AGATA KAROLINA: MAKING AFRICA A POWERHOUSE OF PREMIUM PERFUMES
Take a walk in the fynbos with Agata Karolina, the woman determined that Africa will lead a new world of perfumes.
Agata Karolina is a Polish Aristocrat that had the choice to live and work anywhere. She chose South Africa and a career as a self-made creator of custom perfumes to showcase all of Africa.
In 2015 Agata conceived House of Gozdawa, her business in deference to nature, the beguiling African continent and all of its glorious smells – a sense that is key to unlocking a full sensory experience that offers the most powerful connection with memory, time and place.
“Creating a scent for an individual versus creating it for a space or a place is a vastly different task for numerous reasons. One of them is that when dealing with a person, from a chemistry side, it’s many many more ingredients which you’re using to create it. You have different impacts like skin, someone’s age, race, sex to consider and even the food that they eat have a great impact on how certain smells behave with our bodies,” shares Agata.
“When you’re creating a scent for a space on the other hand, you have to really consider the space itself, the people that live within it, as much as the setting where it actually is. I also have to consider when I’m working, how a smell moves in a space,” she adds.
Agata sources her ingredients from around the world but aims to source from Africa as much as possible. She only works with fully sustainable farmers so all ingredients are farmed in a way that is as biodynamic and sustainable as viable.
Having recently collaborated with a neuroscientist on the way certain oils affect how we wake, realign, focus or rest, and it’s been put into practice at Future Found Sanctuary.
The private mountain sanctuary, nestled on the slopes of Cape Town’s Table Mountain, is a place of unique biodiversity, where mind, body, heart and spirit connect to the healing power of nature. Teeming with peach trees and pines, fynbos and ferns – it’s a place where the elements of nature demonstrate their beauty.
We met with Property Manager David Jonker to learn about his experience of their effect.
“Agata’s scents just create those feelings of peace, rest and relaxation. Everyone that has smelt the fragrance mentions its uniqueness and the fact that she’s tapped into the local fynbos makes it unique to South Africa, the Western Cape and particularly unique to our property so she really has come up with something special,” says David.
“Scent is incredibly important in space because I think what we’ve realised, especially over the last two years, is that the more time we spend in a place we’re actually much more aware of our surroundings. And having scent in our space allows us to calm ourselves and actually be more present,” says the perfumer.
Agatha’s goal is to put Africa on the map for fragrance creation globally – for creating perfume as an end product as well as for the unique indigneous ingredients available on the continent.
Seems the potential for our continent to benefit from this one woman’s passion for perfume is infinite!
