Art in a Bottle

The Perfume Library founder Jahnvi Lakhota Nandan believes fragrances are meant to be liberated.

- HARSH ADITYA

Jahnvi Lakhota Nandan’s The Perfume Library is not a brand, “it’s a studio”, she says firmly. On the face of it, there seems no difference, but as I delved deeper into a conversation with her, Nandan’s approach to perfumery felt more spiritual. The relationship between a perfumer and its buyer is intimate, and that intimacy requires for the perfumer to be vulnerable. “I feel extremely vulnerable about the fact that I am a perfumer. It opens and invites quite a lot of violence,” reveals Nandan. “Let yourself be vulnerable to that violence.”

My first conversation with Nandan was on a random Instagram message when we very briefly spoke about Sylvia Plath’s poetry, and the rest is history. Nandan is multi hyphenated—she is an architect, a writer, a designer, and a Bharatanatyam dancer. At the centre of all her interests was her love for fragrance. Nandan has always been drawn to the idea of spaces which led her to study architecture in Tokyo. It all tied up beautifully for her— the architectural nature of Bharatanatyam, the underwritten script of scent in the mudras and, later, her picking up perfumery as an art through which she liberates the nature of fragrance. “Art, whether it’s poetry, literature or dance, is just a method. I use it to reach an end, the end being the senses,” shares Nandan.

When The Perfume Library was launched at the India Art Fair in 2015, Nandan’s first-ever creation, the Aphtoori Absolue, was an absolute beloved of the Indian fragrance connoisseurs. It uses the maximum numbers of sambac jasmine and in her words, “it sold like hot cakes”. Aphtoori Absolue, an intuitive fragrance, was Nandan’s graduation fragrance, which she picked out from the back of her desk and took to the Art Fair. The ‘Afui’ comes from a Latin word meaning silence and Toori, signifying Kasturi, or the musk. “It felt the most natural thing to do, to bring out something from the past forward, to start The Perfume Library.”