Winter arrives not as an intruder but as a slow-moving threshold, an ancient hinge in the year where the world falls briefly silent, only to reveal a deeper music beneath the frost. For natural perfumers, this is not merely a season of cold air and shortened days; it is a chamber of reflection, a time in which the craft folds inward, asking us to step back, breathe differently, and listen to what we have forgotten during the restless months of creation.
The winter solstice, “solstitium”, the sun standing still, has always marked a moment where human cultures turn toward fire, ritual, and meaning. Across millennia and continents, this darkest point of the year has been interpreted as both an ending and a beginning, a place where the past distills itself into a single drop, and the future begins to take its first, tentative shape.
For the natural perfumer, this pause is not a luxury. It is a discipline.

The Discipline of Stillness
Our art often appears outwardly kinetic: tinctures swirling, resins softening in gentle heat, botanicals steeping in slow macerations, droplets of absolutes and essential oils dancing on the scale. Yet winter insists on the opposite gesture. It demands that we become attentive to the subtle, the unmoving, the nearly silent.
There is a particular intimacy in returning to raw materials during the cold months. Resins thicken, waxes tighten, citrus oils lose their exuberant summer sparkle and reveal their inner architecture: bitter, mineral, almost metallic. Even the woods behave differently. Oakmoss becomes heavier, its velvet texture deepening. Patchouli grows contemplative, earthy, strangely philosophical. Myrrh releases its incense-like breath as if remembering the rituals for which it was once burned in desert temples.
Winter invites us to smell with patience. To bend closer. To rediscover.
In my masterclasses on natural extraction, I often speak of winter as “the quiet furnace” a metaphorical heat that does not display itself but instead works internally, tempering the nose, sharpening the intellect, tightening the connection between memory, intuition, and raw material. Students often find that their ability to evaluate becomes more precise in winter’s psychological clarity. Perhaps because there is less noise. Less competition from the world. More truth.

A Cultural Season: Between Dawn and Ember
Anthropologists remind us that winter solstice traditions across Europe and beyond share three common threads: introspection, purification, and preparation for renewal. Whether one looks at Roman Saturnalia, Norse Yule, the Celtic Midwinter rites, or later Christian traditions, the pattern remains: a cycle of acknowledging darkness, invoking light, and reshaping one’s inner structure before the new year.
This arc mirrors the perfumer’s seasonal cycle. Winter is the moment when we look back at our creations, not with the defensive pride we sometimes adopt mid-year, but with a more honest, almost monastic gaze. Which formulas survived the year with integrity? Which lost their voice? Which require restructuring, rebuilding, or perhaps a return to their primal idea?
This anthropological echoing between the world’s rites and our personal craft is not accidental. Perfume, especially natural perfume, has always been a cultural expression as much as an olfactory one. The materials of winter are the same materials ancient civilizations burned or treasured during the solstice: frankincense and myrrh, labdanum, pine resins, sweet spices like cinnamon and clove, evergreen branches crushed for their aromatic hopefulness. Even citrus peels, bright offerings in a dark season, carry ritual weight.
By working with these materials now, we are participating in a lineage older than our craft. We inhale what countless generations inhaled before us: reassurance, warmth, continuity.

A Phenomenology of Cold
There is also something phenomenological about winter: the way cold changes the body, the breath, and therefore the perception of scent. Fragrance behaves differently on winter skin. Diffusion shifts. The threshold of detection rises. The boundaries between the wearer and the world become sharper.
I often encourage perfumers to smell outdoors in winter, just for a moment. The air itself becomes a collaborator, almost a reagent. A drop of vetiver in a cold breeze unravels into silver threads. A tincture of dried citrus peel becomes crystalline, nearly architectural. Incense resins become richer, darker, carrying with them a memory of fire even before they are heated.
This phenomenological dance between air and material is central to understanding the winter palette. It also forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: many of the scents we adore behave differently in cold months, revealing aspects that either enrich or challenge the composition. This is not a flaw. It is knowledge.
And winter is a season of knowledge.

