Meet Jared

I have always followed my nose.

Smell is my strongest sense, but that doesn’t quite explain it.

I experience much of my life through it.

I remember people by the way they smelled. Places by the air inside them. Seasons by wet pavement, cold dirt, dead leaves, hot asphalt and the first few minutes of rain. Sometimes a smell can recover a memory I didn’t know I still had.

That fascinates me.

Of all our senses, smell seems uniquely capable of reaching past language. Before we decide what something means, we have already reacted to it.

A smell can make us comfortable. Uneasy. Hungry. Homesick. Sad. Happy. Aroused. It can make a stranger strangely attractive or make an empty room feel occupied. It can collapse decades into seconds.

I became obsessed with understanding why.

Inefferel grew from that obsession.

I am not interested in fragrance simply as something that smells good. There are already thousands of beautiful perfumes. I am interested in what scent can do.

Can something smell intimate without smelling overtly sexual?

Can a fragrance feel human?

Can it suggest skin, soil, age, rain, memory, sterility, decay, warmth or another person without literally reproducing any of them?

Can something initially strange become impossible to stop smelling?

Those questions interest me more than traditional ideas of what fragrance should be.

So I experiment.

With aroma chemicals. Natural materials. Memory. Association. Attraction. Repulsion. Familiarity. The strange territory where something can be beautiful precisely because there is something slightly wrong with it.

Inefferel is where I document those experiments.

Some become fragrances.

Some become photographs.

Some remain specimens.

But something remains.