Scent sculptor

by Pamela White

Boulder perfume artist Dawn Spencer Hurwitz always knew she had a sensitive sense of smell. She would catch a whiff of milk from the carton and know that it was about to go sour. She would tell her mom if the meat thawed for the night’s dinner didn’t smell right. And even as a child, she formed a relationship with the natural world that was largely based on smells, surrounding herself with things that had pleasant scents.

“In the spring when the violets and the little lily of the valley would bloom, I knew I wasn’t supposed to pick them, but I would gather them and bring them to my room,” she says.

She savored their scents for as long as they lasted, then looked forward to the next spring.

She loved her mother’s perfumes, as well, and saved her allowance to buy her own bottles of scent — which, inevitably, her mother confiscated because they were too mature for a young girl.

“I didn’t know you could become a perfumer,” Spencer Hurwitz says. “And that’s what people say to me now — ‘I didn’t know you could do that for a living.’”

As Spencer Hurwitz went on to discover, one can, indeed, earn a living by making perfume. But one can also make something far more significant — art.

Olfactory bliss
“This is what I’d call the ‘Middle C’ of ambergris,” Spencer Hurwitz says, holding up a blue glass bottle.

The scent emanating from the bottle isn’t necessarily pleasant, but it is compelling. It slips through the nostrils with a distinct animal note — almost musty, fecal, thick like algae, then softer with a hint of ocean. One sniff leads to another and another until the unusual aroma seems to rest on the tongue, oddly soothing, undeniably sensual.

Most people who make perfumes in the United States are hired by big corporations out of college chemistry programs. They go to work in white coats in laboratories creating and combining the synthetic, chemical aromatics that are the hallmark of most American perfumes. But Spencer Hurwitz got her start in a very different way.

Her mastery of scent began in college with the study of painting — color, shadow, form. But while in college she became very ill. She didn’t want to take the advice of her doctors, who wanted her to be on medication for the rest of her life. Seeking an alternative, she began studying herbs and aromatherapy and came into contact with someone who managed an old-fashioned parfumerie where fragrances were made by hand. The manager told her that one of the staff members had quit, leaving an opening.

“I knew I had a good sense of smell,” Spencer Hurwitz says.  “I felt I had a pretty good aesthetic sense and felt sure that I could translate aesthetic criteria into aromatic criteria.”

She updated her painting portfolio and took it to the interview, where the owner saw her enthusiasm and decided to give her a chance.

The first step for Spencer Hurwitz was to memorize the hundreds of aromatics that are used to make perfumes — florals, animal scents, resins, spices, woods, leafy smells, oceanic scents. To succeed in perfume making, she had to not only be able to distinguish each scent and remember it, but she needed to be able to understand how they would smell when blended together in different combinations. She wrote down her observations about smells, keeping a sort of journal of her aromatic experiences, a process she recommends for people interested in making perfume.

“It’s like learning a language,” she says. “You need a vocabulary. You need to be able to make poetry out of smells.”
For Spencer Hurwitz, the language of scent includes not only adjectives, but also hand gestures and descriptions of motion. Scents move. They shift. They settle.

Everyone experiences aromas differently, she says. By keeping notes about one’s responses and thoughts about aromas — emotional responses, as well as detailed descriptions of smells — people can learn to translate their sensory experiences into perfumes that others can enjoy.

 “It was when I got to start working with the aromatics and the clients that I realized I really understood it,” she says.
And what she understood wasn’t just how to craft enticing fragrances, but that perfume-making was its own art form, just like painting or poetry.

She apprenticed with the Boston perfume maker for three years before going in with a coworker to buy the business. Two years later, she struck out on her own, moving to Boulder in 1995.

Parfums des Beaux Arts, her North Boulder studio, is the furthest thing from a chemistry lab one can imagine. A large table, used to prepare and pack online orders of her fragrances, dominates the front room. Delicate perfume bottles, samples from Spencer Hurwitz’s various product lines, decorate one corner together with a bouquet of fresh tulips, while a bright red sofa offers visitors a comfy place to sit. Signs on the wall read, “Never, never, never give up,” and, “The world is conspiring in your favor.”

But the blending room, where she sits now, is where the artistry happens. Behind her, shelves are filled with hundreds of cobalt-blue glass bottles with labels like “myrrh,” “beech,” “tamarind,” and “lavender.” To her left are graduated pipettes and capillary pipettes, which she uses to measure, drop by micro-drop, the amount of essential oils that go into the fragrances she creates. Antique French perfumes in tiny, delicate bottles sit on a shelf off to the side, part of her private collection.

At the moment, she has nine variations of ambergris on the worktable, each distinct from the others. Given its origins, the complexity of its scent shouldn’t be surprising. Ambergris is to sperm whales what pearls are to oysters, the substance forming in the sperm whale’s stomach to coat something that causes stomach upset. The chunk of digestive material is then regurgitated or defecated into the ocean, where it washes through water for years, perhaps washing up on a beach in Australia. Beachcombers lucky enough to find a clump of this hardened sperm whale vomit can look forward to early retirement.

