By Steve Price & Bryan Ergle
Like the artificers of old, he crafts concoctions that bequeath eloquence and beauty upon the user. With a skilled nose and hand of a master craftsman, he expertly blends different ingredients with his own form of unique alchemy, whose potions are worn and whose effects are rapturous upon the senses. And like any artist of true renown, his humility and his kindness hide what is, in effect, his greatest strength: a sort of down-to-earth humbleness that endears great cerebral intensity and passion into all that he seeks to craft. As a result, the infusions he creates, the fragrances made by his talented hand, are all the more poignant to the senses for it.
The man behind this barrage of praise is one Carter Weeks Maddox, an independent, self-taught perfumer and wizard of the olfactory delights who is kind enough to lend his invaluable expertise and passion to Well-Sewn and what we seek to do here. Recently, we sat down with Carter to discuss what made him tick, and in doing so, we learned as much about the man behind his fragrances as we did about the artist creating the work.
Originally from Tyler, Texas, he now calls Florida home, and Florida is, in many ways, where his journey into creating perfume became real. “When I moved to Florida in 2015, I thought it was under the guise of only being there for six months before I’d be moving to London for a job in tech,” he told Well-Sewn, before continuing: “But then Brexit happened. And then I got more serious about perfume. And then I stayed in Florida.”
Texas, however, provided the spark that became his dream of one day working in perfumery. Carter told Well-Sewn, “Around 2009 or so, when I still lived in Texas, I’d been on a bike ride with some friends one day, and one of them was wearing lavender oil that I could smell as we rode. It was during the annual cedar bloom, and as we rode through this one massive gust of pollen, the smell of the lavender and the pollen both fundamentally changed. I realized I wasn’t smelling either on their own anymore, that they became a completely new a third scent when they combined, like a chord in music. First there were lavender and cedar pollen, and then out of nowhere, here was this scent of fruity cereal. And then it was gone just as fast, and there was just the lavender oil again.”
This incident occurred a year or so after he’d accidentally dropped & shattered the one bottle of perfume he had left. It was also the last day he didn’t wear fragrance. That night, he counted drops of cedar and lavender essential oils onto tissues and his forearms trying to recreate the fruity-cereal scent he’d smelled that day. And over time, he acquired more materials of higher quality, eventually cobbling together a rudimentary citrus cologne with a tiny bit of jasmine that he cut with jojoba oil.
“Nothing I’d made was all that great, but it worked for my needs, and I began to get an understanding about how scents could be blended together to make new smells. I also began wearing perfume again, too. And by the time I moved to Florida in 2015, I was already seeking out a broader range of much higher-quality essential oils and manipulating them to the extent it’d become a hobby of sorts. When I realized I wouldn’t be moving out of the US and had some time to just dilly-dally around in Florida, I spent more time outside and became fascinated by how many florals there are here, in all seasons. I didn’t have that back home in Texas. I wouldn’t have that in London.” Florida fertilized the already existing passion in Carter’s life so that it would eventually, in 2020, help define his brand-new, unexpected career as a perfumer.
“I’d always liked perfume and worn it. My parents both wore multiple perfumes, good ones, when I was growing up – Halston, L’air du Temps, the classic Polo for men in the green bottle, Aramis,” Carter told Well-Sewn. “And I wore those, too, and also had my own collection of bottles that I’d get for Christmas and birthdays. So I always had a pre-existing set of ideas about perfume—what it is or isn’t. And I didn’t think of the oil blends I made as even primitive perfumes. I just liked smells, and had stumbled into this odd, rather expensive hobby of mixing together essential oils to see what new smells I could make with them. I spent mine on these materials, which I was just generally interested in and loved learning about, along with a personal collection of perfume. I have somewhere around 100 bottles of discontinued vintage perfume.”
Somewhere along the way, a friend who’d spent 15 years working at AVEDA pointed out to Carter that he was only one step away from making perfume himself: he just needed to add alcohol to his oil blends. “That completely surprised me. I thought to be a perfumer, you had to be French, your last name needed to be one of, like, three special last names, and if you didn’t meet those criteria, you would never be a perfumer. I thought this was such a strict rule that I never even really explored web outlets for hobbyists. I’d log into them, feel some existential dread at seeing how many people would join in on arguments about batch codes for $400-a-bottle perfumes that were popular in Brooklyn but that I’d never buy because I think they smell pretty terrible, and then I’d log out before ever finding the maker’s threads that are like, ‘Help! My blueberry note smells like a skunk!’ or whatever.”
But then in 2018, Carter came across The Dry Down, “a tiny online community of perfume enthusiasts hosted on Slack by the writers Helena Fitzgerald and Rachel Syme. There was—and still is—a big emphasis on swapping samples in The Dry Down. And that exercise taught me that, especially in the States, novices can and do make perfume, and that some of these makers even make good perfume that sells enough to fund their livelihoods. I just thought, maybe someday—if I’m lucky—that could be me, too.”
