I started Brooklyn Perfume Company in 2014 after friends, excited about my fragrances, encouraged me to go into business. Some find my perfumes challenging, other’s can’t get enough. My perfumes are unorthodox and, like outsider art, are less influenced by artistic tradition than most modern perfumes. I’ve had no formal training and my appreciation of perfumes ended in the 1950s with my mother’s magnificent Joy and Vol de Nuit.

My perfumes are assertive. A few of them—Musk, Amber, and Oud—should be applied in tiny quantities (spray your finger and dab on the perfume), preferably on the side of the neck where only those close or perhaps just a lover can smell them. These same three are overtly sexual and animalic. They bring about erotic thoughts. On one perfume forum, a gentleman commented that there were two aphrodisiacs in his life: Brooklyn Perfume Company’s Oud and the smell of his wife. A friend, said to me, when I was wearing Musk: “Are you wearing some kind of attractant?”

Unlike the others, Sandalwood cools us off. It was the first perfume I came up with and doesn’t, in fact, smell that much like sandalwood, but like the large amount of vetiver it contains. Ambergris is evocative of the ocean in which oarweed, seaweed, ambergris tincture and some classic sea-like synthetics produce the sniff of a just-shucked oyster.

BPC’s perfumes and eaux fraîches contain more than token amounts of the ingredients for which they are named. Ambergris contains ambergris; Green Iris, orris; Oud, frightful amounts of wild oud; and Amber, old balsams and distilled golden amber. All of these iingredients are among the most expensive perfume ingredients in use today.

After the gravitas of the EDPs, the Eaux Fraîches are so pure and evanescent that they uplift. Their fragrance is not my doing; I just left nature alone. Each contains only two ingredients—pure undenatured ethyl alcohol and what’s written on the label. Vetiver contains Ruh Khus, a prized green Indian vetiver; Neroli is scented with distilled orange blossoms, not stems, an almost-unheard-of extravagance; Violet Leaf contains violet leaf essential oil, one of the more sought-after green ingredients in perfumery; Galbanum, the most exotic, contains galbanum essential oil from Turkey.