“I hated putting it away.”
— Mandy Aftel (excerpt)
Old books, botanical specimens, bottles of aromatic materials, hand-colored postcards. Mandy Aftel’s home was filled with objects connected to scent. Whenever visitors came, she would bring them out, and everyone marveled at their beauty. It seemed a shame to put them away again.
The Aftel Archive of Curious Scents is a small museum that turned this personal collection into a place to share with others. It opened in 2017 behind a house in Berkeley, California. Rather than a shop for choosing a finished perfume, it is a place to get closer to the materials that come before it, and to the history of how people have used scent.
Pick up a root. Open an old book. Compare an aromatic material from around a century ago with its present-day counterpart. Here, the ingredient names that appear in perfume descriptions become things with weight, color, and smell.
At a Glance
- Name: Aftel Archive of Curious Scents
- Opened: 2017
- Founder: Mandy Aftel, who created the museum with her husband, Foster Curry, and her son, Devon
- Location: 1518-1/2 Walnut Street, Berkeley, CA 94709, USA
- Main exhibits: Natural aromatic materials and their raw ingredients, antique scent bottles, and old books, prints, and equipment related to fragrance
- Official information: Aftel Archive of Curious Scents
Aftel is a natural perfumer and the founder of Aftelier Perfumes. Although the archive includes exhibits relating to her own creations, the collection reaches far beyond the history of her brand.
Mandy Aftel and the Origins of the Archive
From Psychotherapy to Antiquarian Perfume Books
Before she began making perfume, Aftel worked as a psychotherapist, primarily with artists and writers. After finishing a book about narrative and psychotherapy, she decided she wanted to write a novel and make its main character a perfumer.
As she visited antiquarian book fairs in search of research materials, she became drawn to the old books on perfume and plants themselves. Plant lore, the history of aromatic materials, formulas. With every page she turned, perfume revealed itself as a world too broad to fit within a single branch of cosmetics.
Eventually, she took a class with a friend in making perfume from natural materials and became captivated by the ingredients. Her interest endured even after the perfume business they started together came to an end. Encouraged by her best friend, a book editor, to write a history of perfume, she published Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume in 2001. The novel she had first imagined was never finished, but the books she gathered for her research went on to support her creative work and writing.
A Small Museum Built by a Family over Three Years
The collection expanded from books to postcards, botanical materials, and tools connected with perfumery. While visiting California’s Gold Country with her husband, Aftel said at a small-town museum that she would like to create a place like it herself. His reply was “Okay”.
Aftel, Curry, and Devon then spent three years creating the museum in a cottage behind their home. It stands on the property where Aftel has lived since 1977, very close to the restaurant Chez Panisse. Rather than establish a museum somewhere far away, she made an entrance for visitors in the place where her life and collection had accumulated.
“It made physical what I had found in all those books.”
— Mandy Aftel (excerpt)
The museum’s opening announcement in 2017 described an experience of smelling more than 300 natural essences, comparing century-aged materials with modern ones, and reading more than 50 antiquarian books. Here, “essences” refers to aromatic materials obtained from plants and other sources.
The opening was not the end point of her long-running collecting. In 2023, Aftel also spoke about a newly acquired book on distillation from 1835. Seeking out the materials she wants, bringing them into the collection, and showing them to others: these activities continue to nurture the exhibits.
Reopening after Closure, and Extending the Museum into a Book
During the pandemic, the museum stopped welcoming visitors. It reopened in late 2021 with measures to reduce infection risks. The current official guidance combines indoor mask-wearing with scent sampling in the outdoor Garden Annex.
The Museum of Scent: Exploring the Curious and Wondrous World of Fragrance was published in 2023. The book looks at groups of materials such as flowers, woods, leaves and grasses, and resins, as well as antique bottles and handwritten formulas. Through old botanical illustrations and depictions of the colors of aromatic materials, it opened up the world of the collection to people unable to visit the museum.
For the book, Aftel painted the colors of the liquid aromatic materials in watercolor. Even if scent cannot be printed, the shapes of the plants surrounding it, the colors of bottles, and fragments of history can be conveyed. The museum and the book offer ways into the same collection through different senses.