When he eventually opened Chronotope at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in August 2020, the initial reaction to his work left Carter gobsmacked: whether ironically or fatefully, he found himself having become part of the perfume industry overnight. “One day I was not a perfumer; at best, I was a hobbyist with the gall to ask actual strangers to give me money in exchange for some of my little smelly projects. But then the next day came, and people actually gave me that money.”
Carter recalls the events of that first day that changed everything: “I made my first sale within a minute of opening the store online, and my first ten within three or so. Within the hour, I’d made my first 50 sales. Then at midnight, as I sat frozen in front of my phone watching more and more orders come in, I tallied up the day’s sales figures and saw that I’d made back my entire investment. I was overwhelmed. So I went to bed.”
When he woke, more orders had been placed, and they all needed to be filled. One order was placed by Master Perfumer Christophe Laudamiel—the man behind Abercrombie & Fitch stores’ environmental fragrance, which the retailer also bottles and sells as the perfume called Fierce. Carter said, “I didn’t believe it—I wondered where Ashton Kutcher was hiding. But then a week or so later, Christophe posted a picture of one of the bottles, already depleted some, to his Instagram along with a caption saying that what I’d made what was, and I quote, ‘a feat,’ along with more about how what I’d made was exactly what he liked to see in lavender perfumes. He said he’d been spraying and spraying it and loving it. He posted about it a few more times that year. He’s returned to buy several bottles of other perfumes I’ve made over time.
In time and with hindsight, Carter eventually realized a key ingredient to the immediate success: “I’d been preparing for that launch for way longer than I’d given myself credit for in the moment. In my head, the ramp-up to opening the brand just lasted as long as it took me to build the website. But I eventually recognized I’d been building a sales funnel for three years when I opened. I just hadn’t ever really thought about it in those terms.”
Since 2017, Carter had maintained a second Instagram account that he used just for perfume-related content, to avoid annoying his family and friends with overloads of factoids and thoughts and opinions about his ever-increasing interest into an admittedly niche hobby. The account still exists, though it’s now private, and the content made during those years has long since been gone, as he used the app’s Stories feature, which automatically deletes content 24 hours after it’s posted. Still, Carter reports he reviewed or shared his thoughts about 600 or so unique perfumes between 2016 and 2020, often in the form of personal essays that regularly ran as long as 15, 20, or sometimes as many as 50 individual story slides.
“Over time,” Carter said, “that account became a kind of entirely organic early prospecting pipeline, to put it into sales terms, which I really don’t like doing because I never thought of things that way. I genuinely like the people who follow that account quite a lot and have developed relationships with them. They’re people who also love perfume, whose thoughts on perfume and fragrance are ones I genuinely care about and listen to and appreciate. And they’re also my core audience group. They’ve been with me since before day one. I just also now understand them as the group of people I was always making perfume for—and in some ways, always will.”
Even if things went more smoothly than planned once his perfume brand launched, Carter says, getting to that point had been anything but smooth. When asked about the difficulty of the journey that led to opening Chronotope, Carter was frank about challenges he faced: “It took me a very long time, and it cost me so much money, to find reputable, reliable sources for materials. Because they’re so scarce, not many (if any) in the industry are willing to speak about who their sources are for fear of driving too much demand for the materials they need. One person who I no longer speak with gave me such a lecture when I asked where they found some material or other. They could have just said they’d rather not share. But that intimidation piece, I think, was important to them. There’s a pecking order, I guess.”
He also described the vivid rewards of overcoming the hurdles and achieving what has been a wholly unexpected experience: “Working in a complete silo, with nobody around me who could help, and really not even anyone who would help, has been, in the end, a real blessing. I’m free to work how I want, and that’s let me find a creative voice in perfumery that’s legitimately mine. I’ve never even seen anyone else do this work. I don’t know how anyone else begins a project. I’ve received exactly zero hours of training in a perfume school or even a weekend program for hobbyists. But I do make perfume, and it’s a really embodied process for me. The result is work that smells like mine and only mine. Nobody else has any claim that. I’m pretty proud of that.”
Practically, perfume-making fuses many elements from both STEM fields and the arts & humanities. For Carter, who’s trained in writing and holds a master’s in literary theory, Chronotope is a logical conclusion to work he started around the time he took that bike ride back in Texas: “Chronotope is about writing and storytelling as much as it’s about perfume, and that idea is literally baked into the name of the brand. A chronotope is this particular literary device that I covered in my master’s thesis, and I call the first collection of four perfumes I made the Autotheory Issues in reference to a specific kind of nonfiction life writing that centers human experience in relational networks from the perspective of our unique, individual bodies. It sounds theoretical, and I guess in some ways, it is. But for me, it’s also practical. It’s just what I was educated in. This is how I apply that education.”
