What is Scentient Sessions?
We are a group on Vancouver Island, Canada, getting educated about all things smell, and this newsletter is a chance to explore the culture and science of smell.
Get to know your nose
We think that education about smell is sorely needed. In Canada, at least when we were growing up, we were very rarely taught about smell. We had even less opportunity to play with fragrances by blending materials together. So we’ve created a space where we can do just that: a monthly fragrance blending club. You can smell various natural and synthetic materials from around the world, blend them together based on provided formulas, or go wild and mix up something totally unique to you.
We took inspiration from Saskia Wilson-Brown’s Institute of Art and Olfaction because we think scent is important enough that it should be available to explore wherever you are.
With an emerging awareness of smell, there’s an emerging community of smell studies researchers who are exploring the history, science and varied cultural traditions around aroma and olfaction. This newsletter will chronicle interesting aspects of this world.
For example, did you know that the human sense of smell is excellent? Most of us can rival all but a few animals in nearly every test category with just a little training! Or that smell is often the first of the senses people would be willing to give up, yet among the most likely sense to cause you grief if you did lose it? The more we learn about smell, the more we realize how impressive and rich it is.
Meet Frances and Trevor
Frances runs the monthly Scentient Sessions fragrance blending club. Frances fell in love with fragrances in the aromatic oil section of an occult shop in Hamilton, Ontario at age sixteen. But for years, it was her uncanny natural culinary ability that was her window into the world of smell. Frances even cooked a multi-course meal for her classmates in junior high. “I was always good at picking out flavours in restaurant dishes and reverse-engineering stuff,” she says. To say she is a science enthusiast is an understatement. She holds a Bachelor of Computer Science, a Bachelor’s in Molecular Plant Biology, and a Master’s in Molecular Evolution & Computational Biology. She hopes that Scentient Sessions can be a bit of science outreach to the community.
Trevor, Frances’ partner, writes this newsletter. He’s been writing and drawing since he was small. He enjoys researching odd facts from the emerging field of smell studies and trying to weave them into an engaging larger cultural thread.
During the slowdown of COVID-19, Frances and Trevor wanted to explore the independent fragrance scene and the newly available raw materials to make perfumes. Frances focused on fragrance arts, while Trevor wanted to learn to describe the smell materials of the world and learn new words for fragrant notes. They found what they were looking for in the online Institute for Art and Olfaction. After taking classes, Frances was off blending from her newly amassed palette of hundreds of raw fragrance materials. It’s from this palette that she creates new fragrance formulas on a new theme for the monthly Scentient Sessions club.
Trevor has also taken classes from the IAO, and has been particularly fond of their scent and society series of lectures. He highly recommends others check out the educational offerings at the IAO.
Join us
If you are in the Vancouver Island area, message us to participate in our next Scentient Sessions fragrance club blending sessions. We’ll answer any of your questions!
