Seducing Marc Antony

I became seduced working with extraordinary little bottles of oils. Essences of flowers, resins, herbs, attars, and woods. Holding herbs and spices in my hands, I sense their ancientness. Ingredients such as sandalwood and cardamom were once carried across the desert on camels.

I have long grown weary of being surrounded by synthetic fragrances, and I realize that our sense of smell needs retraining. Instead of smelling pure rose oil, we have been smelling rose fragrance oil, adulterated or completely synthetic. We are taught, and even encouraged, to spend our money on synthetic perfumes and fragrances. Consider that applying synthetic perfumes poses a risk to your nervous, immune, and endocrine systems. Our perfumes and colognes, candles, laundry detergents, and air fresheners are synthetic. Most who think they are allergic to fragrances may actually be allergic to the synthetics.

Do you realize that synthetic air fresheners and even perfumes actually kill the libido? Fake scents act as sex hormones that can lower testosterone levels. If it affects our libido, couldn’t it also affect our creativity and zest for living?

I want more real, not less. More love, not less.

In the art of seduction, Cleopatra had her own perfume laboratory. She soaked the sails of her ship in jasmine and rose to scent the air and seduce Marc Antony as she sailed into Tarsus, and later held a rendezvous in a room carpeted with rose petals, several feet thick. How could the great seduction of Marc Antony have occurred if Cleopatra had simply plugged in a Renuzit?

When I began working with botanical fragrances, essential oils, and perfumery, I found the scent needed to be applied more frequently. The more frequently I apply, the more I receive. In doing this, I believe it is possible to take on the essence, perhaps even the personality of the ingredient itself, be it sandalwood, rose, or spicy floral attars and resins. To keep letting it come into you. To become the essence.

The rose will begin to recognize you and know you are the rose. I like to think that all of the trees and herbs, woods, resins, and grasses will recognize us as kin.

Much more alluring than being mistaken for a plug-in air freshener.