Interview by Matteo Pini
Portrait by Ronan McKenzie

MP You began your professional perfumery career at the fragrance studio Olfiction. What was your experience of it?

ELJ It was pivotal, and I was grateful for it, because labs like that were not around in South London at all. Many places have now built labs but are not perfumer-led. Olfiction gave me an in – I worked my ass off there. When I started at 16, I had to learn that essential oils are like nature’s formulas: any natural material we use will have dozens, sometimes hundreds, of different chemicals. As a perfumer, we learn to make these pairings of different chemicals, some synthetic, some isolates, some a mixture of all of them. Olfiction gave me the technical backing.

MP You recently collaborated with the choreographer Elisabeth Schilling on a project combining dance, scent, and nature. What was the collaboration like?

ELJ The dance project was called Sensorial Symphonies and was about rethinking our relationship to plants, the earth and anthropocentrism. It was my first time combining dance and scent: I made three different fragrances to represent different stages of plant life. One is very green, one is blooming, and another is decaying, and each came in at a particular moment of the performance. I was at the top of the theatre with this crazy setup of fans, hot plates and bowls of fragranced water, the vapour of which would drift towards the audience. I also sprayed them with a water-based version. The vapour wants to rise, but the water droplets want to settle. It really immerses everyone. I did a similar thing at Theatre Peckham, doing scent design for a beautiful play by Babirye Bukilwa called ...cake. There was a scene where a character started smoking a joint, and the audience was like, “How can they smoke on the stage?” It adds a dimension to the experience because it’s not visual, it’s felt. You might feel paranoia or relief, depending on what your vibe is.  

MP Racism is imbued into the verbiage of perfumery – the exoticised way it is advertised, how words like “oriental” are still used, and its distributive mechanisms. How do you consider these questions in your practice?

ELJ They come up organically because it’s all a symptom of the same beast. The way that resources move around the world, whether in perfume or the coltan in our phones, is based on the same colonial networks. Nothing is exempt; perfumery just has its own narrative in that story. Fragrance is such a weird little world because, for some reason, it permits itself to be a bit untouchable. How it’s received is so sentimental: if people go shopping with their parents for their first perfume, it can be a cherished moment. But we also have to talk about neocolonial trade, because that’s the reality of what’s actually going on in that cute little bottle that you’re buying from Sephora. People don’t want to accept that reality: cognitive dissonance is like the last frontier. Scent is also bound up with disgust: it’s an immediate way of being angered or frustrated. Scent has been used to target us at times: at work, people saying, “Oh, your food smells”. To all these conversations, I’m like, bun your office, wear that shit. If you want to eat your food, eat your food. I naturally consider these questions when dealing with scent because I’m always very quick to champion not conforming to a form of scent assimilation, which ends up trying to smell neutral.

MP You recently launched the “Deities” range with the fragrance house Gabar. Tell me about the collection. 

ELJ We’re calling all the fragrances in the line neo-gourmands. Traditionally, gourmand perfumes are very sweet and related to food. We wanted to take it further and own the idea of fragrance related to food from Southeast Asian cuisine. The first one is called Nagar Min, with the key notes being chilli, Sichuan pepper, and cherry blossom. I had so much fun making the Sichuan pepper note: I was trying to translate a feeling of heat and tenacious spice.

MP In culinary terms, Sichuan peppercorn is discussed in terms of its numbing qualities, but it has a beautiful floral aroma that you express. 

ELJ That’s why we liked the idea of cherry blossom: a slight fruitiness with the floral element you describe. The heat element comes in after, almost like a dried chilli. We also have Balu, which has dates, molasses, condensed milk, vanilla pods, and tonka bean. Someone described it recently as feeling like cocoa butter, which wasn’t necessarily intentional, but I do love that texture. Sweet can often smell infantilising, like a kid who got lost in a candy floss machine, but on skin, it doesn’t go too candied or synthetic; it’s more like a sweetness that you could get in a very ripe fruit. Finally, we have Galone, which has sesame, nutmeg, smoked nuts, volcanic caramel, and golden musk. When I’ve encountered sesame in fragrance, it has a kind of flatness to it. This is far from flat: it’s got a lot of chest. 

MP Tell me about “i”, the fragrance you have released under your brand deya. 

ELJ I spent four years working on this fragrance. I wanted to play with a scent that made the scent of a space wearable, by making the smell of home, which is a very big and abstract idea. I’ve used parts of cooking materials that my Jamaican grandma used, like bay leaf, cinnamon and nutmeg. There is a subliminal feeling of that Caribbean kitchen, which is like the organ of a home. When you start looking into Caribbean cuisine, you realise that a lot of the plants we’re cooking with weren’t necessarily native to the Caribbean, which tells a wider diasporic story, which is something that I’m continually questioning and researching. “i” was built from four years of me getting better as a perfumer, but also from conversation, which is perpendicular to how a lot of perfumery was practiced. There’s the classic Renaissance style of, “I am the crazy genius alone in my room”, but for this, I knew it was done when people said to me, “This smells like home.” .