slow Ghost logo: Tyler Lafreniere.
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A Nose By Any Other Name
How a fascination with the olfactory took journalist-turned-perfumer Maxwell Williams around the world and back.
Institute for Art And Olfaction
Maxwell Williams and their work defy the easy elevator pitch. They served as an editor at several top indie magazines for years while writing for Vogue, Condé Nast Traveler, Art in America, The New York Times, ACLU Magazine, GQ, Dazed, and Departure. After taking a break from the tumultuous world of media, they’ve pivoted to olfactory art and experiences, their work blending sculpture, photography, and performance, which has led to solo exhibitions at Galerie de Thorigny (Paris), SEASON Gallery (Seattle), Olfactory Art Keller (New York), the Institute for Art & Olfaction (Los Angeles) and a residency at Mediamatic (Amsterdam).
Through their genderless perfume label, UFO Parfums, inspired by rave culture, Williams has collaborated with brands like Come Tees and OBEY, creators Parker Ito and Tea Hacic-Vlahovic, the poet Ariana Reines, and musician Reggie Watts. They have also contributed several chapters to the book The Essence: Discovering the World of Scent, Perfume & Fragrance (Gestalten, 2019) and wrote and directed the auditory-olfactory horror play LUXURE/OCCIRE, performed at the Experimental Scent Summit 2018 in London.
UFO Parfums
Slow Ghost: It's so interesting that, and correct me if I'm wrong, you started perfume as an area you wanted to explore and now it's a major part of what fuels you.
Maxwell Williams: Yes, it did start that way. I took a class at the Institute for Art and Olfaction almost ten years ago. The Institute just celebrated its 11th anniversary. But I took a class when it was first starting. I became friends with the founder, Saskia Wilson Brown, who's a linchpin of the community. I kept going to the classes, which became a hobby, but I also loved it. Immediately, I understood it to be this multifaceted thing I could explore in many different directions. There were so many places and questions I could try to answer. Maybe it was my journalism brain that was like, "Oh, wow, this is so interesting, and all the answers aren't there yet, so maybe I can look more into it." So, I started studying and researching, both in the practical aspect and as a researcher. Later, Saskia decided she wanted to form a board and asked if I wanted to join, and I've been on it now for about six or seven years.
Peau D’Ange, a collaboration between Halcyon Veil x UFO Parfums
Simultaneously, I was a journalist for 15 years or so. I started my career in New York and then moved out to Los Angeles. I worked as an editor on the executive side, but that was still with independent magazines — everything from running photo shoots to writing articles. Then I went freelance and just wrote for a long time, and enjoyed it. But then the industry started to collapse, and as we all know, thousands of journalists are now without jobs because so many publications have gone under. So, the freelance industry became really competitive. My rates started to go down even though my experience had gone up, and I was seeing this constricting of the industry. At the same time, I got stiffed on a couple of big projects where I had to go to the city of New York and was part of a landmark Freelance Isn't Free Act lawsuit against a publication that didn't want to pay a few thousand dollars. But as a freelance writer, a few thousand dollars is the difference between staying in your living place and paying your credit card minimum payments.
At a certain point, I realized I didn't want to stay in the freelance writing game. I started doing some copywriting. But it wasn't as fun as journalism. At the same time, I was continuing to make perfume and loving it. I started attending conferences and being present in this international perfume community. I wrote for Departures and traveled to Grasse, the home place of Western perfumery, to visit some of the most important areas. I began to understand my way around this field that is quite difficult to get into.
Institute for Art And Olfaction
Can you tell me more about that?
It's a closed-off place. As an independent perfumer who doesn't work for one of the seven or eight big perfume manufacturers, I'm producing and hand-bottling everything myself. It's extraordinarily difficult to build. I see a lot of parallels with journalism. As a freelance writer, you make those incremental steps. You write for the next publication, and then you go to the next publication and tell them, "Oh, I wrote for this publication," and they try you out. I'm doing much of the same, where I'll collaborate with a slightly bigger company next time. That's how it's become my primary career at this point.
You just came back from a perfume conference. What are these are like?
