Me/dea Eau de Parfum

An orange blossom soliflore about mercy—or maybe it’s a baby perfume. You decide.

We live in terrible times—I know you already know this—when we are tricked or encouraged, through gamified apps cooked up by billionaires’ companies, to watch men and women in a variety of official roles kill other families’ children every single day.

Concurrently, and perhaps perversely, a so-called “doll’s head” accord has been all the rage in particularly the level of the market that I work within—artisan perfumery—and especially since 2020. The accord is made from a mixture of heliotropin and vanilla, and it offers nostalgia and comfort to wearers, enabling a memetic route to an idealized, anesthetized fantasy of one’s childhood—a version of good old days that (thankfully) did not include infanticide, and that entirely lack any real, tangible lived-through turmoil. The accord operates like an opiate, and unsurprisingly so.

There’s a place for this in perfumery: what are so many of my own perfumes if not balms, and overtly so?

Still, there remains a deep maliciousness to the doll’s head accord, too. For so long as perfume has been made by Europeans who’ve wanted their product to appear as if it were flung into existence sans colonial plunder, without any actual children’s lives in its wake, the craft’s material origins have been obfuscated, convoluted, and denied outright. This habit continues into the present: a recent BBC special documented child laborers—modern-day slaves—who work as pickers on floral plantations that sell their crops directly to the perfume industry. It’s certainly true that perfumers who produce doll’s head accords aren’t trying to poke fun at these real child victims. But doll’s head accords do altogether distract from and re-write the fungible relationship our industry has with children nonetheless.

Me/dea Eau de Parfum offers a counter to the pacifying dolls’ head accord craze to more honestly reflect material reality. In it, via an orange blossom, jasmine, and neroli complex similar to baby perfume that parents around the globe spray onto their infants, is not a doll’s head—but a child’s. Below it is a whisp of baby powder that wind blows away to reveal as ash and concrete dust just in time for the jasmine’s indole to explode into phenols—tar, diesel, jet fuel. Heavy metals—rebar, barbed wire, the iron content of blood accompany the explosion. As these phenolic notes collapse in on themselves, their energy and virility expended, kudzu vines creeps into view via the scent of their flowers—which smell of orange blossom’s base notes, like fizzy grape soda. Mushrooms sprout, and a new earth is born.

Life, death, decay, rebirth. A child lives, briefly, before becoming part of everything. You might forget the perfume was the site of such terrible harm. You might forget that specifically you, Me/dea’s wearer, were both that site and the progenitor of that harm.

Toward the end of the National Theatre’s 2014 production of Medea with the late, great Helen McRory in the titular role, she’s blood-soaked and reminds her husband they were both responsible for their children’s deaths. These words also remind the audience that had they not shown up to see the play, McRory wouldn’t have all this blood on her hands. In this way, the split in the perfume’s name is at once a pointed finger and a directive to the higher power that might offer forgiveness if you ask nicely.

Might. 

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust—
Without you there’d be no us.