In the heart of my Chelsea studio, surrounded by delicate glass vials and the earthy aroma of vetiver, I found myself rereading Tom Robbins’ “Jitterbug Perfume” for the umpteenth time. As the founder of Petite Histoire, a natural perfume atelier in New York City, I’ve always been drawn to Robbins’ olfactory odyssey—his vivid descriptions of scent as a bridge between the mundane and the divine, the fleeting and the eternal.

The novel’s central metaphor—the humble beet as a key to immortality—struck me anew. In my world of natural perfumery, we too seek the extraordinary in the ordinary, coaxing transcendent aromas from roots, leaves, and flowers. But as I set the book down and turned to my phone, scrolling mindlessly through Instagram’s curated unreality, I felt the irony of our modern condition: even as we grow increasingly connected in the digital realm, we’re becoming disconnected from our most primal sense—smell.

This dissonance inspired me to embark on a sensory pilgrimage across Manhattan, to explore how natural perfume offers a tangible anchor in our ever more virtual lives. In the city that never sleeps, where the cacophony of yellow cabs and the glare of Times Square billboards define the urban landscape, a quiet revolution is unfolding. Natural perfume, with its botanical complexity and artisanal character, is emerging as the olfactory equivalent of vinyl records in a streaming age—raw, imperfect, and impossible to digitize.

My journey began at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I hoped to calibrate my senses through visual art before diving into the world of scent. Standing before Monet’s “Water Lilies,” I was struck by how the painter had captured not just the sight of his garden, but its atmosphere—the humid air, the earthy scent of water and greenery almost palpable in the brushstrokes.

Just as a master photographer captures the soul of New York in a single frame, natural perfumers are distilling the essence of the city into bottles of liquid poetry. The pioneering work of Mandy Aftel, founder of Aftelier Perfumes and author of “Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume,” has influenced many of us in this community. In her influential book, Aftel explores how botanical materials can capture the essence of place and emotion through their intrinsic complexity. Her approach emphasizes the rich history and artisanal methods that define natural perfumery—techniques that have been largely forgotten in our age of mass-produced synthetic fragrances. [1]

In the Islamic Art wing, intricate perfume bottles from the Ottoman Empire caught my eye. Their delicate filigree work reminded me of the complexity of a well-crafted fragrance—each note carefully balanced, yet coming together in a harmonious whole. I jotted in my notebook: “Top notes: bright citrus, like sunlight on the Met’s facade. Heart: rich florals, the museum’s hidden gardens. Base: smooth sandalwood, old masters’ varnish.”

From the Met, I walked to Madison Avenue, where I visited several perfume boutiques. In these temples to olfactory art, I hoped to find inspiration in the work of both traditional and progressive perfumers. The stores’ sleek designs, with refrigerated cabinets housing precious elixirs, felt a world away from my own workspace, yet we shared a common goal: to translate emotion and memory into scent.

I sampled a fragrance heavy with patchouli and was instantly transported to my first New York apartment, a fifth-floor walkup where the previous tenant had left behind a stick of incense. That scent—earthy, slightly musty, yet oddly comforting—had become, in my mind, the smell of new beginnings.

This experience reminded me of Dr. Rachel Herz’s research on the olfactory-limbic connection. As a cognitive neuroscientist at Brown University and author of “The Scent of Desire,” Herz has conducted extensive research on the relationship between smell, emotion, and memory. Her work demonstrates that our olfactory system has direct neural connections to the brain’s limbic system, allowing scents to trigger emotional responses and memories in ways that visual or auditory stimuli cannot. This biological reality helps explain why fragrance experiences feel so immediate and profound compared to our digital interactions. [2]

The contrast between our digital lives and the experience of natural perfume couldn’t be more striking. While social media platforms present carefully edited versions of reality—filtered photos, curated feeds, and algorithmic content—natural perfume presents us with an unfiltered truth. It evolves on our skin, interacts with our unique body chemistry, and creates an experience that cannot be standardized or digitized.

As evening fell, I found myself at Carnegie Hall, not for a concert, but to experience the building’s unique acoustics. In the empty lobby (a friend who works there had let me in during a rehearsal break), I closed my eyes and imagined the molecules of a perfume dancing in the air like notes in a symphony.

The parallel between music and perfume struck me forcefully. Both are invisible yet profoundly moving, both unfold over time, revealing different facets as they develop. A perfume’s top notes are like a symphony’s opening bars—bright, attention-grabbing. The heart notes are the main melody, while the base notes provide a lingering resonance, like the final chords reverberating in Carnegie’s perfect acoustics.

This paradox—of representing something as ephemeral as scent or music in a digital format—brought to mind the work of Lizzie Ostrom, a perfume historian who writes under the pen name “Odette Toilette” and authored “Perfume: A Century of Scents.” Her research traces the changing role of scent in society through different eras, offering insights into contemporary perfume culture in our increasingly digital world. [3]

I find this paradox playing out in my own brand’s online presence. How do you convey through a flat screen what can only truly be experienced through the nose? A photograph can show the visual beauty of a rose, but it cannot convey its scent. A video can demonstrate the process of distilling jasmine, but it cannot let you experience the heady aroma that fills the air during that process.