But Chronotope’s perfumes—like, ostensibly, all perfumery—also exist beyond the practical realm. And perfumery is for Carter as it has been for so many others before him: a deeply personal, spiritual, and even philosophical practice: “Whether or not anyone realizes it,” Carter claimed, “perfumers expose the entirety of one of our sensual capacities through our work. You almost have to be an exhibitionist to do this work. No other job has ever made me feel so constantly exposed.”
This inherent property of perfume—that making it requires self-exposure—eventually made Carter realize that approaching his work as if he were writing memoirs in scent was redundant. So just over a year after he launched Chronotope, he pivoted and began using perfume as a vehicle to help express the embodied experiences of others. This is all part of what Carter calls an “ever-moving journey” that “endlessly evolves” in regard to his personal relationship with, and understanding of, scent and perfume.
“Plus, I never want to be the product being bought,” Carter unequivocally stated; “I want the perfume to be bought. And if I make perfume about my life, then I sell that experience, that part of myself, off. I don’t want to commoditize my life like that. I just want to make perfume that people enjoy wearing.”
But he sees the work as engaging more than simply sheer enjoyment: “I really care about creating work that challenges and changes people’s current understanding of perfume just a little bit. Not much! But still a bit. I want my perfumes to point ahead, not back. Sometimes I want my perfumes to evoke memories, sure. But really I just want to use perfume to tell stories. Perfume makes many people feel uncomfortable, which is a pretty good sign that it’s actually art. But I don’t think it should feel bad either—it certainly doesn’t to me! I want to make work that feels better, that offers people escape routes instead of trap doors. So the subject matter I cover in my perfumes are sometimes unusual at a first glance. But if that’s what’s needed to illustrate the point I’m trying to make through a project, so be it.”
Indeed, far from shying away from the unusual, Carter embraces it, often pointedly. When discussing the often sweet, fruity floral scents – the type that are popular with, and marketed to, young women, he found himself at an impasse of sorts with the way they’re marketed and what their notes lists often represent.
“Most people making perfume are men,” he said, “and fruity-florals are, on the whole, targeted to girls and young women, almost exclusively. I think we owe some respect and care to those girls and young women—but I look around, and I don’t see it. What does it tell younger women and girls when a perfume commercial has a camera following some actress all around Paris wherever she goes, speeding after her if she’s running away, chasing her around corners…it looks like she’s just being stalked. And so often in cultural iconographies, ripe fruits represent sexual awakening or whatever—they even often represent girls who haven’t even finished puberty yet. So when we call fruity florals ‘sexy’ perfumes, and this is what we bring to them via marketing, we’re swimming in poisoned well water. The industry has fabricated this entire genre of perfume centered on sexualizing youth and being super predatory toward them. It’s all just creepy. Very ‘Humbert-Humbert-gazes-at-Lolita.’”
“So when it was time to make a fruity floral for Chronotope,” he continues, “I thought, I’ll make this about men, not women. Gendered power differential: dissolved, instantly. And I took my inspiration from a nude beach that I live near and go to from time to time that’s frequented by gay men who get rather handsy in the dunes. And now the sexual undertones inherent to the genre imply consent—while at the same time, the concept of the perfume includes this group of people whose stories aren’t really ever told through this medium.”
That concept became Playalinda, a perfume which pushes the boundaries of the form and, Carter hopes, inspires some introspection. “If anything tells me the ideas I was trying to get across in Playalinda actually work,” he said, “it’s that it’s been the brand’s bestseller for almost the entire time Chronotope has been open. But more than that, it’s that most of the customers who send me positive feedback about it happen to be men. And more often than not, they’re not gay. I think it’s great that men don’t even care about the gay element to the story of that perfume. They’re just glad to have a fruity floral that’s made with them in mind, a product that fits within this genre they’ve been told isn’t for them because none of the stories about that genre are ever about them.”
“So many people have these deeply complicated feelings about perfume that get in the way of their engaging with it. These are real insecurities that have been hammered into people over time, but they’re really just products of elitism within the industry,” Carter said. “It’s things like not being the right gender to wear a particular kind of fragrance, or how just because they can’t afford a fragrance, it diminishes their self-worth…it’s a lot!
He continued, “If you look at the messaging and images that perfume brands create, often times, it has you wondering like, what planet are they living on? There are still perfume brands that stand by their use of explicitly racist and colonial terminology. It can be rather regressive. And that’s what keeps people from engaging with perfume, but it’s also what keeps people who want to make it, like me, afraid to join the industry. But I eventually had to just say, screw that, because the industry has some very real issues it needs to work through if it’s going to last. People want fragrance, but what is offered makes so many people feel bad—so really, people just need alternatives, not replications of what everyone already knows doesn’t work. I’m not afraid to seek out some of those alternatives. I can at least try.”
