Founder's Note
For a long time I tried to take photographs of the places I went. Of the food, mostly. The photographs never returned anything I had felt being there.
What I remembered, every time, was the smell.
The bakery on Doroshenka in Lviv at 7am, when the air is cold and tastes of woodsmoke from the chimneys. The hour at the wet market in Sheung Wan when the ginger has just been cut and tea shops open their doors. A study in a townhouse off Marylebone, 4pm in November, when the light is going and the room still holds tobacco from someone who left an hour ago.
These were the things that survived the trip. Not the photos. The air.
AERA is a small archive of those airs, made into burnable, sprayable, wearable form. Each release is a single coordinate — one place, one hour, one set of observations. A perfumer composes from a brief; the brief comes from a notebook. The notebook is mine, until the bottle is yours.