Dab a Little 3,000-Year-Old Greek Civilization on Your Wrist

Imagine hanging around the Palace of Nestor in southwest Greece in the Mycenaean Bronze Age (1300–1180 BCE). You pass through one of its courtyards on your way to a social or religious activity and sniff the air. What does it smell like? Perfumer Michael Nordstrand spent nine months crafting the answer.

On October 18, Nordstrand, along with archaeologist and Mycenaean perfume expert Cynthia Shelmerdine, will give a talk, “Perfume in Pylos: Recreating a Bronze Age Scent,” at the Getty Villa Museum. Attendees not only will enjoy Nordstrand and Shelmerdine’s unique expertise about ancient aromas but also get to smell Nordstrand’s “ancient” formulation. In advance of the lecture, he reflected on the fragrance’s creation process.

Your re-creation of a 3,000-year-old Pylos fragrance touches the worlds of science, scent, and ancient history. Would this project come as a surprise to your childhood self?

Michael Nordstrand: I had a lot of strange ideas as a child that I never really gave up. I was always drawing and wanted to be a scientist—to study animals and live in the field. I will still follow a praying mantis around at a botanical garden for a half hour if I feel inspired or sit and draw it. I also wanted to be a linguist; today I speak 15 languages.

In my 20s I was a fashion illustrator, which landed me front row at fashion shows—I felt like Andy Warhol when he worked for Harper’s Bazaar—and I ended up becoming an artistic/creative director for brands like Helmut Lang and Calvin Klein. When I became stressed out by fashion’s pace, a friend suggested I take an aromatherapy class. And that changed my trajectory again. I read Chandler Burr’s The Perfect Scent and researched the fragrance world, which is very hard to get into. I eventually studied perfume creation at Givaudan, ISIPCA, and the Grasse Institute of Perfumery, as well as getting a certification in medicinal plants from Cornell University, and became an independent perfumer.

My current work with Getty and other clients brings together all the sensibilities of this circuitous journey, which is always evolving because I have so many interests.

You describe yourself as a “Method” perfumer, which draws from Method acting, the technique where actors study and sometimes seek to embody a character’s inner life, emotions, and experiences in order to create a more authentic performance. How does this work in perfume?

Nordstrand: I’m very “Method”! A friend of mine once said, “You’re the Daniel Day-Lewis of perfumery.” For example, if I’m reconstructing something historical, I’ll devour period-specific texts to get into the mindset and culture. I research which extracts and technologies were around at the time, and what trace physical evidence there is of perfumed materials, to learn what people could have actually achieved. I read 172 academic papers and articles about ancient world odorants as a beginning point to the Pylos perfume project.

While I was creating the fragrance, I only listened to ancient Greek-inspired music. I also read books like Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, which is really a historical fantasy; but it paints a picture of the time period so vividly I found it helpful as a source of inspiration.

In a more literal sense, my research for the Pylos perfume led me to source raw wool from Skíathos, a Greek island, to filter the perfume through in the end. The research also helped us select ingredients like sage, rose, and coriander, which Cynthia and I can confirm are historically accurate because they were recorded on Mycenaean Linear B tablets.

What were the uses for perfume in ancient Pylos?

Nordstrand: For starters, it wouldn’t have even been called perfume then. Perfume comes from the Latin phrase “per fumum,” meaning “through smoke,” from burning resin, and the idea was that you would pass your arm or clothing through the smoke of perfume and take on its scent. In ancient uses, fragrant oils or perfumed animal fat products would have been called unguents or something similar.

In ancient Greece and the Mediterranean, we don’t have proof that people were using unguents the way we use perfume for personal use today. Excluding the Mycenaean period, we do have evidence that they perfumed things like cloth for offerings. The unguents may have also served as incense, food additives, or medicine. For example, people chewed mastic resin, a natural exudate from the mastic tree, that is valued for medicinal purposes; it is still incorporated in perfume today. Many different types of resins were also burned in temples for religious ceremonies alongside other ingredients.

