The Alchemy of Memory
Scent, essence, solstice.
Venus of the Mind is a monthly beauty + culture newsletter for those who like to look good & think deep.
A guide to this publication and its tiered offerings can be found here.
Our book club for paid subscribers meets Tuesday, Jan 20, 3:30pm to 4:20pm EST via Zoom. We’re exploring The House of Beauty: Lessons From the Image Industry & are so lucky to be welcoming author Arabelle Sicardi who will join us online in conversation about their book.
Inside today’s Winter Solstice publication: the quarterly newsletter for all subscribers.
The Alchemy of Memory
1. Scent - LabSolue Perfume Laboratory in Rome, Italy.
2. Essence - Novice experimentation with fragrance in Fairfax, Virginia.
3. Solstice - Experiencing winter as a sensory portal.
4. Postscript - The official sound of my holiday and all quarterly newsletters in one place.
Winter Solstice 2025, Northern Hemisphere.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves._Mary Oliver, Wild Geese
Scent
One of my favorite autumn/winter activities is time travel.
The new moon in Scorpio through Winter solstice is when I am most prone to revisiting all that was. I remember everything. I return to my past and sit with her a little longer. It goes without saying, then, that this November into December my amygdala has been getting lots of mileage back and forth across the ether.
In other life seasons, photography, literature, music, or movies have been my preferred methods of transport. This year, fragrance has been my vehicle of choice and it’s proven to be a deliciously volatile accelerant through time.
Lately, I’ve been returning to September of this year. Specifically to LabSolue Perfume Laboratory’s Rome location. This perfumery operates as both a B2B and B2C entity which I think influenced the mind-shifting olfactive experience I had when visiting for the first time this past summer.
I’ve always been scent-oriented and come from a family of “sniffers.” My parents, my sisters, myself, we’re always pausing to smell in the kitchen while cooking, pausing to complement each other or our friends on how good their curls smell, pausing to pick outfits for the day that will only be complete after the appropriate complementary fragrance has been selected. Whenever I take my canine child out, we meander together because I want to smell the forest behind our house just as much as he does. Yet, despite all of this personal context, I’d never spent a considerable amount of time thinking critically about scent until visiting LabSolue and now I can’t stop.
In Rome, as we sniffed around the shop together, the lab guides walked me through the company’s matrix of sourcing, creating, and supplying their fragrances. They honored my request to talk to me in Italian as I was in the country for the purposes of immersion and whenever we hit a bump in communication they would clarify in English before switching back over to Italian. The in-shop experience was so engaging that I went back a second time the following day. My limbic system wanted more, who was I to deny it?
My favorite version of me exists back there, in Italy. She’s gazing out the window of a Trenitalia railway car somewhere between Sarzana and Rome. Ivana alone, bumbling around in a third language, a foreigner blissfully divorced from all cultural context, belonging nowhere, bound to no-one, with only five contacts in the whole country.
Perhaps because I have always felt like a stranger in the U.S. my “home” country, to spend time in an actual “foreign” country as a stranger comes naturally. When I returned to Italy for a third time this past September my foreign-ness fit like a tailor-made glove. Moving around as an outsider felt good and I loved who I became away from the familiarity of home: an Ivana who was braver, more observant, determined and kinetic, yet simultaneously leisurely.
Every time I adorn myself in Ambra Grigia, I call that version of me into the now. Transposing her out of my past and into my present. Transmuting myself into her future. Bit by bit until we inhabit the same corporeality.
Self alchemy, the only way to craft the life I want most. A process born out of equal parts necessity and desire.
Essence
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again._Mary Oliver, Wild Geese
Essence and spirit are often treated as synonyms but I consider essence to be the quality of a spirit. The spirit distilled. Whether talking about adding essences to a drink that uses spirits, or parsing through an overwhelming array of essences versus toners, rejecting gender essentialism, or leafing through esoterica, essence deserves its own consideration.
This December, as part of my private solstice celebration week, I took myself to DIY Scent Studio for the studio’s 2.5 hour Perfume Intro and Creation Class. This Virginia studio also offers open perfumery hours. While in class, I eavesdropped on a patron who was making his way through new materials the owner had sourced upon his request as he’d booked time to come in and blend some personalized Christmas gifts. How cool!
Before even touching the perfume organ, Sherry - one of the studio’s co-owners - took me through a historical overview of perfumery from what is known about ancient ritualistic practices using scent up through what is now understood about how human olfactory sensation works. She also offered some insights into the craft and chemistry of perfumery rooted in her own knowledge as a business person, student, and perfumer.
As Sherry spoke, she made a point to remind me of the Latin word perfume, meaning “through smoke.” This definition made its way to the forefront of my mind when it came time to conceptualize my own perfume blend as I imagined myself in a temple working with incense, crafting a series of sensorial offerings to a god named Life.
Offering is the name of my first blend. It’s playful yet weighty and warm opening with notes of bitter orange and anise that mellow out into sugar, then fig, before drying down to a base of caramel, tobacco, and cocoa. I loved it from the jump.
Reception is the name of my second blend and I approached its creation with the goal of blending a “light and distinctive” fragrance, but the result was something else entirely: an opening of black pepper layered over a middle note of cannabis before drying down into a base of smoke spice, rain, and wood incense. Sharp, severe, spicy, messy and unforgettable, all before softening into a curious whisper - kind of like life.
I am undecided about this latter fragrance much like how I am undecided about which adventures I want to craft for myself next in 2026. With Reception, the longer it lingers on my skin I am both enticed and repelled by what I created. Though not my original intention, perhaps the polarity means I succeeded? Unlike an offering which is one-directional in its orientation of service, isn’t the essence of a reception about the push-pull of give and take? When humans believed in gods, giving offerings was tradition but there was always uncertainty in whether or not the gods received said offerings with acceptance. Nonetheless, even with their reception in limbo, the offerings had to be made because the gods demanded it. Just as Life makes its demands.
Solstice
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things._Mary Oliver, Wild Geese
Winter Solstice delineates the transition from autumn to winter as the longest period of darkness within a 24-hour cycle. Every day after that, the light lingers a little longer until we wake up in spring.
Spring Equinox will bloom into Summer Solstice giving us the longest day of light in the year until bit by bit summer melts into Autumn Equinox and fall descends us into Winter Solstice once again.
The longest night gives way to the longest light with all the threads of our lives weaving themselves through seasonal portals along these cycles.
Where to next? Only way to find out is to sense through winter’s darkness. I’ll be sniffing my way through, smelling every proverbial rose, learning along the way how to embrace each thorn with my soft animal body.
P.S.
Ella Fitzgerald is the official voice/sound of my holiday. Her medley of We Three Kings + Little Town of Bethlehem is stellar.
This year’s previous quarterly essays can be found below.
Autumn Equinox 2025
Summer Solstice 2025
Spring Equinox 2025
