Discovery is a beautiful part of loving scent. Like wine tasting, sniffing and noticing more of the notes you like can be both helpful and harmful. Harmful? A word without a sniff or a taste can turn you off a category. For instance the word "Patchouli" instantly sends people to disregard a scent on offer, which is why when I make custom candles, I label the offerings as 1, 2, 3 to retain more of the smelling less of the assigned associations with a word.
There are also multiple sources of where a scent can be from such as lavender. Is it from India, England, France, The United States, or Australia?
When Whiskey & Woof launched two weeks shy of seven years ago, there were four scents in two sizes. The requests and advice came in rapid fire, something that doesn't happen to VC backed companies. Let's visit SmallBizLandia, in the age of the Internet and social media platforms, opinions flow freely without experience or thought for what the costs are for development.
Six months following the launch the world started to close up and I was finding my feet with this business. People were home and suddenly my field was exploding with competition from established brands like Aesop and Loewe. Brands I respect and have used myself. Requests for more and more scents "I want your version of a lavender," were popular. That's not what I set out to do when I launched Whiskey & Woof. It's a niche company with high standards and as original scent combinations as there can be.
Destination: Who owns an idea? A Story? A scent? Rabbit Hole of Ownership, here we come. Recently a colleague I met at a retail conference at the end of 2019 found my Instagram page and reconnected. From the beginning he was in "I am an expert" mode with varying degrees of success. He has worked in retail and pivoted to brand consulting. When we reconnected he started promoting his own agendas publicly on that account
In any case, this is not new behavior. Look at the poem The Odyssey, told and retold for roughly 3000 years. There are many works where writers have captured and distilled those around them as well for their stories, as the saying goes "write what you know." The upcoming release of "Life of M" by Rachel Clusk has been one of those books, which has gone into the mainstream zeitgeist due to her association with Natalie Portman. As The New Yorker.puts it "Cusk’s crime is not that she has used a real person as inspiration for a character, as writers have done since time immemorial, but that the protagonist of her novel “isn’t anyone,” that she is little more than a device for thematizing the dissolution of the self."
In 2023, Robert Kolker wrote a feature about art and life borrowing for The New York Times called "Who is The Bad Art Friend?," dissecting the case between two Grub Street reporters, Sonya Larsen and Dawn Darland. A Facebook group was formed by Garland when she detailed why she donated a kidney, of which Larsen was a member. Larsen was inspired to write her lauded short story "The Kindest." It went to court for plagiarism over Larsen's short story based on Darland's letter to the unknown person she donated a kidney to, mostly because Darland did not enjoy Larsen's depiction of a white savior who donates a kidney wanting endless applause. In a similar matter, when not receiving enough attention or praise from Larsen in the Facebook page, she made a point of reaching out to Larsen first asking about her life and then bringing the exchange around to her donation. Ultimately the judge ruled in favor of Larsen that is was not plagiarism.
The NBC sitcom St. Denis Medical devoted an episode to a head nurse trying to prove when she donates she doesn't need credit but then an anonymous donation is questioned she was behind and she cannot stand not to be given credit. The head nurse cannot and has never considered that version of herself and that is probably why, if not a tactic around the book release, that Natalie Portman is rumored to be displeased with the M character, allegedly based on herself. If you admire a writer, knowing that they may borrow from life, and they do portray you, do you, the subject, have any say in that art and the writer's interpretation of who you are in fiction or what you represent to them? If you don't like it, which Portman is rumored not to, and would you go so far as to sue them like Darland?
The question of ownership and credit in art and creations has been much on my mind this summer from seeing Raphael's exhibit at The Met to James Prosek's work at The Edward Hopper Museum, much of which is fabricated by other people. DaVinci is given sole credit for the Sistine Chapel but he had a team of painters. Raphael did as well. Through that art that is the way credit has been designated. Matisse's A Modern Scandal show at SF MoMA curated another room of artists who have created their version of his work The Woman With A Hat over the decades that including David Hockey's Cecelia with a Green Hat.
Cut to last Sunday, August 9th in Montclair, CA. I attended the SF Sniff Squad event at Ol: factorie Candles which also offers spa services. Attendees were invited to bring perfumes and scented products they were working on or had finished for feedback and to introduce those products each other. I was invited by group leader, Yosh Han, renowned perfumer. One of the attendees made a point of sniffing my tomato & petrichor candle, Vibe & Vine. I pride myself in not making dupes and always having my own version of a scent. Many times the story comes first and then my hands start reaching for different bottles to play with, sometimes it seems obvious and with seven years of experience some scents come in to play after years of experimenting. That's why scents like No. 57 Keanu took two years of development after the initial request for a custom memorial candle.