Why is Natural Aromatherapy so Important Today?
As Natural Perfumers, aside from being involved in the Art of composing and designing a Perfume, we get involved in the knowledge of Natural Raw Materials, their olfactive properties, plant genus, botanical name, molecular properties and healing properties and awareness of possible toxicity and contraindications of each raw material, and how to keep and use our raw materials in a way that does not degrade their quality. 
To create a Natural Perfume that will not just be beautiful, but also will add-on the 
healing properties provided by the raw materials, the Natural Perfumer requires many skills and knowledge of managing raw materials, including the use of high-quality essential oils.
The Natural Aromatherapy Course is very important to get to know the importance of Reconnecting with Nature and learning the botanical definitions of the origins of Essential Oils in flowers, leaves, twigs, trunks, roots from plants, flowers, fruits, seeds and trees. All of them, act in a sense similarly to Human Beings. We all have secretions and excretions. Essential Oils, resins and absolutes are the result, in a condensed way, of those plant secretions and excretions; and it is then, during the Distillation Process or during the Cold Press Process or the Supercritical CO2 extraction Process, where we get to experience the end-product of Essential Oils in lab amber bottles.

It is fundamental to have a good understanding of Olfaction, in order to appreciate scents and flavours and to have a mental map of different categories of scents and Fragrant Families to base on in our Perfume composition, also taking in account, the Volatility Properties of each scent, so we can define our Notes and Accords in a way we can tell a story through the Fragrance of a Perfume. 
The Natural Perfumery Course will bring hands-on experience of Raw Materials categories and aromatic properties, a thorough explanation of each Aromatic Family and subfamily, so this will help us to understand which raw materials to use when designing a Perfume that will be “warm, floral, bright” and a perfume that will be “fruity, sweet, fresh”, or a “sensual” perfume or a “fresh aquatic” perfume too. 
Aromatherapy will take us to the next level of understanding of Raw Materials, how to use them when applying them to our body through various types of applications: aerial, bath, topical and oral in a safe way.  Aromatherapy is becoming much more relevant since Perfume and Cosmetics brands and Fashion brands are making efforts to become more ecological, more sustainable, more aware of the toxicity of certain ingredients and the use of Natural Ingredients with no animal cruelty. 
Aromatherapy has a much more clinical and biochemical approach, as the main focus is to apply a “healing substance” or therapeutic product to our body in a safe way.  
Aromatherapy grew up with Perfumery hand in hand during Ancient Times, but since last century, there has been a disconnection of between Aromatherapy, Botany, and Perfumery. 

Perfumery as the art of creating complex compositions of scents has again become relevant.   
Nowadays, we are becoming much more aware of the need to Reconnect with Nature and we are returning to our roots and the traditional wisdom of what Nature provides us, how to protect Nature, and how to use Nature in a sustainable and respectful ways. This natural perspective contributes to the resurgence of a new conscience in Humanity of the need for Nature and the care for of Nature. 
Aromatherapy is a science-based study of aromas and their effects inside our bodies. Aromatherapy is also applied to Cosmetics side of Perfumery and also to Pharmaceutical and Nutritional Products. Perfumotherapy is the combined discipline of Olfaction Training, Natural Perfumery and Natural Aromatherapy. It makes sense to enlarge the panorama of Perfumery and its possibilities in development.

​The International Perfume Foundation (IPF) offers curriculum courses to become a Certified Perfumotherapist in three certification courses: Olfaction Training, Natural Perfumery, and Natural Aromatherapy.

There are really two main seasons in Nova Scotia: freeze and sneeze. The freeze part is an olfactory isolation tank. As nature’s vitality recedes into itself, the conversation with your nose, simply stops. As Canadians are fond of reminding me - if nature won’t come to you, you go to it. Trudging through the woods can lead to whiffs of pine, maple bark, the salty fishy smell of the small harbors, all served in a blanket of very gently odiferous snow. In the city, the smell of wood burning fireplaces and Christmas trees, even the ubiquitous wet dog, are always a blessing. They break the monochromatic blandness of the landscape. 
 
If winter is a palace of solitude, spring, and summer feel like carpet bombing. The breeze becomes saturated with pollen, fresh cut grass, goldenrod dust, and in late summer, ragweed. Your nose and your eyes swell, an unfortunate impediment to renewing one’s olfactory conversations with nature. Allergy pills come in handy. They deliver the relief necessary to revel in the smell of wild roses, rhubarb, cabbages, blueberries, strawberries, honey, and the rest. 
 