Consider how we experience fragrance in the digital realm versus the physical world:

When we encounter a perfume online, we might see beautiful product photography, poetic descriptions of notes and accords, user reviews describing personal experiences, and lists of ingredients and their origins.

But what we miss is the actual sensory experience: the way the top notes burst upon first application, how the heart notes bloom with our body heat, the subtle transformation as base notes emerge hours later, and the personal interaction between our skin chemistry and the botanical compounds.

This gap between representation and reality is precisely what makes natural perfume so valuable in our digital age. It offers an experience that cannot be digitized, filtered, or experienced through a screen.

Hungry after my sensory explorations, I made my way to District M in Times Square, where the lines between taste and smell blur deliciously. As I savored a Neapolitan pizza, its aroma of basil and wood smoke mingling with the sweetness of San Marzano tomatoes, I contemplated the role of culinary scents in the olfactory landscape of New York and in my own creative process.

Natural perfume offers a sensory counterpoint to our increasingly digital lives through complex botanical compounds that interact with our physiology in fascinating ways:

These volatile compounds found in citrus peels, conifer resins, and herbs create the bright, uplifting qualities in natural perfumes. Like the dazzling lights of Broadway just outside the restaurant windows, limonene in citrus oils and pinene in pine needles don’t just smell refreshing—they’ve been shown to affect mood and cognitive function.

Scientific literature supports this sensory impact. A study published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine demonstrated that sweet orange aroma, rich in limonene, had measurable anxiety-reducing effects in human subjects. This research suggests that certain terpenes may help alleviate the mental fatigue that often accompanies digital overload—a finding that resonates with my own experience of relief when stepping away from screens into more sensory-rich environments. [4]

Responsible for the warm, spicy notes in natural fragrances, compounds like eugenol (found in clove) and cinnamaldehyde (in cinnamon) create depth and complexity. These molecules interact with temperature receptors in our skin, creating subtle sensory experiences beyond just smell.

The definitive text “Essential Oil Safety” by Robert Tisserand and Rodney Young exhaustively documents how these natural compounds interact with human physiology. Their research explains how compounds like cinnamaldehyde don’t merely stimulate olfactory receptors but engage with our entire nervous system, creating mild thermal sensations on the skin—a multisensory experience that synthetic fragrances rarely achieve. [5]

Sipping an espresso, bitter and complex, I decided my next Petite Histoire collection needed a spicy facet—perhaps a hint of cardamom or a whisper of pink peppercorn, to capture the city’s culinary diversity.

In an era of carefully curated Instagram aesthetics and digital personas, natural perfume offers something refreshingly authentic—a form of self-expression that can’t be captured in a selfie or conveyed through a social media profile.

New York’s fashion industry, with its emphasis on personal expression and authenticity, provides a natural home for the natural perfume movement. Designers like Mara Hoffman, known for her sustainable and ethical practices, exemplify the values that align with natural perfumery—a commitment to sustainability, craftsmanship, and sensory richness. Though Hoffman herself hasn’t specifically focused on perfumery, her approach to fashion centered on “a deep respect for natural materials and traditional craftsmanship” (as noted in Vogue) illustrates the aesthetic sensibility that many natural perfume enthusiasts share. [6]

At a recent pop-up event in SoHo I watched as attendees moved from clothing racks to perfume displays, appreciating both as forms of self-expression that exist beyond the digital realm. There was something refreshingly immediate about witnessing people’s unfiltered reactions to scents—no likes, no shares, just the spontaneous widening of eyes or involuntary smiles as they discovered something that resonated.

As dawn broke the next morning, I found myself in Central Park, seeking a moment of natural respite in the urban landscape. The morning dew on grass, the loamy scent of earth, the green sharpness of freshly broken leaves—these were the aromas of a New York often overlooked, yet vital to the city’s character.

Walking through the Conservatory Garden, I was struck by how the scent of roses changed from the cool morning air to the warmth of midday. This evolution mirrored the way a perfume develops on the skin, affected by body chemistry and the passing of time.

The concept of biophilia—humanity’s innate connection to nature—helps explain why natural scents feel so grounding in urban environments. Dr. Judith Heerwagen, an environmental psychologist and researcher at the University of Washington, has studied how natural elements influence human well-being in built environments. Her research suggests that incorporating natural elements, including botanical scents, into urban environments can help satisfy our evolutionary need for connection with the natural world. [7]

This reconnection happens on multiple levels:

Natural perfumes follow the rhythms of nature—seasonal availability of materials, the aging process of tinctures and absolutes, the daily evolution of scent on our skin. This temporal quality stands in stark contrast to the instantaneous nature of digital experiences, where everything is available all the time with no regard for natural cycles.

