Why I chose perfume

I chose perfume because it can’t be experienced through a screen

I have many stories to tell. About family, heritage and legacy. There were many ways I could have told them.

I could have made films. Written poems. Explore photography.

These days, almost everything is mediated through a screen. Stories are watched, scrolled, skimmed and saved. We kind of experience life at a distance. Even art has become something we consume passively. I didn’t want that for these stories.

Perfume is one of the few art forms left that demands your body’s engagement. You can’t smell through a screen. You can’t rush it or fully explain it. You have to be there. You have to bring your body into the experience.

Formulating perfume also doesn’t require screen time. Neither does wearing it. There’s something significant in that.

The process is physical: measuring, blending, and a lot of waiting. Returning to the skin repeatedly. And when someone wears a scent, the experience is just as human. The scent moves with them wherever they go, it reacts to their warmth and changes over time as they create their own memories with it.

That’s what made perfume feel right to me. Embodied living. It was all about honesty. It felt like the most human medium available to me. Almost a tiny resistance to the digital numbing we experience every day.

So big picture, I’m hoping to preserve our senses, and with it our beautiful humanity with all its stories to come.

Love, Azama