Scents I have no wish to forget

Infragantico was born twice.

The first time, in a garden in La Mancha: saffron flowers and thyme, a grandmother's geraniums by the fig tree, the smoke of vine shoots burning at harvest, the petrichor rising from dry earth after the storm. Scents whose names I have no wish to forget.

The second time, many years and thousands of kilometres later. A journey brought me from La Mancha to the Netherlands, and one evening in Amsterdam a fine summer rain awakened that same petrichor from foreign soil. I understood that smell is how memory travels — and that I had come home for the second time.

And yet, this city does not smell like that garden. That was the second gift: streets along the canals where scents from other parts of the world mingle — new scents I did not yet know how to name. Ever since, this house has moved with two forces: the memory of the scents that made us, and the wonder of those we do not yet know.

I came to perfume as a cook: through the senses, with my hands. The first perfume that undid me, I tried to rebuild in my own kitchen — and I never really stopped. Beneath my parents' house there is a cellar of inherited chests, old clothes, burnt firewood, my father's dark tobacco: a scent I have been chasing ever since, and have not yet reached. Every house should have an impossible search. This is ours.

Infragantico composes slowly, from Amsterdam: reading, researching, translating a myth, a legend or a novel into natural raw materials, chosen for their quality and their unrepeatable aromatic character. Every bottle is weighed in grams and labelled one by one.

We don't make perfumes to please everyone. They are for people with much to tell and no hurry to tell it — people who, like our seal, take time to decipher.