When the marvelous perfumer Danniele Sergent came up and sniffed it she told me the current tomato trend was due to her tomato and leather perfume for Cognoscenti, first released in 2012. To give credit where it is due, I had not heard of that house or fragrance but I was aware of Demeter Fragrance Library founder Christoper Brosius (ex-Kiehl's perfumer) releasing his Dirt + Grass fragrance at Henri Bendel's in NY in 1996. Hearing about such a great scent combination I wish it had been there for me to sniff.
Tomato was a not at first a scent I was going to play with but last year I took a course at The Fragrance Alliance Center. I decided to experiment with all the trends the teacher had mentioned with my trio of summer scents. What is summer to you?
My childhood memories are strong ones of being in the garden with my grandmother when she visited and my mother. I also love going to the beach and entertaining with family and friends inside and outside. In fact Watermelon Aura was inspired by my cousin's wife, Leticia, who is an architect and their home has won design awards in Australia. The home was designed for indoor-outdoor living with sliding downs expanding and contracting rooms with every level of the house providing an opportunity to gather as a group.
Back to the current trend of tomato scented candles. I am going to mix the tomato and leather fragrances in my scent library together for myself to sniff. During the lockdown time, a client received the heirloom tomato scented candle from Loewe. I smelled it while delivering a custom order and she gave me the licorice candle of their's. The candles at that time were 5 oz for $120. Mine have been $65 for 8-9 oz (heavy pours happen) for seven years. If anything then seeing and smelling Flamingo Estate's tomato candle I thought it was time to once again add something a bit more commercial (you can find tomato candles in Trader Joe's too, there's a quality and taste level at any price) with my take on it. Tomato was my choice over the much requested Vanilla.
That being said and credit to all those who came before me, the fellow on Instagram read the notes in my created for Kiehl's No. 26 Nolita and commented it was similar to a scent created for a 007 movie. I looked up the notes and there was very little in common. They use a martini note, whereas mine is whiskey and multiple minor notes had nothing in common.
The story of the creation comes down to Kiehl's approaching me in December 2024 to be part of their Locally Made Initiative, as the first US brand to do so. I made a pitch deck which included a custom candle for the project with the main note at that time being calendula, since that is a line of their products I use. When they said Whiskey & Woof had been selected they requested a sample that was centered on lavender, which is in many of their best sellers including Midnight Oil eye cream and oil, products I also use. It turned out to be the clear winner - lavender for Kiehl's, leather representing the area of the Concept store Nolita (downtown NYC) and whiskey for Whiskey & Woof. Calendula comes from marigold which is not a strong scent. Last summer I did have a panic after a delayed construction issue on the store because a few doors down, DS & Durga was releasing a limited edition lavender and leather scent. However, again, aside from those two notes, there was very little in common and the two scents did not smell alike sniffed side-by-side.
Inspiration comes from living life. A scent can carry us back there. I wasn't as immersed in scent in 1996 the way I am now. I was living in Australia at that time, then back to NY for a short while and off to LA. I am always open to education and discussion. Ownership and competition are fundamentals of human kind. I thank all those who created before me.
This summer I have been lucky to have had experiences from Newport, RI visiting the Guilded Age Mansions to Sausalito, CA learning about the houseboat wars from the 1970's. Excess, indulgence, art, books, creativity and who owns is under debate and being mined by AI.
I'm currently making my way through Empire of AI by Karen Han. The debate of scraping work for machine learning has lead to multiple lawsuits. Bad Bunny sued a producer who used AI to create a song that charted on Spain's Spotify chart that was created to sound like Bad Bunny and Justin Bieber. I have smelled AI created scents that are, for me, not quite there. Scent is personal, for me at least it remains that way. Like the scene in Devil Wears Prada, knowing and following the source takes you down interesting roads of influence often decided by a handful of powerful people in a small room.
Knowledge of the history of what you are doing is inspirational and so I learn and read and sniff my way through this world soaking it up. AI creators try to argue that they are using human intelligence as a basis for success of their generative predictive text outputs using a "learning" like a human as a way to justify the uncompensated scraping of works, text books they are buying up and then destroying. Another example of a select few making choices for the rest of us.
Thank you for reading this deep dive piece of creation and ownership. I have put together a discovery box of votive candles and the tomato scent, aka Vibe & Vine will be on offer for it in limited amounts. Have I piqued your curiosity? Do tell.
Wax, wicks and candlesticks,
Coco
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