Every year, the Institute for Art and Olfaction holds an award ceremony that I consider to be the Golden Globes of the perfume industry. It's the more independent side of things. The foreign press does not vote on it; it's not the Oscars, which would be the more mainstream perfume awards (the FiFi Awards) that give all their awards to designer brand perfumes. We do the opposite. We hold an award ceremony for independent and artisan perfumers. Everyone from the indie perfume world and the olfactory art world comes. Those who are smaller companies and simply make their perfumes from home. We give out a series of awards at a fairly prestigious event. I wore a tuxedo this year at the ceremony, which was in Lisbon at a beautiful old building called Casa de Alentejo. If you look at the pictures, they are very baroque and ornate and beautiful.
Institute for Art And Olfaction
And this happens every year?
We did it online during the pandemic and then in LA the year after, which is our home space. We're trying to do it in LA every other year, but we've also been doing it in Amsterdam, London, and Berlin. We're going to try to do it in Asia in the future. We also do a series of events surrounding the awards. One is the Experimental Scent Summit, a curated program of talks and demonstrations that gets to the "new" in perfumery, developments, and technologies. One of our members, Jeffrey Paul, did a cocktail party this year with aromatic scented cocktails. Then, I always do a scented rave. I find a club in the city and do an installation. So, there are some beautiful scents when people come out and dance to techno.
People either think of perfume as super industrialized — the kind you buy at the big box stores — or something wholly intellectual and cloistered. You found this DIY space where you can get people to enjoy perfume and see it as something accessible. Like wine, it can be intimidating but doesn't have to be.
That's personally my approach, and who knows where my journey will go. Eventually, I have dreams of not doing everything myself. I think I will always be the person who does the original blend, mainly for my own brand, but there are things I wouldn't say I like to do that I eventually would love not to be DIY. For example, I don't like to design my own website.
UFO Parfum
Oh, 100%.
I'm using a website template, but I would love to hire somebody to make something beautiful. Or even have people in the lab who can help or handle the business or logistics. Logistics are a nightmare for perfume. There are a lot of barriers to entry when you're turning it from a hobby of blending to becoming a company. And shipping is a huge problem. I need to go through a third-party shipper, and you need to have these really difficult to get hazardous materials certificates. It's a long and complicated process. Also, ideally, you want to have everything in-house if you're going to make an independent perfume company. All of those things are barriers to entry. It is very, like you said, hard to understand. A part of that is also the high overhead. I put every penny I made as a copywriter into my perfume practice. When making perfume, everything costs money, but you have to be willing to pay. And as somebody who doesn't have a trust fund, it's a tricky dance. I'm also competing with people that do have lots of funding. When people ask me how to do these things, I'm like, well, it's hard. But I'm happy to share exactly how I did it. But it's more challenging than you think it might be.
UFO Parfums
People have an illusion that all of us could become perfumers, but there is a strong business aspect behind it. For instance, if you want a specific scent, you need to get the raw materials in bulk.
The other thing is that it's not just getting it in bulk but getting it in breadth. What you want is to build a library of scents. I have thousands of different scents in mine, and each costs something to get. And then, when you find a formula, you buy them in bulk. But just to get the breadth, you have to spend so much money. It's crazy
If there was any person or group you could collaborate with, or any project you've dreamed of, what would it be?
I am doing some projects now that are dreams. I'm in this great position of not being jaded, I'm still a baby. I'm living the dream. Right now, I'm working with some music festivals to design merch items, perfumes, and then musical artists, which I'm not at liberty to say yet. One larger underground artist and I are planning and scheming a perfume. But I would also love to work with fashion houses, and am working with a designer named Rio Uribe for his label Rio Sport. He won the CFDA award nine years ago. I have worked with Obey Clothing and Come Tees, and I'd love to do more like that. And I'd love to work with outside-the-box brands. For instance, Hims and Hers made a perfume. I also want to work as a perfumer at other independent perfume companies that hire perfumers like Zoologist, American Perfumer, or Xyrena. But I'll never be able to collaborate exclusively with a big fashion house because they only work with the big seven or eight perfume manufacturers, or they have it in-house. I want to explore the next level down, the cool independent companies. And I'd love to work with more music festivals.
