Spite EdT

Carter Weeks Maddox - Chronotope
2020
Eau de Toilette

Autotheory Issues No. 3: A Perfume about Selfishness

Carter: I became Catholic when I walked Camino, and Catholics confess. So here’s one of mine: I lied about the story behind Spite EdT when I launched Chronotope. It isn’t the story of a eureka moment. I made it because I was raised in a small town called Tyler that was once the world capital for rose production—which is also a place where rose, for decades, was used to justify chattel slavery. Due to that awful inheritance, rose will never symbolize romance for me, nor will it ever be a convincing metonym for orientalized fantasia. I am unable to nuzzle into any of its smarmy mythologies. And Gertrude Stein was flat-out wrong. A rose is not just a rose. The scent of rose even heralds a haunting. Spite EdT, which takes its name from the opening lines of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, summons the historical ghost many in my hometown would rather willfully forget or ignorantly ignore. This is a rose that is spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. It is a rose that is also a reckoning.

Notes: Bulgarian rose (that is not a rose, that is not a rose), orris, angelica, ash, violet leaf, rolling fog, the great flood, new growth sandalwood, frankincense, leather, scalded sugar, castoreum.