What the Raw Materials and Historical Objects Reveal
Connecting Roots, Leaves, and Resins with the Names of Aromatic Materials
The archive holds not only aromatic extracts but also their raw ingredients. The official information lists materials such as vetiver roots, benzoin resin, and bushman’s candle. Some of the botanical materials stored in drawers can be touched as well as viewed.
When KQED’s Bianca Taylor visited in 2018, she was struck by wooden drawers containing vetiver, juniper berries, cedar wood, shells, and other materials. A 2019 visit described in Via also recounts the experience of handling patchouli leaves and pieces of Virginia cedar wood.
There is something compelling about taking perfume terms such as “woody” and “resinous” back to the physical forms of the ingredients. Wood, roots, and resins differ in both appearance and texture. Seeing a raw ingredient separately from its bottled extract also brings the work of extraction into view: the process that turns a plant into a perfumery material.
Comparing Old and Modern Aromatic Materials
Comparing aromatic materials from around a century ago with modern ones has been a feature of the museum since it opened. With bottles that have survived for so long, it is not only the labels and containers that become historical records. The smells remaining inside can also be compared.
The collection includes a group of old aromatic materials found in the attic of a French perfumer. Vogue described them in 2017 as a set of bottles from a perfumer who had worked for Rimmel. Their French labels and handwritten lettering retain traces of the work of the people who handled these materials.
However, the smell of an old bottle cannot simply be taken as the smell it had when new a hundred years ago. What is being compared here is a material that has survived the passage of time and its modern counterpart. Rather than deciding which is better on the assumption that aging always improves a material, it is helpful to see this as an opportunity to explore the differences that can exist under the same ingredient name.
Learning about the Osmothèque, which preserves and reconstructs the formulas of finished perfumes, alongside this archive reveals the different focuses that preserving scent can take. What the Aftel Archive brings us closer to is raw materials and the cultures of the people who have encountered them.
Learning about Animal-Derived Materials through Physical Exhibits
The Garden Annex offers opportunities to smell historical animal-derived materials, old essences, and oud oils, among other things. Ambergris is an aromatic material originating in a substance formed inside sperm whales. Materials with starting points entirely different from the flowers and leaves of plants are also part of the history of scent.
Exhibits such as a taxidermied civet and a papier-mâché musk deer make the origins of these materials visible. From the familiar perfume word “musk,” visitors can broaden their interest to the animal, the history of harvesting the material, and differences from present-day perfumery.
Smelling historical animal-derived materials here should not be taken to mean that today’s perfumes generally use them in the same way. Nor does an exhibition centered on natural materials guarantee that something is safe or healthy simply because it is natural. Aftel collects the diversity of scents in nature and the traces of how people have used them.
Books, Prints, and Equipment: Uses beyond Perfume
The holdings include a sixteenth-century Book of Secrets, the botanical work Theatrum Botanicum, first published in 1640, and The Complete Distiller from 1810. Distillation equipment, old scent bottles, and pomanders for carrying fragrance also help shape the world of the exhibits alongside the materials themselves.
In these books, scent does not belong to perfume alone. Plants, cooking, distillation, and personal care sit side by side within a single volume. They reveal how fields of knowledge that might now occupy separate shelves were once connected through the same materials.
“I like people to be able to read things; it slows them down and makes them wonder.”
— Mandy Aftel (excerpt)
This thinking also explains why visitors are given gloves for handling the antiquarian books. The experience does not end with looking at spines through a display case: it makes time to follow the illustrations and words on the pages. The current official information offers visitors the chance to read more than 100 of the books in the collection.
Smelling, and the Freedom to Put It into Words
The Perfume Organ and a Deconstructed Fragrance
A perfume organ is a tiered set of shelves holding numerous bottles of aromatic materials. Like a musical organ, it offers a view of the materials at hand, but instead of producing sounds, the perfumer combines the scents in the bottles. At the archive, these shelves create a panorama of the world of ingredients.
