(Content warning - animal illness and mental illness below. If these topics are difficult for you, please take care of yourself.)

 

When I started learning perfume, my intention wasn't necessarily to open a business. I remember some skeptical looks when I first told people that because I think they know me better than I know myself, but my primary goal was to learn as much as I could, and my secondary goal was to hopefully recreate the scent of my soul cat. (I talk more in depth about this below.) When I finally decided to launch Mythpunk Olfactive, the response from everyone I knew was, "Yeah, duh, we know." And looking back, it does seem like an inevitability.

 

I'd always loved good-smelly things, but I was never going to be the target demographic for perfume marketing. I remember watching my mom cap her beauty rituals off with spritzes of perfume. The entire process seemed glamorous and feminine to me, two things I wasn't. My mother had lost her sense of smell, making it even more mysterious to me. (She still swore she wore it for herself and not for others, which I didn't understand at the time, but I do now.) The first pang to make them hit me when I was 7. My childhood best friend got a toy perfume-making kit for her birthday. I remember feeling so envious I was kind of angry, because I was the "creative one" in the friendship, but she looked a lot more like the skinny smiling white girl on the cover than I did - I looked like a little gremlin.

 

Anyway, I was born in Dallas, Texas to a 17 year old mom. She was an addict and very mentally unwell. As a young kid I was removed from my her custody, and my grandpa’s girlfriend decided to marry him so they could adopt me. (Thanks, gran!) In the middle of kindergarten, my grandpa lost his job at the Superconducting Super Collider when it was defunded, and around the same time, his adoptive mom became gravely ill. She didn’t have much time left, so we moved into her home in Lubbock, Texas to care for her.

 

Lubbock was very different from Dallas, and we were very different from the people who lived there. We stuck out. A lot. I was a chubby neurodivergent kid, and I was already pretty queer-coded, even in kindergarten. My grandparents were computer nerds who thought it was socially acceptable to use the Vulcan salute when picking me up from school. They spent their days building websites for other businesses in Lubbock, and I spent mine coping with living in the dusty asscrack of the Bible Belt and trying to stay away from other kids (who'd innocently ask my teachers questions like "Why doesn't she look like other girls?" and ask my grandparents why they were older than their own parents).

 

I spent a lot of my time in my great-grandmother’s garden, which continued to bloom long after her death. It felt like the one verdant, magical space in all of Lubbock. Her roses had been her pride and joy during her life, but the bruise-purple irises were my favorite. My perfume Strangeling is based on the days I spent there in the dusk, nestled among their tall stalks, scribbling in a notebook with my pen. When their petals started to droop and shrivel, I’d crush them in old books and reopen them to smell their dark ink stains on the pages.

 

As an adolescent, I developed schizoaffective symptoms, a combination of my mom's Borderline Personality Disorder and her mom's schizophrenia. I was subsequently put on an antipsychotic called Seroquel that turned my life into a bit of a waking nightmare.

 

I know that’s a lot, but I want to contextualize how indie perfumes became so important to me when I discovered them a few years later. As a big damn weirdo, I finally felt like the target demographic. They brought me comfort during a time where comfort was hard to come by. I craved the embodiment of magic and stories as an escape from my nebulous reality, and the literary and mythological inspirations behind the perfumes gave me that. Their atmospheric note lists transported me to wild, worldly places away from Lubbock’s dusty fields and their smell of burnt methane.

 

Scent became an important ritual for managing my mental health. It gave me some small semblance of control over my hallucinatory synaesthesia (which existed before I was put on Seroquel but had become increasingly disruptive), and it also helped me make some peace with myself. It felt like a little glamour that I could cast to invoke, strengthen, and protect the parts of myself that felt too vulnerable to show the world.

 

My grandparents enjoyed my new fragrance hobby with me, and they supported it when they could, but we couldn't afford a lot, so I mostly got my fix by making up my own collections and posting them on LiveJournal.

 

When I was 19, I met my soul cat, Cheddar, outside my boyfriend's house, when she howled mournfully at me from under my car, and she was perfect. I knew she was mine as soon as I'd coaxed her inside. I could sense the shape of her heart and the way it fit perfectly into the empty spaces of my own. She was a starved, terrified little teenager, and so was I. We were both alone on the threshold of adulthood, so we crossed that threshold together.

 

From there, she saw me through opioid addiction, bulimia, the death of my grandfather, the death of my mom in 2017, and the emotional fallout of that - my burgeoning alcohol dependency and the abandonment of a writing mentorship I’d started. I promise I'm a better writer when I'm not writing about myself.

 

(Here’s the animal illness part. Again, I know this is hard to read, so please don’t feel like you have to, even if you made it this far.)

