An engraving from the 1576 English edition of The New Jewell of Health symbolizes the art of distillation, which was used to extract essential oils from fruits, flowers, and other materials. The "Boat of Foolish Smells," in a caricature engraving published in Josse Bade''s 1502 edition of La Nef des Folles (The Ship of Fools). Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it. --PATRICK SÜSKIND, Perfume Egyptians emptied corpses of their organs and filled the cavities with aromatics to prepare them for the afterlife. Romans splashed doves with rose water and set them loose in banquet halls to scent the air. Marie Antoinette employed her own perfumer, Jean-Louis Fargeon, who created bespoke perfumes to match the queen''s many moods.

People have feasted on aromatic materials, scented temples with them, offered them to guests. Whatever the vehicle--flowers or food, incense or perfume--people in every time and place have gone out of their way to exercise and indulge the sense of smell. Why? Because no other sense makes us feel so fully alive, so truly human, so deeply, unconsciously, and immediately connected with our memories and experiences. No other sense so moves us. As an artisanal perfumer who works with extraordinary aromatic ingredients from all over the world, I venture deep into the fragrant world every day. And one of my greatest joys is bringing other people there, too, and watching as they immerse themselves in the experience. Scent is fun, sexy, visceral, transporting: it reminds us who we are and connects us to one another and to the natural world. Of all the senses, the sense of smell is the one that reaches most readily beyond us, even as it most powerfully taps the wellsprings of our inmost selves.

It has an unparalleled capacity to wake us up, to make us fully human. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde portrays the deep, instinctive connection between scent and our unconscious thoughts and emotions: And so he would now study perfumes and the secrets of their manufacture, distilling heavily scented oils and burning odorous gums from the East. He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their true relations, wondering what there was in frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one''s passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that stained the imagination; and seeking often to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences of sweet-smelling roots and scented, pollen-laden flowers; of aromatic balms and of dark and fragrant woods; of spikenard, that sickens; of hovenia, that makes men mad; and of aloes, that are said to be able to expel melancholy from the soul. Wilde knows that aromas can take us anywhere, that they are a magic carpet we can ride to hidden worlds, not only to other times and places but deep within ourselves, beneath the surface of daily life. We close our eyes--we do this instinctively before we inhale a scent, as if preparing for the internal journey--and before we even consciously recognize what we''re smelling, we are carried away without our consent. Or we are stopped in our tracks, brought entirely into the present moment. (The next time you catch a whiff of skunk, try thinking about anything else at all.) I''ll never forget the first time I smelled the intense aromatic essences that are the perfumer''s palette.

I had signed up for a perfume class at a nearby aromatherapy studio. The teacher laid out many small bottles of naturally derived botanical essences for us to compose with: oakmoss, angelica, jasmine, frankincense, patchouli, kewda, sweet orange, lime. I leaned over to smell each one, amazed at how rich and complex and singular and stinky and alive they were, how transporting. As I took in the oils, in all their gorgeous diversity, it was as if a mirrored sensation were occurring inside me; I felt as if I were becoming one with the oils, as if they were entering me. I couldn''t tell where I left off and they began. I couldn''t and didn''t want to find the words to describe them; I just felt radiant and alive--as radiant and alive as they were. I fell in love immediately. By then I''d already lived for more than twenty years in Berkeley, California, where I had a thriving psychotherapy practice and had written a few books.

The city itself had had a profound influence on me from the moment I arrived there, after an upbringing in Detroit. In Berkeley, I found the bohemian ambience I had longed for, an energy that was palpable in the streets, in the restaurants and cafés and shops. It felt as if behind every Arts and Crafts façade there were people making pottery or jewelry, writing books, doing improv, inventing new recipes, collaborating in a kind of rampant cross-fertilization of creativity. As it happened, I moved into an Arts and Crafts house right behind the restaurant Chez Panisse, where Alice Waters had just begun to spread the gospel of locavorism. Three houses down was the original Peet''s Coffee, where Mr. Peet himself roasted the beans. My block was redolent with the smells of fresh coffee and of vegetables roasting in Chez Panisse''s wood-fired oven. In Detroit, front yards had been clipped, manicured, rolled-lawn affairs, but here in Berkeley people''s front yards overflowed with casual cottage gardens of fresh herbs and heritage roses, fruit trees in bloom, jasmine and wisteria climbing from basement to attic.

I had never seen such a gift to the street! Despite Berkeley''s reputation as the epicenter of the counterculture, the aesthetic it was steeped in was simple, almost Old World. It spoke to me, and it played a great role in shaping my own aesthetic. Working with the best ingredients, doing only what needed to be done and no more--this became my creative mantra. It was a mantra that guided me through several career turns, fueled by the Berkeley milieu. As a weaver I worked with a range of natural materials--horsehair, goat hair, wool, silk--learning to spin them into yarn, and dyeing them with herbs and lichens I gathered. I developed an appreciation for the ways that raw materials were grown, processed, and used all over the world. Later I trained to be a therapist and focused my practice on artists and writers, to whose brilliance and creative energy I was drawn. Researching a book I was writing on Brian Jones, founding member of the Rolling Stones, I was drawn to his fascination with the costumes and music of other cultures, and to the way he embodied the conviction that anything is possible and that creativity is what life is all about.

I wrote another book, The Story of Your Life, marrying my fascination with plot and narrative to what I had learned about character and transformation through my years as a therapist. Then I decided to write a novel, with a perfumer as my protagonist. I knew nothing about the craft of perfumery, but its aura had allure. I signed up for that perfume class, little dreaming that in the process of researching my novel I was about to discover my true calling and become the artist I had only planned to write about. Not only did I fall in love with essential oils, but I discovered that I had a knack for blending them. Just as sometimes you meet someone it seems you''ve known forever, the essences, with their distinct personalities, had a mysterious familiarity to me. I could appreciate their textures and shapes almost instinctively, like a language in which I was already fluent. As I started making perfumes, I could identify where and how I''d made mistakes, and in correcting them I learned so much about the way each essence interacted with others.

I set up my own perfume business, a true cottage industry. Gradually I developed a following for my artisanal fragrances, developed from entirely natural materials that I sourced from all over the world. At the same time, I immersed myself in the rich history of scent, acquiring more than two hundred rare and antique books on perfumery, one book leading me to the next as I fell under the spell of their charm, beauty, and eccentricity. Discovering the universe they contained was like being the first explorer in a cave that harbored the unsullied pottery and intact arrowheads of a lost civilization. In the stories of perfume, one could relive the world being discovered, retrace the footsteps of the people who came upon spices in faraway places and learned to extract the aromatic oils from exotic plants. In their intricate woodcuts and engravings, old distilling apparatuses looked like crosses between lab equipment and the tools of witchcraft. It wasn''t just the history of perfume I was discovering. I had entered a heady world in which perfume commingled with medicine, science, alchemy, cooking, mysticism, cosmetics, and craft.

There lay the richer, more synesthetic sensibility of a bygone time, a beautiful and mysterious universe of magical things jumbled together. Eventually I did write another book of my own, not a novel but Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume, which introduced perfumers and "perfumistas" to the sensual history of natural aromatics and the building blocks of creating perfume with them. The nascent natural/artisanal perfumery movement embraced the book, and I began to teach the art of perfumery as well as to practice it. I also began to confer and collaborate with chefs and mixologists who were coming at natural essences via food and drink. I found myself in the vanguard of a surge of interest in scent as a key component of flavor.