This article was written for, and first published in CaFleureBon.
The green within. Photo, creative direction, digital editing by a_nose_knows for Parfums Dusita Issara.
Half of my soul was made of greenness, lush and dark and so wild I’d never venture inside on my own; a child of two worlds I was, each taking its stake in me and each with its pull, echoing in my essence like canonical voices inside a choral chamber. Of the two, winter reigned over the urban, schooled, and modern self; summer, instead, claimed my verdancy, luring me with torrid adventures in the hills and the depressions of the Romanian countryside.
The healer. Photo, creative direction, digital editing by a_nose_knows for Parfums Dusita Issara.
My babysitter was old and childless, illiterate, and intensely religious, moved by the innocent purity of the poor and many. She was monumental like any other memory of peasant truths, and so imbibed with love for me that it poured, alight, from her tiny body; every move left traces of goodness in the air, and word went around of healing powers and blessings beyond compare. I called her grandma Ionica, and I’m still not convinced she couldn’t speak to animals, fly, or unlock cages with a thin blade of grass.
The stealth of freedom. Photo, creative direction, digital editing by a_nose_knows for Parfums Dusita Issara.
Where there are people, there is pain; the constrictions of life take a toll on the soul, and that, in turn, makes bad on the body, robbing it of its strengths and stealing its freedom. To make it whole again, villages everywhere need not only a fixer of the parts, but a finder of freedom. For that’s what the healers do: they find the fleeting freedom, and bring it back into the afflicted, thus curing the illness and fenting the fate.
The medicine woman’s hut, details. Photo, creative direction, digital editing by a_nose_knows for Parfums Dusita Issara.
All healers have special skills. Grandma Ionica’s was to heal severe wounds with devotion, patience, and an ointment of summer herbs and carefully-collected, lovingly-washed spider silk. (Yes, you’ve read that correctly; moreover, biotechnology’s most recent clinical trials have proven that spider silk fibroin biomaterial shows safe and effective wound healing).
My peasant childhood summers were thus part of a string of a thousand summers, filled with a thousand little girls learning the ways of herbs and spider silks from a thousand little old women.
Across history, they all paid for their powers with their sanity, social solitude, or burning at stake; still they endured, dedicated to finding and bringing back other people’s freedom: thousands of midwives through thousands of births, thousands of medicine women through thousands of sicknesses, thousands of caring nurses nursing thousands of deaths.
The green with out. Photo, creative direction, digital editing by a_nose_knows for Parfums Dusita Issara.
Parfums Dusita Issara is, as my grandma Ionica used to say, “not what you put out, but what you let in”*. Resistant as contemporaneity has been to fougeres, and scared a bit by the repetition in today’s niche tobaccos, I’ve often seen Issara passed un-sniffed, only shining its intrinsic glory on the backroads of fragrance collecting. And maybe that’s not a loss, but an investment into making ready; one needs time, I suppose, and a prerequisite limitation on freedom: a nose has to lose all preconceived notions of definition, creativity, or execution in order to fully enjoy—and be rescued—by Issara’s scientifically-proven-traditional-practice esthetic.
And when you finally do, there is no freer rendition of nature, and no scent more summoning than this brilliant concoction: out of norms-green, it has light and universality; it summons, it matches, it reconnects.
And it heals, with the seamless touch of a thousand herb summers.
Issara. Photo, creative direction, digital editing by a_nose_knows for Parfums Dusita Issara.
What it smells like: grandma Ionica’s herb shed. Wood shavings, roots, salts, jars and wires, cork, calendula salve, raw petrol, leather pouches, coal, raw lye soap.
*Interestingly enough, I heard almost the same saying today, while collecting my review notes, in Call the Midwife. Serendipity.
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