Carter Weeks Maddox, Chronotope’s Founder, Perfumer & Creative Director >>
I grew up in a family of perfume wearers whose collections include some of the 20th century’s greatest fragrances, and my parents allowed me to explore their collections freely, without regard for gendered categories or social niceties. And I was raised in the deep rural Pineywoods of northeast Texas, where the agrestic, classically well-regarded smells of iron-rich red clay soil, spring wildflowers, hickory smoke rising from BBQ pits, and fields of freshly baled hay could be interrupted at any time by the turpentine tar of 100-foot-tall old growth loblollies going up into flame (my brother fell asleep and left his campfire unattended), an exploding meth lab (a portable building snuck onto the unoccupied property bordering my parents’ acreage), or the fear-inducing raunch of a cottonmouth who’d slivered way too close unnoticed. (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 as a way to avoid spending money that I didn’t have 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 then, I swapped out the store-bought oils cut with jojoba and other diluents for purer, costlier extractions. I also began collecting and working with isolates and synthetic aromachemicals, as well as collecting many of the (by that point, almost 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 >>
In 2012, I wrote my master’s thesis about a literary device that I recognized manifested regularly within women’s writing about their lives. The device is called a chronotope.
Two days after I completed grad school by defending that thesis, I flew to Spain to walk an ancient pilgrimage route called the Camino de Santiago. Then life happened.
And almost a decade later, I opened Chronotope with the brand’s debut fragrance, Buen Camino EdP.
Perfume is, for me, far more than just some sorta smellin’ good.
It is, instead, 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 this reviewer called “their own olfactory universe.” Part of this, I think, 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 work.
There’s no shortage of multinational, corporate- or celebrity-backed, focus-grouped, “optimized” perfume in the world, and there never will be. And I say that not to disparage those perfumes, as I enjoy plenty of them. There is not a perfume in existence that I’ve worn more than I’ve worn Britney Spears’ Midnight Fantasy.
But I wear that perfume and others like it—including most fragrances that occupy the “niche” category, and which are sold everywhere from well-known department stores all the way down to specialty, boutique retailers—with the full awareness that most perfumery in the world was not ever created for me or you to enjoy and be moved by. It was created for me and you to buy.
Most perfumes don’t exist to move us. They exist to move units.
But there is another, and I think much better, way for perfumery to be.
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