Tucson perfumer Lesli Wood Peterson wins award

For artisan perfumer Lesli Wood Peterson, the smell of success is fir needles, sage, embers and pine.

That’s her fragrance Incendo, a winner at the Art and Olfaction Awards in Los Angeles held on May 7. Incendo was one of 10 artisan perfumes from across the world up for an award — shall we call it an Eauscar? — from The Institute for Art and Olfaction, a nonprofit organization that celebrates independent and artisan perfumery.

Incendo won in the artisan category at the third annual event.

And to think, Peterson almost didn’t enter the contest.

“I thought, ‘What right do I have? I’m not educated,’” says the self-taught perfumer, who’s called Tucson home for the past four years.

Her first stab at perfuming, when she was a kid, didn’t go as well.

“I made this concoction with stuff found under the sink,” laughs Peterson, who grew up mostly in Texas. “That was my first perfume. I got it taken away.”

La Curie is Peterson’s unisex fragrance line, with five scents so far and plans to roll out eight more. It was born on a coffee table out of frustration at Peterson’s inability to find the kinds of woodsy, masculine scents that she prefers.

She’s always straddled the worlds of science and art, working for years at San Francisco’s Exploratorium and dabbling in creative endeavors like sculpting. Mixing scents, though, makes sense for someone like Peterson who loves obsessive research and appreciates the mysterious emotional appeal of a favorite smell.

She’s very hands on from mixing fragrances drop by drop to creating the clean graphics of La Curie’s packaging to the tongue-planted-firmly-in-cheek writing on the website, www.la-curie.com. The full description for Incendo: “Fir needles, embers, incense, sage, pine, sun kissed dark skies.”

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“Some of the maker sites are so intense,” she says. “I do have a sense of humor about it. It’s fun. I want people to know I don’t take it too seriously.”

Which is why she also touts that La Curie is influenced by “culture, history, design, and Pink Floyd.”

But, when she works in the sunlit studio of her downtown-area home, she tends to listen to chill tunes. Peterson loves playing with tinctures and absolutes, oily mixtures so concentrated they’re thick as tar. She’s surrounded by pipettes, vials and glass jugs half-filled with fragrances that look like sun tea. Tucked up high on a shelf is a white container of holy water from the Mission San Xavier del Bac.

“It smells like plastic,” Peterson says.

La Curie relies on word of mouth, so Peterson’s especially excited about the Art and Olfaction Awards as well as a recent shout-out for Incendo on perfume blogger Luca Turin’s perfumesilove.com.

La Curie fragrances are available at a handful of stores outside Tucson. Locally, you’ll find them at Mast, Desert Vintage, Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson as well as Miraval, which stocks Peterson’s very first scent, Faunus, named for the Roman god of forests. Peterson crafted in the neighborhood of 60 different variations before hitting upon the perfect blend.

“I wanted woodsy and specifically European forest,” she says.

As special as it is, though, Peterson never spritzes it on her own skin.

“My husband wears it, a lot of my girlfriends wear it,” she says. “I smell it all over town.”