#nosevember prompt: Abundance
Perfume: Apoteker Tepe, After the Flood

I came late to the party with this scent, after Apoteker Tepe closed in 2018 and ATF was thus discontinued. However, the perfume somewhat notoriously still circulated among groups of perfume enthusiasts online, who, even though there was only a finite amount left in the world and many of them only had small decants themselves, generously decanted vials of the stuff and shared it with others. Because it was too good not to share. That’s how I first encountered the perfume—I don’t remember who sent it to me anymore, but someone wonderful decanted a few milliliters from their own decant and mailed it to me in a small glass vial.

The scent is magical: mushrooms and dank moss on the forest floor, as morning light filters through the trees. Carter Weeks Maddox of Chronotope Perfume wrote about this perfume and its abundance-from-scarcity in a wonderful article published in Mushroom People, titled “Precious Milliliters: In search of a lost scent.” He writes: “When we share this perfume, whose life was so tragically short-lived, we’re documenting its wondrous time lapse—these violets, this glorious mushroom—and constructing the narrative we’ll use to recall it once it evaporates from the real world to live only in our collective memory.”

Last year, Pineward Perfume revived AT’s perfumes, partnering with AT founder Holladay Saltz to acquire her formulas and bring her perfumes back to life—that’s how I finally got a full bottle. But more special to me is the little glass vial, mailed to me from a fellow perfume enthusiast, its contents dwindling down with every wear and every share.