Clara Weale

United Kingdom Early Modern

Memory-led perfumes that sit between photo-realistic and abstract, built by taking a formula apart and rebuilding it, and released with a playlist. Her scent design for exhibitions leans on historical research.

About

Clara Weale is a perfumer and scent designer based in Glasgow, Scotland. She is the founder and director of A Library of Olfactive Material, a not-for-profit scent education organisation, and the maker of the Glasgow-made perfume brand Early Modern.

The Library is an open access resource for scent education, exploration and experimentation, with more than 300 fragrant substances, books, magazines and ephemera to explore during monthly open sessions and one-off workshops. It is currently on hiatus. She hosts events that deconstruct different scents and subjects.

Early Modern was born in lockdown. With the Library closed, she began experimenting with compositions, and the first to launch were Life Of The Party and Veil, both responses to lockdown life. The debut collection is four fragrances that are meant to remind you of something without being sure what. Each perfume comes with a playlist, made at the same time as the formula, which helps her define what she is working on. She says a scent is finished when she can take the formula apart and rebuild it several times, from different starting points, and arrive at mostly the same result.

Beyond perfume she designs scents for exhibitions and heritage projects: an interpretation of early 17th century perfume made as a companion to a royal apothecary's account, an aromatic history of Sauchiehall Street, five scents for an installation at Mount Stuart, and an ongoing research project on the smell of insulin. She tries to keep her perfumes somewhere in the middle of a scale from photo-realistic to abstract.