In my atelier, creating a natural perfume takes patience and time. Tinctures must macerate for weeks; absolutes arrive according to harvest seasons; formulas evolve gradually through countless iterations. In her book “Fragrant: The Secret Life of Scent,” Mandy Aftel explores this temporal dimension of natural perfumery, revealing how it connects us to traditions and practices that span centuries. Her work highlights how the time-based nature of scent creation and experience offers a counterpoint to our increasingly accelerated digital lives. [8]

While digital experiences compress the world into the dimensions of our screens, natural perfume expands our sensory awareness of space. The sillage (trail) of a perfume extends our presence beyond our physical boundaries. The origins of ingredients connect us to distant landscapes—Moroccan roses, Indian jasmine, Haitian vetiver.

Research in ethnobotany, such as that published in the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, has documented how aromatic plants have connected cultural practices across geographical boundaries, creating olfactory links between distant regions. These studies reveal how scent has historically functioned as a form of cultural exchange and geographical connection. [9]

On a visit to Kalustyan’s, the legendary spice emporium in Manhattan’s “Curry Hill,” I’m reminded of this global scent network. Bins overflow with frankincense tears from Oman, pink peppercorns from Peru, and star anise from China—aromatic ambassadors from distant lands, now part of New York’s sensory tapestry.

Perhaps most importantly, natural perfume reconnects us with our own bodies in an age where we increasingly exist as disembodied presences online. The way a fragrance interacts with our skin chemistry, responds to our body heat, and evolves with our movements throughout the day reminds us that we are physical beings, not just digital avatars.

The research of Dr. Charles Spence, Professor of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University and head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory, provides a scientific framework for understanding this embodied quality of scent. His extensive work on multisensory perception demonstrates how our senses interact to create unified experiences, illustrating why fragrance can serve as a powerful counterbalance to the primarily visual and auditory nature of digital interaction. Spence’s research suggests that we may be suffering from “sensory poverty” in the digital age, with our technological interactions neglecting the proximal senses—touch, taste, and smell—which are fundamental to our experience as embodied beings. [10]

On my final night of exploration, I attended a natural perfume salon in a converted loft in SoHo. The space was lit with beeswax candles, and small groups of attendees huddled around perfumers’ stations, eager to experience their latest creations. I watched as a young couple closed their eyes in unison, inhaling from strips dipped in a tobacco-and-vanilla absolute. Their expressions—surprised, delighted, moved—were immediate and genuine in a way that made me realize I hadn’t seen unfiltered reactions like these in months.

As we navigate the complex relationship between digital convenience and sensory fulfillment, natural perfume stands as a gentle reminder of the irreplaceable value of direct, unmediated experience—a small daily ritual that grounds us in our physical bodies even as our minds navigate increasingly virtual spaces.

In New York City, where the digital and physical worlds collide in spectacular fashion, natural perfume is more than just a pleasant scent—it’s a portal to a more mindful, connected way of experiencing the world around us. It’s a reminder that in a city of millions, each of us has a unique story to tell, and sometimes, that story is best told through the intimate language of scent.

As we look to the future at Petite Histoire and within the broader natural perfume community in New York, I see a growing trend toward authenticity, craftsmanship, and sensory experiences that can’t be replicated on a screen. In the city that sets global trends, natural perfume is poised to redefine our relationship with luxury, sustainability, and personal expression in the digital age.

Perhaps there’s something appropriate about this olfactory renaissance happening in New York, a city that has always been defined by its smells—some glorious, others less so. As I left the perfume salon and walked along Fifth Avenue, I caught whiffs of roasting chestnuts, diesel from passing taxis, and fresh flowers from a corner stand. No Instagram filter could ever capture this olfactory portrait of the city at night. Some experiences, thankfully, remain stubbornly, gloriously real—just like the pan-temporal journey in “Jitterbug Perfume,” connecting us across time through our most ancient sense.

[1] Aftel, M. (2001). Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume. North Point Press.

[2] Herz, R. (2007). The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell. HarperCollins.

[3] Ostrom, L. (2015). Perfume: A Century of Scents. Hutchinson.

[4] Goes, T.C., et al. (2012). “Effect of Sweet Orange Aroma on Experimental Anxiety in Humans.” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 18(8), 798-804.

[5] Tisserand, R., & Young, R. (2013). Essential Oil Safety: A Guide for Health Care Professionals. Churchill Livingstone.

[6] Farra, E. (2020). “Mara Hoffman on Sustainability and the Future of Fashion.” Vogue, March 18, 2020.

[7] Heerwagen, J. (2009). “Biophilia, Health, and Well-being.” In: Campbell, L. and Wiesen, A. (Eds.), Restorative Commons: Creating Health and Well-being through Urban Landscapes. USDA Forest Service.

[8] Aftel, M. (2014). Fragrant: The Secret Life of Scent. Riverhead Books.

[9] Pardo-de-Santayana, M., et al. (2014). “Ethnobotany of Perfumes.” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, 10, 64.

[10] Spence, C. (2020). “Multisensory Flavor Perception: From Fundamental Neuroscience Through to the Marketplace.” Cell Press, 20(4), 773-782.