In a sense, everyone in Pylos was participating in perfume creation on a daily basis. We imagined people conducting their daily bathing routine, perhaps applying a scent, then layering it with something else during a midday prayer. And scents were seasonal, depending on holidays and availability. You might have walked into an ancient Greek city at one period and smelled myrrh everywhere in the air; at another time you’d smell honey and figs.

It’s possible that scents were blended, but likely not often bottled together. Instead, we imagined a common air. In perfumery, this is called a “headspace”: an approach in which the molecules that create an aroma are extracted from the air and analyzed. So, our perfume is more like an ancient Mycenaean headspace than it is a perfume in the modern sense. It’s what the average ancient Mycenaean Greek person might have smelled during the course of a day.

What was the creation process like?

Nordstrand: Once Cynthia and I finalized the ingredients, raw materials were sourced, and infusions with the oils began in February. I did both cold infusions and heated ones with clay vessels and a fire pit; with the heated infusions, the olive oil became very viscous. I hand-harvested damask roses from April to early June and continued adding them to the oils.

Each batch was filtered through sheep’s wool, which contains lanolin, an animal fat that readily absorbs odors from its environment. This imparted a vaguely sweet, hay-like tone, alongside a slightly animalic warmth, contributing to the historical accuracy. The resulting scent was unguent-like and would work for uses such as the perfuming of cloths.

I was also inspired to create a second, modernized fragrance. We have the power now to make molecules that didn’t exist before or to harness nature in different ways. Instead of using coriander for the modern version of this ancient fragrance, I used a molecular distillation of linalool, a naturally occurring terpenoid alcohol found in coriander seed. I strengthened it with a molecule that’s not found in nature—it’s like linalool but more stable. This made the scent last for 24 hours instead of three, extending the pleasure.

A French company called MANE also sent me a range of molecules and natural extracts to consider for incorporation into the modernized version. I combined the ones that represented coconut, bell pepper, prune, and upcycled spice bread to create a sort of spiced fig syrup alongside mastic leaf oil and cistus extract from Crete. When the fragrance opens, it has this air of being around the fig harvest, which I imagined the people of Pylos having access to, and which is reinforced by archaeobotanical evidence.

The plum-like note from the cistus extract, when combined with wool absolute (an ingredient derived from sheep’s wool), was interesting to me. That fruity note actually comes from the gum resin collected from cistus plants, called labdanum, which sticks to the hair of grazing animals like goats. In ancient times, labdanum was raked out using a comb-like tool.

At the talk on the 18th, audiences will get to smell both perfumes, including this modern version built with new raw materials that perfumers have in their palettes today, many of which the ancient Mycenaeans would never have dreamt of in antiquity.

Are there recent trends that resonate with ancient methods or proclivities, for example, figs?

Nordstrand: Fig is one of those notes that is perennially revisited, so I wouldn’t say it ever really goes out of style. The true task for a perfumer is to do something completely new in the face of two amazing benchmarks, a term we use to refer to references of popular perfumes in the market: Premier Figuier, from L’Artisan Parfumeur, and Philosykos, from Diptyque, both by Olivia Giacobetti. I recently created a fragrance called Isleta that imagines a kind of air above the branches of fig trees paired with a rich jasmine tea and warm sandalwood.

I’m noticing some very interesting other trends in perfumery though, and I do an annual presentation at a convention in New York City called ScentXplore, where I introduce annual trends and demonstrate how perfumers interpret them to consumers. For a little preview, one big trend I’ve seen is the exploration of two vastly different sides of the same spectrum: a surreal, futuristic take on otherwise normal materials or notes, and a very pastoral interpretation of materials that honors the wisdom and beauty of the world around us as a kind of spiritual experience. In times like these, people look deeply inward for comfort and answers or else they seek other perspectives entirely—new worlds, new ideas.

Do you have any thoughts on ancient perfume bottles, and could you please select a favorite from our collection?

Nordstrand: I love the history and artistry of perfume vessels and other containers for housing the precious materials we still use today. I’m most drawn to the shape of things like the alabastron or the exaleiptron, which are supremely elegant. The choice of a singular material also helps highlight the graceful form.