Spencer Hurwitz offers a sniff of the three other animal tones, musk, castorium and civet. Musk, once taken from the glands of a musk deer, is intoxicatingly sensual and sweet — a scent in which to drown oneself. Castorium, taken from oil glands found between a beaver’s hind legs, is more animal than ambergris, pungent and earthy. Civet, once scraped from the perianal gland of civets, smells like nothing so much as concentrated cat urine and is enough to knock a person over.

Eu de litter box, anyone?
“Sometimes just one drop of civet in a fragrance makes all the difference,” she says.

Though the animal tones that Spencer Hurwitz uses are synthetic — not only is harvesting these scents cruel to the animals, but the cost of natural animal essences is extreme and market shares are parceled out years in advance to big corporations — the vast majority of the oils and essences she uses are completely natural.

“I would rather smell stinky, stinky natural smells than gasoline, and that includes aroma chemicals,” she says.
For natural tones, there’s bees wax, one of Spencer Hurwitz’s favorite scents.

“You can smell the bees’ bodies,” Spencer Hurwitz says, pointing out the subtle animal note embedded in the overall scent.
And, indeed, you can — a warm, almost sweaty smell.

There are countless variations of honey, each almost sickly sweet and very distinct.

“Can you smell the hay in that one? That’s the French countryside.”

There’s iris, paprika, tuberose, artichoke, frankincense, pine, fresh-cut ginger, orange blossom, liatrix, orris, lime peel, peppercorn,
narcissus, an herb called deer’s tongue…

A person could sit here and sniff all day.

Pity the nose
Human beings have five senses through which to interpret the world. We see, hear, taste, feel and smell our way through life. But of those five senses, our sense of smell is perhaps the least appreciated.

Modern life tends to be dominated by sights and sounds. In fact, we are bombarded by things to see and hear. And yet our sense of smell offers information vital to not only human experience, but also survival.

Odors tell us when food has gone bad. They warn us of changing weather, of nearby animals, of fire. Odors can even tell us which man or woman would help us produce the healthiest possible offspring. And our olfactory sense is designed to get our attention — quickly.

“There is a rather direct route into the part of the brain that regulates mood and emotion and assists in memory,” says Dr. Charles J. Wysocki, a member of the Monelle Chemical Senses Center who has been researching the human olfactory sense for more than 30 years. “It’s like an interstate highway, going directly there. Other sensory systems can and do get there, but they take the country routes.”

Though it was once believed that the olfactory sense was more tied to memory than other sensory systems, Wysocki says that’s not true.

“It turns out that when put directly to the test, other sensory systems are every bit as good when it comes to evoking memories,” he says. “However, the kinds of memories that other sensory systems evoke are often stale, flat, whereas the types of memories that the olfactory system brings forth are laden with emotion and a lot of mood.”

But our sense of smell does much more than that. It can even influence our choice of mate. Each human being has a unique “odor print,” much like an individual fingerprint. The odor is determined by the same set of genes that regulates the immune system. Though the mechanism isn’t understood, conclusive research has proven that people are attracted to those whose immune systems are genetically very different from their own.

“The idea here is that any offspring that might come of such a mating would have the immune system from two parents who differ in the genes that regulate the immune system,” Wysocki says. “So therefore it would provide the offspring with a more general defense than two individuals who had nearly the same set of genes.”

Wysocki’s research has shown that primer pheromones, chemicals produced in the male armpit, can alter a woman’s menstrual cycle and mood, affecting her fertility. Body odor can even offer subconscious clues about a person’s sexua| preference. Most of us are not consciously aware of these odors or their influence on our sex lives.

“I would venture to say if you ask any adult, they could surely recall at least once in their life where they’ve been in close proximity to someone and they would prefer not to be because of the smell coming off of the individual,” Wysocki says. “So it’s easy to demonstrate where individuals might avoid other people based on the smell they are experiencing. It’s very difficult to demonstrate or even have a person be aware that they are, in fact, attracted to someone based on smell.”

Women typically pay more attention to the input coming in from the sense of smell in social interactions than do men, while men pay more attention to visual cues. Not surprisingly, women generally have a more sensitive sense of smell than men.

“When a sex difference is detected, it favors women,” Wysocki says. “Women can detect lower concentrations of odors and are better at identifying them. They’re more sensitive to what they smell, experiencing pleasant and unpleasant odors more acutely.”

So in this day and age of scented shampoos, deodorant, mouthwash and chemical perfumes are people being deprived of crucial sensory information in ways that impacts reproduction?

“One would think so, but it would only be speculation on my part because no one’s really put that to the test,” Wysocki says.
Not only are people unaware of much of the information provided by their olfactory sense, some of its best input is credited to another sense — the sense of taste.

“There are people who are acutely aware of what types of information can be extracted by their sense of smell. But oftentimes people do take it for granted,” he says. “When they sit down and have their dinner meal, for example. As soon as they take a bite of it, they say ‘This tastes great,’ when, in fact sense of taste is limited to sweet, sour, bitter, salty and [savory]. The rest is coming from the sense of smell. Once we put something in our mouth it’s a confusion. It becomes taste when in fact it’s not.”

