Spite

Carter Weeks Maddox - Chronotope
2021
Eau de Parfum

Notes: Molle jasmine vines, white rose of York otto and absolute, tuberose, orange blossom, rose thorns, peony, artichoke, guava leaf, French lavender absolute, green carnation, ruh khus, Iranian galbanum, nasturtium stems, green sacra frankincense, nard, thyme, Hawaiian sandalwood, chrysanthemum, nutmeg, clove, pimento berry.

Autotheory Issues No. 4: A Perfume about Adaptation

Carter: Because one reminder wasn’t enough. You shouldn’t expect an intense version of the EdT, though; I can imagine nothing more intense than that shameful history. Instead I allowed myself here to lean into rose’s mythologies, its falsities. And there I uncovered forebearers of my own identity. Up surfaced Oscar Wilde with his green carnation, Mary Magdalene with her spikenard, Cynara with her artichoke, among others whose lives were marred by hate, whose memories are obscured by willful erasure and fiat propaganda. And in Spite EdP, my new myth for rose, these figures meet inside my hometown’s rose garden along with the enslaved people who planted its bushes. And together, they burn it to a crisp in an acid-green blaze of glory. Biologists have long claimed spite serves little to no adaptive advantage. But I’m calling their bluff—because to live out of spite is to adapt. Is to survive.