The upcoming range - eloquently entitled ‘Sound’ - explores the act of listening and a process of merging scent and sound into fine perfume.
Phase one: listening
In honour of Aequill’s birthplace, I walked the streets of East London, deeply listening to the local soundscape and recording fragments of its essence using a combination of field recording and creative writing.
Sound and scent share the quality of transience, so I chose to walk, slowly and methodically through different neighbourhoods recording the kinds of feelings these sites inspired in me and capturing details that gave a sense of time and place.
I noted scents that accompanied or complimented the soundscape…
Taking shelter from spring showers, I sipped green tea in a small cafe whilst listening to rain dapple the window, appreciating how the flavour and scent of the green tea enhanced my ability to hear the raindrops.
I walked Regent’s Canal beneath morning sunshine, pausing under blooming mimosa trees, listening to birds singing and people laughing, admiring how the honeyed sweetness of the flowers merged with sounds of joy.
In another moment, looking towards the sky, I watched aeroplanes silently glide through cloud formations, imagining the scents that might be existing up there in the atmosphere.
Phase two: exploration
After recording these sonic-olfactory events, I set to work building a scent organ from pure essential oils and aroma molecules, and proceeded to make a series of scent sketches around the sonic themes of rain, birdsong, and silence.
Equating rain to green tea, birdsong to mimosa, and silence to cedarwood, I built fragrances around each key olfactory note, combining with other scents to create form and movement that mimicked their complimentary sound.
For example, I wanted the scent of green tea to fall gently around the wearer like a delicate spring rain, and for mimosa to radiate joyously from the skin. For silence, I wanted the cedarwood to move as a mysterious aura emanating from the person wearing it, the kind of fragrance that seduces whilst being almost imperceptible.
Phase three: refining
After the initial sketches were compiled and presented for peer review, then came a process of refinement and working alongside Aequill founder Jintana Khieochaum and an olfactory chemist to craft the initial experiments into industry-standard niche perfumes.
With an insistence on top quality ingredients (primarily of natural botanical origin) we aligned the perfumes with Aequill’s foundational home fragrance range Mum’s Aromatherapy Shop simply by using ingredients of excellence. The nose perceives organic scents with much more sophistication, so it was important that we present each component as accurately as possible, to create detailed nuance between the sonic and the olfactory realms.
Written by our resident artist: Ecka Mordecai
website: https://eckamordecai.bandcamp.com/album/critique-prosper
IG: @ecka_mordecai