One of the other companies I'm working with is everybody.world. We're doing two scents coming out this fall. This summer, I'm also teaching a class at the Institute about the history of scent and music and how they intertwine. Our senses of smell and hearing are interrelated in both physiological and sociolinguistic aspects. A lot of the words that are used to describe perfumes are borrowed from music. We talk about notes; we talk about a perfumer's organ. It has been interrelated and interlaced in a lot of different ways since the mid-19th century when Septimus Piesse, a perfumer, first described this idea of the notes of perfume. He had done that as a one-to-one type piece of music: here's what you're smelling and how it looks musically. And since then, it's been done that way.
UFO Parfums
If someone wants to learn more about this world, what are some books that really inspired you.
A Diary of a Nose: a Year in the Life of a Perfumer by Jean-Claude Ellena. He is the head perfumer behind a lot of Hermes perfumes. He's a genius. We love him. He's also a diarist and has journaled his life and put it into a couple of books and articles. It's not for the independent perfumer, but it gives some nice insights into how a perfumer thinks about scent. Also, Chandler Burr's The Emperor of Scent. It's a dialogue with Luca Turin, one of the people who popularized a sort of biological neuroscience and put a pop version of that into the mainstream. Luca Turin and his partner Tania Sanchez also wrote the book Perfumes A to Z, a pithy review of hundreds of perfumes. People take that as a bit of a critical volume.
Are there any events you want readers to know about?
There's another music festival that I'm working with called The Friends With Benefits Festival, which is happening in Idyllwild in August. I'll be there doing scents for their musical performances. In November, I'm mounting an exhibition that's a two-person collaborative between myself and Sean Raspet, an artist who works in olfaction, at the Olfactory Art Keller, an art gallery in New York that primarily deals in olfactory art. It'll be my second exhibition there. I also have a piece up in a show called Found Scents. I surreptitiously took some plant material from a notoriously restrictive botanical garden and tinctured the materials into this beautiful wearable perfume that I've called "Redacted Garden."
Olfactory Art Keller
The exhibition we're doing in November, Sean and I, is on our olfactory system, which was described much later than many of our other systems. It wasn't until 2004 that Richard Axel and Linda Buck won the Nobel Prize for explaining the olfactory system. They're still doing a lot of work mapping the genetic structure, and they're finding a lot of our olfactory receptors are susceptible to mutation or variation. So, we have been developing this perfume that only uses materials related to the olfactory receptors susceptible to variation of mutation. It's like an olfactory Rorschach test. Ideally, each person that smells it has some sort of mutation. Will smell something slightly or even vastly different.
So it says much more about you than the perfume.
Ideally. We are still determining how everyone's cones respond to light, but can gather information so that you see blue the same way I see blue. But some people have mutations in their cones and difficulty seeing green. We call that colorblind. Then, we have a similar term in our olfactory system called anosmia, with different degrees of anosmia. There's a complete anosmia, which means you can't smell at all. And then there's specific anosmia, which means that you can't smell certain molecules, and then there are degrees within that. You might have an anosmia, but that might not be complete, which is the variation we're discussing. You may smell something different than even the general population. For instance, many musks are related to these genetic variations. Perfumers will add different musk variations into a perfume they want to smell like musk because it's so common that many can’t smell specific notes.
That's so interesting. Thank you for breaking it down. You really do make this much easier for the average person to understand.
I hope so. I mean, that's my job as an educator! To try to help people understand what these systems are. A part of it, too, is that we're approaching it as artists, and trying to express the things that we learn in the best way to the general public.
From the archives:
The Subversive, Transfixing World of Jelly Art
Pivoting To Witchcraft With Meredith Graves
Copenhagen's Fabrics of the Future
Raymond Pettibon Appreciates Your Black Flag Tributes
Slow Ghost is a newsletter covering the next wave in culture, brought to you by writer Laura Feinstein.
Thank you so much for the lovely conversation <3