Dr. Wysocki suggests the following experiment. Take a variety of jellybeans and mix them up. Close your eyes, hold your nose and pick one at random.

“You will only taste sweetness and texture,” he says. “As soon as you let go of your nose, you will be able to identify what jellybean you’re eating.”

But our sense of smell is neglected in yet another way. Our senses of sight and sound thrill to theater, film, television shows, dance concerts. Our sense of sight gets treated to art exhibits, fireworks and laser shows. Our sense of hearing taps into the enjoyment of the iPod and the concert hall. But whoever heard of a scent exhibit or a smell concert?

Well, times may be changing.

The art of scent
For Spencer Hurwitz, designing a new fragrance is a creative process that starts in her experience of life. For 20 years, she has carried a notebook in which she writes notes for future designs. Like artists working in other media, she finds much of her inspiration in the natural world.

“I’ll be outside on a beautiful day and smell or hear something,” she says.

When an idea comes to her, she thinks it through, drop by drop, experiencing the fragrance in her mind until it’s so clear to her that she can almost smell the finished product. Then she sits down in her blending room. She knows exactly how many drops each size bottle holds and counts the various components drop by drop.

Particularly complex scents often need to sit for a week or so while the molecules macerate, or fully blend, before she can complete it.
“This gives me time to clear my head so I don’t think I’m smelling stuff I’m not,” she says.

After a week has gone by, she can return to the blending room to sniff the results of her work and refine them. About 85 percent of any particular design is usually completed in her first attempt.

Whenever possible, she uses 100 percent natural essences, which she buys from wholesalers who work directly with growers. When she needs animal notes or rare botanical notes, however, she uses the best possible synthetic options. As a result, even those designs with synthetic scents are at least 65 percent natural.

Currently, she offers a number of lines. Her Essence Studio line came with her from Boston and includes five or more new fragrances each year, including seasonal and holiday scents. It’s her least expensive line, accessible even to the teenage budget.

“The Essence Studio line is where I can be the most eclectic,” she says. “It’s where I can do scents that have a touch of humor. They’re not unfinished, but they can be sketches. I think doing sketches is sometimes fun.”

Her New Creations line was created for sale primarily in boutiques. It includes 12 elegant fragrances — a scent wardrobe — that can be layered.

“Each fragrance is like a little portrait,” she says. “If you’re going to buy one wardrobe and you don’t want to pick and choose, you can buy this.”

Her Limited Edition Collection is made up of her most artistic, signature fragrances. Limited to 500 bottles for any given fragrance, they often feature rare aromatics that usually aren’t always available to her.

“This is where I get to produce products that are signed and numbered like artists’ number prints,” she says. “They can be my most esoteric fragrances. I get to explore unusual themes.”

This past year she created fragrances to represent certain colors and the emotions that often accompany them. Inspired by Picasso’s cubist work “Three Women,” “Sienna” starts off with a piquant cinnamon, peppery scent, with mellower middle tones of basmati rice, honey and white oak, finally settling with notes of leather, balsam and, yes, civet. The end result is nothing like a cat box, but instead feels vibrant and sexy. “Celedon: A Velvet Green” has a bright, clear green scent that is somehow smooth, not sharp like many green scents. Then there’s “Blue-Green: Arnica,” which has oceanic tones and which was inspired in part by Claude Monet’s “Waterlilies.”
“Most people think of perfume as a commodity, and I do have products for sale,” she says. “What artist doesn’t want to sell their work? But instead of being a store, this is a studio.”

Her products are hand-counted, hand-blended, hand-bottled, and she enjoys matching people to the right scents, perfumes that work well with the chemical composition of their skin, their personalities and their fashion style. She custom makes fragrances, as well, consulting with clients who want a particular scent or scents for special occasions.

Among her clients is an A-list of celebrities: Kate Hudson, Goldie Hawn, Cher, Madonna, Donatella Versace, Demi Moore and many others. Her products sell online to clients in Europe and on both coasts, but in Boulder few people know about her.

“Americans are known for brash, bold chemical perfumes,” she says. “The fact that I don’t do that sets me apart.”

And now is the perfect time to stand out from the crowd. The New York Times recently hired its first ever perfume critic. Various European museums have started hosting scent exhibits.

And much closer to home, the Denver Art Museum has invited Spencer Hurwitz to speak about historical French perfumes in conjunction with its exhibit, “Artisans and Kings: Selected Treasures from the Louvre.” She will be designing scents representative of perfumes Queen Marie Antoinette and Madame de Pompadour might have worn, as well as examples of the kinds of scents that were commonly worn on scented wigs or used in potpourri to overcome the pre-indoor-plumbing stench of life at court.

“People are finally getting the idea that fragrance is an art form,” she says. “It’s about what it’s like to be alive, what it’s like to be a human being. That’s what every artist does. You translate your ideas about life into something other people can experience.”

Dawn Spencer Hurwitz will speak at the Denver Art Museum on Wednesday, Oct. 17, at 6:15 p.m.