 

In January 2022, Cheddar was diagnosed with Stage IV chronic kidney disease (CKD).

 

The prognosis was bad, but it wasn't a surprise. At her original diagnosis in 2019, we were told she had three years, and I started the pre-grieving process, and I quit drinking. She had been my tether to the world, and I was terrified of losing that. I knew that if I didn't quit drinking before she was gone I wouldn’t be able to stop.

 

I think almost everyone says this about their cat, but Cheddar smelled incredible. I don’t know that I possess the language to describe why it smelled so good or exactly what it smelled like, even as a perfumer. She smelled like little wisps of smoke, but also like something clean and creamy. And there was a dry, dusty smell, like dust motes swirling in sunbeams. It doesn't sound that great on paper, but it was the most magical smell in the world to me.

 

She’d curl up on my pillow to sleep at night and press her face into mine, and the smell of her would fill my imagination with visions of us walking together in a dream forest at dusk. The scent was transportive - this was less of something I actively imagined and more like a place we would just go as we slipped into sleep. I’d hoist her up on my shoulder, and together we would step through a faerie door into an autumn clearing where a radiant bonfire sent up glittering plumes of smoke.

 

When her CKD progressed to stage IV, we had about three months left. My greatest fear had always been losing her, and it was happening, and my pre-grieving process hadn't fully prepared me. I needed more time that I didn't have, so in lieu of that, I decided that I should find something to build my life around in her absence. I decided to learn perfumery. It was the only thing I could think of that comforted me before she came into my life, and I guess the thought of it had never fully left me, but I also wanted to recreate her smell. I never wanted to forget the smell of her or the feeling of being loved by her - the two things were linked in my mind.

 

By that point, though, the smell of the ammonia on her body was overwhelming. I realized that there must have been a moment where I had smelled her for the last time, but I wasn’t sure when it had happened. It had shifted imperceptibly until it was covered totally, the way you don't notice the dying warmth of autumn until winter’s first snow steals it away all at once.

 

I had already started the process of forgetting. On our last night together, as we fell asleep, she nestled her face into mine, and we were in our dream forest together. I wanted to go through our door one last time together, but I couldn't smell anything except the ammonia. The door was closed to me.

 

A vet came to our home the next day to help us say goodbye, and I held her as her heartbeat slowed. It took so long that even the vet seemed alarmed. I’m sure there was a medical reason for it, but at the time I was convinced it was my fault. Our bodies were on the couch, but our hearts were in the dream forest at the door. It was still closed. I felt everything in me trying to leave with her, but I couldn’t go where she was going.

 

I told her she could go, and that I’d be right behind her when it was my time. It might feel like forever to me, but for her it would feel like no time had passed at all. Excruciatingly, her heart stopped.

 

I stood up with her body, and out of habit I pressed her to my shoulder.

 

That’s the last time I smelled her - the way she’d smelled before she got sick. With her body finally at peace, her kidneys could stop straining. Her natural scent was still there underneath it all, and it was as magical as ever.

 

She had crossed through our faerie door one last time. I was caught on the wrong side of it, but where she had gone, there was still a tether from her heart to mine - a wisp of smoke, glittering and alive. When it’s my time, I’ll follow it back to her.

 

That's how the Through the Forest Dark collection was conceived. It was originally called The Door at Autumn's End. I prototyped a bunch of perfumes in an attempt capture not just the way Cheddar smelled but the way she made me feel - the way her heart was shaped like the empty spaces of my own. I hadn't succeeded in that, but I did feel like the shape of something else forming, and that became Stuffkin. I loved the idea of a family of sentient stuffed animals who were almost daemon-like and whose role was to provide comfort for strange children, so Hushkin and Fluffkin came next, and that's how the Stuffkin family was born.

 

Then I challenged myself to make a smoky orange perfume that I liked (I hated smoke and oranges). At first I thought it smelled just like me until I realized it actually smelled like my mom. I tweaked it until it actually did feel like myself, which felt appropriate given her influence on me, and I used a similar vanilla accord to Stuffkin, which also felt appropriate. This became Changeling, and it kicked off the narrative of a changeling meeting the Stuffkin family in a goblin market called The Golden Curl (named for Christina Rosetti's poem, but also symbolic because of my mom's hair).

 

I started sending these to people, and they requested to buy them, but the state of Texas kind of frowns on selling things and not paying taxes, so I didn't do that. Still, it was incredibly encouraging that people were enjoying the things I made.

 

As I continued to mythologize aspects of my life in an act of reclamation and acceptance, these efforts took on a shape of their own, and I began to recognize the strange contours as the shape of my heart. I named it Mythpunk Olfactive. That’s me. I’m Ashe; I'm Mythpunk Olfactive. Welcome to my heart. I hope you find something here for you.