Margaret Talbot at The New Yorker:
This past August, in a windowless room of the British Library, in London, Tasha Marks was enacting her own form of time travel. Marks is a scent designer who works with museums, heritage sites, and other cultural spaces to create odors that can open an instant portal to the past. The library had commissioned her to concoct historical smells for an exhibition about the lives of medieval women. On a conference table, Marks placed an array of bottles and fanned out several mouillettes—the paper strips that perfumers use to sample fragrances.
The library would be putting on display a thirteenth-century edition of a remarkable Latin manuscript called “De Ornatu Mulierum,” a compendium of beauty and hygiene advice for women. Marks had obtained ingredients listed in the manuscript to re-create the smell of a breath freshener and of a hair perfume that would have been applied as a powder, like dry shampoo. (“Let her make furrows in her hair and sprinkle on the aforementioned powder, and it will smell marvellously.”) The text didn’t offer exact recipes—no proportions were provided—so there was an element of improvisation, allowing Marks to act as both historian and artist.
more here.
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