“Smell was our first sense, and it was so successful that in time the small lump of olfactory tissue atop the nerve cord grew into a brain. Our cerebral hemispheres were originally buds from our olfactory stalks. We think because we smelled.”
― Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses
Why Osmic?
Greek osmḗ "smell, odor"
Osmia is the study of our sensory perception of smell
About me:
My name is Annie and I am an independent perfumer located in Brooklyn, NY. I was taught in a methodology of fragrance formulation by Saskia Wilson Brown, founder of the Institute of Art and Olfaction in LA, and self taught thereafter. My practice is informed by a curiosity about the neuropsychological primality of scent.
My ethos:
Adorning fragrance is twofold. It is a visceral way of communicating to others your sensorial preferences, as well as serving as a personal ritual of anointment, bestowing value in the here and now alongside a recognition of its impermanence.
I work mostly with raw botanical materials. Oils and absolutes distilled from flowers, bark, leaves, roots, seeds, fruit peels and other natural living sources offer a complex scent profile, vary batch to batch depending on the cultivation environment and have rich cultural and natural histories of use and trade that inform the narrative of our contemporary use of them.
I am also fascinated by synthetically designed aromatic molecules. Some of these smells don’t exist in nature but we still have the ability to perceive them. Some are facsimiles of familiar scents but are designed to vaporize more slowly to increase longevity of wear (sillage). Synthetic molecules also allow the fragrance industry to remain environmentally sustainable and animal-cruelty free.
