After reading about Berkeley’s Aftel Archive of Curious Scents in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Vogue and Smithsonian magazine—to name a few—I thought I knew what to expect when I got there.
Indeed, my visit to the museum played out almost exactly as outlined in their coverage. Upon entry, my husband and I received an envelope full of tools: a glove to handle rare books of perfume formulas and lore; a paper nose cone to “zoom in” on scents; a scrap of wool to neutralize our smell palette; and four paper dipsticks, which, at the end of our visit, would be dipped in scents of our choosing from the gorgeous perfume organ, a tiered collection of essence-filled vials.
Inside I also found the promised collection of objets d’art, perfumery tools, raw materials, centuries-old literature, endangered creatures and, naturally, curiosities. I knew what was visible, sniffable, touchable and all the ways I would be welcomed—by the owner herself and the cozy nature of the home the museum is housed in.
What I did not expect is how unprepared I was to really, truly, experience the world it offers visitors.
A Missing Sense
Much like the natural perfumes that owner Mandy Aftel made her name creating, the Aftel Archive is a museum of subtlety.
“I think people come to the museum and think it’s going to smell like Macy’s,” Aftel shared with me in a Zoom call a few days later. “Natural perfumes don’t radiate. You have to be intimate with someone to smell it. It doesn’t have the trail that synthetics do.”
Intimacy, I discovered, is difficult to conjure up in an instant, especially in a museum full of so many unfamiliar elements, though Aftel designed every interaction around it. Open a drawer and pluck a rocky piece of opoponax resin to roll in the palm of the hand. Uncap one by one, a dozen vials of hefty glass and lean in to unearth the secret of a fig-less fig perfume. Pick up the weighty handle of a magnifying glass to decipher the pages of The Book of Perfumes.
This I did with intense concentration, dedication even, but I failed to do so with the same carefree nature of my beloved guest.
“I was so glad you came and got to experience with your husband,” Aftel said by email, “who seemed to really enjoy it.”
Was it that obvious that I had not, like him, found my moment of revelation? “That smells like my uncle’s garage,” said my husband over a vial of fir. He dove into memory in quick succession. “And that,” he said of another vial, “smells like my father’s garage.” Even when I smelled honeysuckle, I was not transported back to New Mexico, where I had first encountered the scent in the dry desert air.
“I find people respond to scent from a very animal part of who they are. Not a part that has a lot of language and not a part that is about what they present to others in the world. It’s more a deeper piece of them,” said Aftel. “People will be attracted to certain smells that speak to their soul, and it bypasses kind of everything else.”
To go deep, to get close, to make room for attraction—they require one to be free of expectation, of assumption, and, candidly, the burden of a journalistic assignment. I moved through the museum waiting for a story to reveal itself, in search of something to share with readers. In the process, I closed off the very part of me the museum calls upon guests to surrender.
Drawing Out the Feeling
For 30 years, Mandy Aftel was a therapist for artists and creative people. “That part of my brain is not gone,” she said, though it was not something she had to say.
I sensed that energy almost immediately. As our conversation went on, I gave into it, beginning to ask her questions more for myself than my story. Though I don’t know for certain, I suspect she realized that, and soon the call took on the quality of a session.
Aftel offered advice on how to describe scent (“anything that comes from food is fair game for smell”) and where to find beauty (“nature”). We veered into an affable conversation about modernity and husbands as her own spouse, Foster, chimed in off camera. I felt a comfort with her that I couldn’t conjure up in the museum because I had come to terms with the fact that I did not know where my story was going. At that moment, I was talking to her just to see what happened.
“People come to the museum insecure about scent, a little bit like wine. They don’t have the vocabulary, and they’re worried their choice will be wrong.” Aftel said. “I feel like scent is a purely sensual pleasure in that there is no wrong answer. Any answer you have, that’s the right answer.”
She was referring to the act of attaching words to odors, but it spoke to me beyond that. I realized how insecure I had been walking through the museum, facing the self-imposed pressure to get the story right, to write something that hadn’t been written. Plus I was insecure about this sensual realm, of letting myself be vulnerable enough to experience pleasure in a place I didn’t know, surrounded by strangers.
What might have happened had I lingered on some scents a little longer? What would I have written had I never read anything about the museum at all? What might have come to me then?
The Aftermath
Normally I begin my day briefly glancing out the window of my apartment before settling into the news. The morning of my phone call with Aftel, when I slid up the shade, the clouds outside stopped me from turning away. In an unusually milky gray sky, they looked placed—the work of an artist instead of atmosphere.
A few hours later, those peculiar clouds remained, suspended in a sunset-poised sky among the edges of San Francisco’s downtown buildings. The sky exuded a kind of confidence, and everything in it had a sharpness that seemed important. I kept looking up as I walked, trying to understand why I couldn’t stop. And then an answer came to me like a vapor. Perhaps this was what Aftel had told me about scent, how it bypasses the usual channels. Here was a satisfaction deeper in me than where words choose to go, my animal nature emerging after all. Pleasure.
Most visitors, Aftel told me when I arrived at the museum, are repeat customers. At least half of them come back to experience it a second time. Now I know why, just like I know that I, too, will be back. I won’t do anything to prepare. I’ll just let myself go.
The Aftel Archive of Curious Scents is open every Saturday from 10am-6pm at 1518-1/2 Walnut St., Berkeley 94709. Call 510.841.2111 or visit aftelier.com for tickets.
