Written by:
Lina Swislocki
Order
this Issue of Curve:
18#2
Opus Oils deals in fantasy. Just ask co-founder and mixer Kedra Hart to describe her creative process: “I was looking at all these old postcards for inspiration and I went into the postcards and started imagining what it would be like to be the people in the cards...and I started translating it into a scent palette. Sometimes it's methodical and sometimes it just conjures itself up."
And conjuring is a big part of what Opus Oils is all about. "It's really a challenge to get on the inside of a person and what appeals to them on a soul level. I was trying to capture their essence in a scent."
Hart started mixing her own perfumes when she was about 10 years old. "I would mix different scents that I had, and I discovered that I didn't ever like something on its own," she says. Reading Tim Robbins' Jitterbug Perfume and taking a trip to a perfume factory in Paris only fanned the flames. Soon, she found herself getting stopped in the streets by people enchanted with her fragrance, and suddenly she was in business, making perfumes for friends and by commission. "I realized that I loved the whole process...it was like creating a picture with scents," she says.
So she opened her own business, Precious Petals. Things were going fine, until the Northridge earthquake destroyed her shop. "I had the best-smelling pile of rubble in town."
But even an earthquake wasn't enough to keep her from her calling. In 2000 she was approached by private investors and immediately started designing and developing the lines for Opus Oils.
In addition to being mixed in small batches, Opus Oils are different from other perfumes on the market because of their content. Some lines are made of all-natural products, with no synthetic content whatsoever. The other lines are made of a combination of natural oils and high-quality perfume oil. The advantage of the synthetic is that it lasts longer, but Hart still prefers the naturals. "To me it's almost a living part of the plant that continues on, it's like the soul of the flower and you just don't smell that when you smell a synthetic scent," she says. None of their products are tested on animals, and (unless specifically noted otherwise) everything is made in the United States.
Hart takes time and care with her perfumes because smell is so important. "It's the most pervasive of all our senses. Without realizing it, you're smelling every time you walk in to a room; and with people and pheromones there's a whole other aspect of it. People are picking mates through smell a lot of the time and not even realizing it."
Nearly a decade since she began, Hart (a self-described control freak) still mixes her perfumes by hand. She has released two new fragrance lines: one inspired by burlesque legend Satan's Angel called Queen of the Fire Tassels, and one in collaboration with her partner Jonathan called Roller Girl: the Perfume that Packs a Punch. For each of them she collaborated with another person to capture a specific persona in a bottle. The results are unusual and delightful.
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