Going indoors, whether in winter, spring, summer, or fall, offers a different sort of olfactory challenge. Hundred-year-old wooden houses in wet cold cities have a most unique dull and musty smell: mold. Brick has its own more gravelly-smelling variety. Long-term survival in Nova Scotia and, especially in more densely populated Halifax, depends on you smelling the mold in the walls, the rot under the floor, and humidity of the basement, before you sign the lease or purchase the house. 

Once a norm, a regulation, or a law is established, it is normalized into the social fabric and everyone just goes along, gently nudging each other into a state of synchronized collective policy adherence. Scents, especially perfume, are guilty pleasures permitted only in the privacy of your own home. Like then-Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau remarked when he reformed the Criminal Code in 1967 decriminalizing homosexual acts, “there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation”.
 
The above discussion would appear to suggest that the books on Nova Scotian’s freedom to wear scents in public and to engage in social intercourse via olfaction – are simply closed. But there are two ‘new’ phenomena that could provide silver linings on this scentless dark cloud: COVID related anosmia and social media aggravated depression and its associated attention deficit disorder.
 
The incidence of mild or severe anosmia associated with COVID is has spurred much more sophisticated discussions of how olfaction actually works, as well as a much finer discernment of what scents, odours, and fragrances wake-up the nose, and which ones simply shut the body down. Until COVID made it fashionable to explore, an impaired sense of smell was just ‘too bad’, period. Help is now more widely accessible. 
 
Currently, the approach to anosmia therapy is primarily medically driven and couched in physio-therapeutical models. It is similar to treating deafness by re-enabling the auditory sensory pathways from the sense organ to the brain, and by reversing physical damage to the organ and the pathways themselves. But there is so much more to a full auditory experience. Even the soundscapes of everyday life are symphonies of complex auditory interactions which can only be truly appreciated by encouraging the patient to pay attention to all of what they actually hear – timber, tone, duration. Once you have trained yourself to hear, to discern the notes and the harmonies, sound becomes alive. And so it can be, for the sense of smell. 
 
Though it is well-known that synthetics are at the root of scent allergies, natural scents, rarely get a chance. In Nova Scotia, the mere detection of an olfactory signal causes suspicion and alarm in the Scent-Free community. Even essential oils are suspect. After all, you can’t tell if the offending substance is real and natural or synthetic until you start sneezing or choking. But what if, in the process of treating the anosmia, an entire set of products enter the world of certification, requiring fabricators of scents to divulge in the product-label if noxious substances and synthetics are contained? Or if the discernment of salutary vs noxious substances becomes as common as the discussion on whether a specific wine contains sulfites, or was grown with organic grapes? 
 
Providing anosmia patients with a more aesthetic understanding of the phenomenal complexity of the olfactory sense organ and its field of cognition, just at the moment when it is being re-trained, provides us ‘aromaphiliacs’ (if indeed there is such a word) an opportunity to re-write the narrative of scent in the mind of not just the patients, but of the public at large. 

One of the most disturbing public health epidemics in North America, especially in young adults, is depression. Understandably given the pandemic, climate change, the threat of nuclear war, political instability, bossy machines. But one of the most oft-cited culprits for the generalized alienation, nihilism, attention-deficit-disorder, and body-image anxiety affecting teenagers is social media. Living a digitally mediated existence forces youth to live in a world ruled by sight and sound to the detriment of taste, touch, and smell. Taste and touch often intrude into the metaverse. We must eat, and we need to touch, if even just to open the refrigerator door. But who, ever, pays attention to smell, (especially in a scent free environment) unless some un-expected odour forces us to remember that we actually have an olfactory sense (e.g., uncurbed dog waste tracked indoors)?
​What if, olfactory training could provide teenagers a path back to non-digitally mediated reality? What if the simple act of learning how to pay attention can return them to the ‘real world’, to unmediated cognition, and thus, to an authentic, authentic self? 
 
Far-fetched for sure, but the opportunity to insert a positive narrative for scents in the treatment of anosmia and of depression/attention deficit disorder, nevertheless, is here, now. And the real bonus is the collective re-awakening of the magical world of olfaction. In the words of Oliver W. Sacks, the passionate and brilliant neurologist chronicled in the book and motion picture ‘Awakenings’: 
“In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.” ​