When the museum opened, it also included an exhibit that broke down Curious, the perfume Aftel created in response to the museum, into its individual ingredients and the aromatic combinations made from them. It was designed to let visitors follow how individual materials such as tobacco and hay lead to a finished perfume.
The 2019 visit report also describes comparing natural and synthetic versions of vanilla, rose, and jasmine. Even with natural materials as its central subject, the museum does not confine the conversation to impressions of finished products. It offers a way to smell and consider the differences between ingredients.
Following Your Own Memories rather than Seeking the Right Response
People unfamiliar with perfume may worry about whether they can describe it well, or whether their preferences might be wrong. Aftel does not believe there is any need to search for a correct response to a smell.
“Any answer you have, that’s the right answer.”
— Mandy Aftel (excerpt)
Writing about a 2024 visit for East Bay Magazine, Samantha Campos recounted how the smell of fir reminded her husband, who accompanied her, of a relative’s garage. The same bottle does not mean “forest” to everyone. Here, learning the categories of aromatic materials can overlap with encountering your own memories.
Those differences can also help us learn about perfume ingredients. The smell we imagine on hearing a name may not match the impression we receive from the actual material. Rather than treating that mismatch as a failure, we can examine what we experienced. Leaving room for that is part of the appeal of this small archive.
Key Milestones
| Year or Period | Event |
|---|---|
| Before beginning to make perfume | While working as a psychotherapist, Aftel begins collecting antiquarian perfume books as research for a novel |
| 2001 | She publishes Essence and Alchemy, turning her collected books and interest in natural aromatic materials into a book on the history of perfume |
| The three years before opening | Aftel, her husband Curry, and her son Devon create the museum in a cottage behind their home |
| 2017 | The Aftel Archive opens, sharing a collection through which visitors can experience old books, raw ingredients, natural aromatic materials, and antique essences |
| Late 2021 | The museum reopens after its pandemic closure with measures to reduce infection risks |
| 2023 | The Museum of Scent is published, sharing the collection and the culture of scent |
Current Visitor Information
The following is official information checked on October 14, 2026. Times are local to Berkeley.
- Opening hours: Every Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
- Visit duration: One hour, with a limited number of visitors admitted per time slot
- Admission: Adults US$25 plus a US$3 service fee; children US$15 plus a US$3 service fee
- Reservations: The museum recommends buying tickets online in advance, as walk-in spaces may not be available. Holders of gift passes or complimentary tickets should arrange a date and time by phone or email
- Indoors and scent sampling: Masks are required indoors. Visitors remove them to sample scents in the outdoor Garden Annex
A visit includes gloves for handling old books, an AromaCone to help focus on scents outdoors, and take-home scent strips dipped in selected essences. Check the booking information for details such as the number of strips provided.
Book through the official ticket page. Before buying, check the time slots and availability for your chosen date, along with the conditions for children’s participation. It is best to proceed through the booking calendar where you select a date, rather than through a list of past events.
References
- Leaves and Flowers interview with Aftel: the move from psychotherapy to perfume, three years of museum-building with her family, and her reasons for collecting (October 1, 2024)
- The archive’s official visitor guide: current exhibits, visits, admission, reservations, and mask requirements
- Antiques and the Arts Weekly interview: collecting old books, aromatic materials and equipment, the Berkeley home, and the motivation for turning the museum into a book (October 10, 2023)
- Aftelier’s museum-opening newsletter: the original visitor information and the deconstruction of Curious (June 2017)
- Hyperallergic’s account of the scent museum: the late-2021 reopening, the collection, and Aftel’s comments on making the book (October 31, 2023)
- Publisher and distributor’s book listing: publication date and contents of The Museum of Scent
- KQED’s visit to the archive: drawers of raw ingredients, animal-derived materials, and the perfume organ (January 2018)
- Via’s visit to the archive: handling ingredients and comparing natural with synthetic, and old with modern, aromatic materials (February 10, 2019)
- Vogue’s report on the museum: antique Rimmel scent bottles and exhibits of animal-derived materials (July 11, 2017)
- East Bay Magazine’s account of a visit: the experience and Aftel’s comments on responses to scent (September 27, 2024)
- The museum’s official ticketing service: one-hour visit reservations
