Carter Weeks Maddox, Chronotope’s Founder, Perfumer & Creative Director >>
I had a very fragrant childhood. My family were perfume wearers whose collections included some of the 20th century’s greatest perfumes, and they enabled me to explore them freely, without regard for gendered categories. And I was raised in the deep rural Pineywoods of northeast Texas, where the smell of iron-rich red clay soil, spring wildflowers, hickory smoke rising from BBQ pits, or fields of fresh-cut hay might mix on any given day with the scent of 100-foot-tall old growth trees going up into flame (my brother fell asleep and left his campfire unattended), an exploding meth lab (a portable building that’d been snuck onto the unoccupied property bordering my parents’ acreage), or the fear-inducing musk of a cottonmouth who’d slivered too close (IYKYK and if you don’t, trust me when I say that you’re not missing out).
<< Northeast Texas Pineywoods forest
I began toying with making my own blends of cheap essential oils when I was in college both as a way to not spend money that I didn’t have on perfume and as a means of stress relief, particularly once I entered grad school. And I continued to do so even after I finished school and started working—only the cheap essentials were swapped out for costlier ones, and eventually I began using synthetics. I also began collecting many of the (by that point, exclusively vintage) perfumes I’d grown up around.
Hamilton Pool Preserve & its collapsed grotto outside Austin, TX, where I spent countless afternoons while I was in college & grad school >>
Just before I started working, however, the week after I finished grad school, I flew to Spain to walk an ancient pilgrimage route. The experience was life-changing, but even though I’d just been minted with a diploma confirming that I was a trained writer, I struggled to put anything coherent about my pilgrimage into words. This felt like total failure. Eventually, however, I realized that I didn’t need words—because the experience was coming through my ever-growing hobby of working with scents.
This was where and when Chronotope as a brand formally began—nearly a decade before I’d actually launch it with any products. And it’s what perfumery has been for me ever since: the most authentic method of creation that I’ve found to capture and express the fullness of lived experience, contradictions and all.
<< Testing the limits of a walking stick’s strength at the end of my 2012 pilgrimage through Spain in front of the Catedral Basílica de Santiago de Compostela.
People who smell my perfumes often note that they occupy what one reviewer called “their own olfactory universe.” Part of this, I know, is that I’m self-taught as a perfumer. Still, I take pride in hearing that my work offers something that’s clearly different from the norm. It’s even part of why I decided to start selling my perfumes.
There’s no shortage of multinational corporate- or celebrity-backed, focus-grouped, “optimized” perfume in the world, and there never will be. I enjoy plenty of those perfumes. But I’m also aware when I wear them that they weren’t produced for you or I to enjoy them so much as they were produced for you and I to buy them. They aren’t expressly intended to move us. They’re intended to move sales units.
But there is another, and I think much better, way for perfumery to exist—one that returns to this historic craft’s more democratized, personal, and artistic roots. So I’ve been delighted that Chronotope has been welcomed into the growing network of indie-artisan brands since its launch in 2020. And finally—