That lack of fear has helped him monkey-wrench boundaries with fragrance in other ways, as well. “I’m really interested in the clinical application of scent, too, of the effects that smell, or the lack thereof, has on sick or broken bodies. When we think of perfume and the images used to sell it, it’s all these models. But they’re not the only people who should wear perfume. I’m interested in everyone else, and in this craft’s capacity to represent all the other bodies, too—everyone who isn’t just a hot model. We already know there’s a cost to idealizing everything. So why does perfume still do it?”
And his products stand by this claim: “I have seven perfumes out right now, and three are explicitly about clinical experiences of sickness and ill-health: blood poisoning and crippling infection, living with and treating cancer, and then blood and bodily decomposition,” Carter continued. He has shared his expertise with facilities on these scent experiences and those clinical implications—but out of respect for some of that work being ongoing, we’ll hold off on publishing more about it until it has progressed further!
We’ve covered a lot of territory in this article already—but not yet the process of creating a single fragrance. Cater explained the journey: “When I go to create a fragrance, I write out a brief for myself for what I want the perfume to do. Sometimes I want to evoke certain feelings or emotions, or to depict a body in a very specific state of being, like one that’s just been through a bout of chemo—or other times, I might want to produce scents with materials that I know have certain effects on the nose itself. Iris materials, for instance, contain molecules that short-circuit the olfactive system; you can smell and smell and smell, but you’ll only smell them once every fifteen minutes or so. The other fourteen minutes, that part of your system is shocked into being unable to smell anything. You can make a lot of cool effects happen with that sort of molecule!”
He continues, “I know every perfumer has their own approach when it comes to tackling a brief. But nobody’s ever shown me any ‘best practices’ for doing so. And one thing I love about not having the formal training is that I lack any sort of ‘institutionalized’ approach to responding to a brief. I get to begin each and every project on a completely blank slate that’s mine and only mine. If you go sniff around at Sephora or a department store sometime, I think you’ll realize what I mean pretty quickly. The perfumes there are all made by so many different perfumers, for so many different brands. Yet there’s something about them that makes them all just blend together. I’m convinced that commercialized training makes it harder for a perfumer to develop their own individual style. But being self-taught, I had no other option but to develop my own style, my own approach to answering a brief.”
In addition to his own exquisite line, Carter has been the perfumer working on Well-Sewn’s own, forthcoming perfume line, Effronté et Évocateur. He was kind enough to share his thoughts about working on the project: “Where Effronté et Évocateur lives in my head is not anywhere near Chronotope. Chronotope‘s perfumes are admittedly a bit baroque and grandiose, they deal with all these ‘big ideas’ that are hard to boil down. And they’re extremely confrontational; with them, I’m making all these sweeping gestures. And sometimes those result in smells that are even somewhat self-contradictory. With most of Chronotope’s seven perfume releases, it’s hard to pick out one note and say, ‘this is an X perfume.’ But you can do that with the work I’m doing for Effronté et Évocateur. It’s all uniquely refined and decisive, and whereas Chronotope’s work typically contains some degree of actual stink, the work for Effronté et Évocateur is all very, very nice.”
The reason for this difference, Carter explains, has to do with how each of the brands approach their relationship with the past; where Chronotope is an attempt to break away from the past, Effronté et Évocateur contains a real respect for tradition. Carter said, “These are perfumes that live in a nostalgic place that doesn’t dip into melancholy and being driven by emotion; rather, they are reminiscent of an era when people dressed very, very nice and enjoyed all the finer things of the past that we unfortunately only rarely get to experience anymore.”
Regarding working on a new brand, and another person’s concepts, after having spent the last few years so head-down in his own, he said “It is a challenge to get out of my own head, and not to recreate my own aesthetic, but it’s also not hard either. It’s a pleasure to work on something coming from someone else’s mind, which is freeing. I’m allowing myself to use materials more liberally than I have allowed myself to use them before. Perfumes aren’t just about feelings, they are feelings, and Effronté triggers that effect immediately: it’s all about reminiscence.”
Reminiscence is something of a catchword when discussing perfumes with Carter, for one takes the impression that they are seeing the expression of an artist of old, pouring their soul into works of cerebral art that are designed to play not just on the nose, but on all the senses. He stands as a vanguard of artificers that create scents that do more than just make people smell pleasant but create sensory experiences that can engender true emotional responses. Such perhaps is the reason so much hard work, dedication and passion goes into the labor of love, for the craftsman knows no other road than the path through perfection.
