About Emily & Jitterbug Perfumes
Welcome to where brewing science meets botanical alchemy.
I'm Emily
—a perfumer, artist, and potion brewer working from the coastal forests near Astoria, Oregon. My path has been delightfully non-linear: 25+ years exploring craft brewing, decades as a graphic designer and web developer (since 1999), Executive Director, Professional Fiduciary, dog rescuer, dharma student, and always—always—a maker of things that shouldn't technically be possible.
My perfumery practice is built upon my love of fermentation and brewing science, not conventional fragrance training. I barrel-age bases the way distillers age whiskey. I freeze-concentrate using eisbock techniques from German brewing tradition. I steep botanicals like brewing gruit or crafting herbal tisanes, drawing on the ancient wisdom of brewsters, witches, and healers who worked with plants before hops became standard.
This means my scents undergo transformation, not just blending. They age. They steep. They interact with wood, smoke, ice, and time. Color shifts. Viscosity varies. Botanicals settle. This isn't poor quality control—it's evidence you're getting something that actually went through a process.
I've been deep in aromatherapy since 1993, but my approach shifted dramatically in 2004 when I encountered Luca Turin's radical work on olfaction and the quantum theory of smell. Combined with Tom Robbins' "Jitterbug Perfume"—a novel that treats scent as consciousness, rebellion, and immortality—these influences cracked open what I thought perfumery could be.
I work synesthetically, seeing sound and tasting color. My perfumes are composed the way I experience the world: as overlapping sensory systems where a scent can have texture, a color can have temperature, and a memory can arrive as fragrance before image.
What Makes Jitterbug Different
I'm not trying to recreate commercial perfumes or make "inspired by" versions of popular scents. I'm working with:
Actual botanical materials (not just aromachemicals)—petals, roots, lichen, moss, stamens, tea leaves, bark
Time-based processes borrowed from brewing and apothecary traditions
Wildcrafted & foraged ingredients from the Pacific Northwest coastal ecosystem
Small-batch methodology that doesn't scale and isn't meant to
Each scent is part potion, part experiment, part love letter to the forest and the coast. They're made in extremely limited quantities because the techniques I use—barreling, smoking, freeze-concentration, cold-steeping—require patience, space, and surrender to what the materials want to become.
The Philosophy
This sanctuary of scents exists at the intersection of biology, chemistry, physics, and imagination. I blend science with synesthesia, creating fragrances that refuse to stay in their lane. They're not just "pretty"—they're curious, complex, sometimes challenging, always intentional.
If you're looking for uniform, predictable, commercial-style perfume, there are countless places to find that. But if you want to smell time, transformation, and place—if you want a bottle that shows its process and tells a story about coastal wildcrafting and brewing alchemy—welcome home.
The Invitation
Step into this aromatic realm where every scent carries the memory of the forest floor, the patience of barrel-aging, the wisdom of ancient plant medicine, and the unrepentant creativity of someone who refuses to choose between scientist, artist, brewer, and mystic.
Together, let's explore what happens when you stop trying to make perfume and start making something else entirely.
