An Olfactory Lab

What is the craft services?

The Craft Services is an olfactory lab, born out of my desire to connect people with their emotions and memories through handmade bespoke scents crafted with essential oils, absolutes, botanicals and the most exquisite raw materials sourced from all over the world.  

I have been creating “potions” since I was tall enough to reach out to my mom’s and older sister’s perfumes shelves, which brought me lots of trouble while growing up, and although my family was never particularly fond of the entrepreneurial and experimental spirit of my so-called “potions” and “recipes”, I always found a way to practice my “craft” and surround myself with scents and flavors everywhere I went.

To create a scent, I manipulate concepts familiar to musicians, such as notes and accords, but instead of working with sound wave frequencies, I blend volatile organic molecules by taking materials ‘apart’ and put them back together just like I do while solving a puzzle or folding origami (two of my favorite hobbies).

When I moved to Los Angeles, I decided to take my curiosity one step further and enrolled in classes with renowned scent masters/niche perfumers Sarah Horowitz of Sarah Horowitz Parfums, and Jessica Hannah and Ashley Eden Kessler from the Institute for Art and Olfaction.

As smell is part of the very air we breathe, up to seventy-five percent of our emotions are affected daily by our sense of smell.

Scents can evoke images, sensations, memories, and even associations (colors, sounds, and textures). In fact, numerous scientists are studying the surprising interconnectivity of our olfactory sense with other senses beyond the connection between taste and smell, known as the “chemical senses” — we process our food with our noses. Taste without smell is virtually impossible.

The Craft Services designs either familiar scents that can retrieve old memories and offer a sense of nostalgia or new ones that will create memories of events, places, emotions and people where it was first experienced, influencing moods and behaviors along the way.

Am I a sorceress? Not really. This strong effect of our scent memory of creating ‘madeleine de Proust’ at every inhalation comes from the fact that our olfactory cortex is located in the limbic system, the area where our emotions, memories and feelings are collected.

Let’s start your powerful journey into the world of scents.

Photo by Kristine Lo. www.kristinelo.com