Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Tucked behind an unmarked black door in a residential corner of west London, Sarah McCartney’s perfume workshop would be easy to miss — were it not for the smell. It wafts down from the windows: a heady mix of astringency and sweetness. But that’s nothing compared with the cloud of aromas that greets me when I walk in.McCartney, glamorous in statement spectacles and red lipstick, navigates serenely through it. “Violet. Rose. Synthetic beaver gland secretions,” murmurs the 64-year-old British perfumer, proffering three bottles. Not everything in her Aladdin’s cave smells equally sublime; it’s not meant to. For McCartney, who, in addition to creating scents for individuals, has perfumed concerts, installations and multiple theatrical productions, the priority is to use fragrance as a way of “evoking places and ideas”.The product of that ambition can be sampled in Aqua Tofana, a new opera by the young Sardinian composer Gaia Aloisi, which premieres as part of London’s Tête à Tête festival next month. It tells the true story of Giulia Tofana, an alchemist in 17th-century Italy whose poison enabled women to dispatch abusive or inconvenient husbands. It is ripe with olfactory potential for McCartney, who has been tasked with creating the “deadly” potion that gives the opera its name.“I loved the idea of creating something fresh and lovely: basically just the kind of thing you might plausibly give to your husband and say, ‘Here, I’ve got you a new eau de toilette. You might want to wash with it,’ before watching him crumple on the floor.”To achieve this, McCartney has used a cheery composite of citrus and bergamot flavours. But there’s an additional layer — one that capitalises on the sinister quality of Fabrizio Funari’s libretto and Aloisi’s angular score: “I’ve included substances such as wormwood, nutmeg and black pepper, the idea being that once the initial lightness of the citrus fruits starts to wear off, you’re left with quite a dark, rich and unsettling perfume. And within the context of knowing that Giulia Tofana was one of the most successful serial killers in the world, you might start to feel slightly suspicious.”Is there a possibility that, between all the visual and musical stimuli, such subtleties of aroma might go unnoticed? McCartney believes that “even when we don’t positively register it, smell contributes to the atmosphere of a room.” Besides, “smell activates a part of the brain that wouldn’t otherwise be used . . . I’m not hoping to add something extra to the opera, but rather to fill in the missing part that everybody has forgotten about.”The impulse to “fill in the missing part” — to capture something otherwise beyond reach — fuels much of McCartney’s work in the arts, including for the ballet By a Thread at the Marylebone Theatre earlier this year. In 2015 she scented a Handel opera with three fragrances to represent the main characters. The following year, she dreamt up the scent-scape of The Great Gatsby for a literary event at Senate House. For the group BitterSuite, McCartney devised aromas for multisensory performances of the Debussy String Quartet, while three years ago she co-created the scents of 1880s Paris as part of an installation for Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” at London’s Courtauld Gallery.More personally meaningful for McCartney, however, was The Lion Cupboard, a perfume combining hints of juniper, pipe tobacco, grapefruit and mint toothpowder that she based on the smell of her late father’s cupboard (“Smelling it became a link to my dad after he died”). McCartney views perfumery — and its transportive powers — as a kind of witchcraft: “When you spray something into the air, you are casting a spell.” She smiles: “I just choose to use it for good, not evil.”After growing up in Yorkshire and County Durham, McCartney’s route into the world of professional perfumery was a long and winding one. She studied mathematics at Durham University, switching to anthropology and psychology in her third year, then worked for many years in advertising and marketing. In 1996, she landed a job as head copywriter for Lush, the cosmetics company, where she stayed for 14 years. It was while working there, “learning how to convey the impression of a smell in words”, that she decided to teach herself the ropes of perfume-making. 4160 Tuesdays, her artisan perfumery brand, was born in 2011.McCartney follows a rich tradition of artists who have integrated perfume with other disciplines. At the height of his career with the Ballets Russes in the 1920s, the impresario Sergei Diaghilev reportedly had the stage curtains sprayed with his favourite fragrance, Guerlain’s Mitsouko. In 1938, the poet Benjamin Péret enriched the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme with the aroma of roasting coffee. Since then, “olfactory art” has evolved into ever more flamboyant forms. Few were more ambitious than Christophe Laudamiel’s Green Aria: A Scent Opera, a 2009 exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, in which two dozen fragrances were pumped out of a “scent organ” to individual seats, accompanied by music.What has always fascinated McCartney is the connection between fragrance and emotions. “Our sense of smell plays a key part in our evolutionary success: it’s there to warn us of danger, it’s there to make us feel secure. As a result, our attract/repel response to it is very fast and the [emotional] imprint it leaves is very strong.”But is perfumery capable of generating the emotional complexity of other art forms? Yes, says McCartney, because it taps into our bank of memories: “One individual aroma-chemical can leave a very complex impression because it can remind people of all sorts of different things . . . You will never ever, for example, want your new girlfriend to wear your ex’s perfume.” What’s more, says McCartney, our reactions are highly sensitive to the power of suggestion. “You can play with that in an arts context. If you tell people that the smell you’re about to put into a room is harmless but might make them throw up, some people will throw up.”So how concerned for our health should we be when smelling her version of Aqua Tofana? McCartney takes pains to reassure me that it is innocuous. Still, she is not averse to some gentle massaging of the audience’s perceptions: “I did joke about making a tincture of my great aunt’s ashes and adding that to the mix. Of course I didn’t end up doing that, but some people still think I did.” She concludes: “Ultimately, the idea of opera is to make you feel. And maybe, this perfume will make you feel a little bit more.” ‘Aqua Tofana’ premieres on September 22, tete-a-tete.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
