Benjamin Esposito, perfumer and founder, House of Mammoth
For most of my life, I thought I hated perfume. My peers wore the popular calone-laden mall fragrances of my teen years, which smelled synthetic and strange. To me it was the smell of trying too hard, and I felt secondhand embarrassment for them. Just take a shower if you’re worried about how you smell, I remember thinking. The perfumes worn by older folks were no better; the spicy florals, suffocating musks and leathers, the power fougeres all caused sensory overwhelm and sent me fleeing. It’s no surprise I didn’t appreciate perfume, as worldly pleasures weren’t a thing we celebrated in my family.
Polaroid from a happy childhood
I was born in New York, the second of four children, the quiet one. What we did in my family was go to church, and we viewed everything through the lens of conservative evangelical Christianity. God knew all and saw all, the world was a scary place, and we were just passing through this life trying to be good enough to spend eternity in heaven. I stayed in that bubble and worldview for upwards of 20 years before it became too small for me and my family. I mention my sheltered life because it bred in me an absolutely relentless curiosity about how things work, how people lived, how others perceived the world, and the overarching WHY of life. I was always in the woods, climbing cliffs at the beach, or on a bike exploring. It amazed me that any random square inch of ground could contain a whole world if you just took a moment to stare at it. And when I wasn’t out exploring, I was holed up in my room for hours on end reading, writing, or playing music.
Benjamin Esposito and wife Elaine at a lavender farm
I am a sensual person- I need to touch, taste, feel, experience in order to understand. And that curiosity and immersive approach to life is where my perfumery education began, and continues to this day. I love to eat, and so I learned to cook, and when that wasn’t enough, I learned to make the butter and farm the eggs and brew beer. My wife Elaine and I made bath soap together, and then I had to learn to make soap for traditional wet shaving. I couldn’t stop there, I needed to learn how to make the fragrance as well. I became a perfumer because it was the next step. It was inevitable.
I began House of Mammoth in 2018 out of a desire to put something good into a world that seemed to be growing darker and scarier for my family, as anti-immigrant sentiment and anti-Asian hate grew. We started as a traditional wet shaving brand, with a goal of making high quality luxury soap with original perfumery, to raise awareness and funds to fight human trafficking. In just a few years, we’ve donated or raised a tremendous amount of money to organizations like RestoreNYC.org and Love146.org. I stopped counting when we broke the $20,000 mark. It’s incredible.
note cards House of Mammoth
The thing I love most about running House of Mammoth is the immense privilege of formulating perfumes to tell stories and connect with people all over the world. We are a tiny brand, but much loved by the few who know us. Each of my fragrances is designed to connect with the wearer, to make you think about yourself and your life, and hopefully to make your experience of life richer and deeper. Perfume is so very personal, the only way to connect is to compose from the heart.
Benjamin preparing a perfume trial
Perfumery is one of the most difficult things I’ve pursued in my life, truly a practice and an art form where the more you learn, the more you realize you have to learn. The breadth of what is possible in perfume is staggering. I’m drawn to the creative side of perfumery, how the sum of a perfume can be greater than its parts. I love the highly technical side, the chemistry and the precision, understanding the properties of each molecule or material, and how materials can express themselves differently in different contexts. I love the tedious labor of trial after trial, experimentation, pushing through regular failures, and the quiet solitary moment of satisfaction when I’ve achieved what I’d wanted with a perfume.
Ben Esposito’s Perfume organ
On American Perfumery: The most powerful “story of America” imagery for me as a New Yorker was that of the melting pot of immigrants from all over the world looking for a better life, how each person brought something different of themselves to a community. American perfumery is at its best when a perfumer finds their unique voice and shares their secrets with us, saying, “this is how I see the world.”
Independent and artisan perfumery feels uniquely American as well. It is rebellious in the sense that it is outside of the corporate machine. It doesn’t need to be produced at a large scale with the cheapest possible materials, and it doesn’t need to appeal to the broadest possible audience. And you just can’t find perfumes anywhere else like the ones made by talented, careful artisan perfumers like Dawn Spencer Hurwitz, Manuel Cross, Chris Rusak, Shawn Maher, Diane St. Clair – the list goes on.
Son Lux, courtesy of sonluxmusic.com
Favorite American Artist: One of my favorite American artists is Ryan Lott of the band Son Lux. I appreciate the sublime, the beautiful, the absurd, and more, but what moves me most are human connections and the everyday. Son Lux’s music is immersive, experimental, at times distant and electronic, but always deeply human. I’m still reeling from the film they recently scored, Everything Everywhere All At Once. It’s a film that manages to be absurd and sincere, nonsensical and meaningful at the same time. I was drawn into it, and it became a part of me.
Art is powerful that way. Music and perfume similarly allow us to experience the world through the eyes of the artist, but we can also take their work with us through our daily lives. Just look at how we talk about music and perfume: “this is OUR song”, “this is MY signature fragrance”. A fragrance accompanies your life, and if it is lucky, becomes a part of you. And for my money there’s no greater honor for an artist than that moment when a human being takes your work into their personhood: “this is meaningful to me”.
–Benjamin Esposito, perfumer and founder, House of Mammoth
Sonder is “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” Notes: lemon, bergamot, grapefruit, clean mountain air, watery green notes, lily of the valley, opoponax, benzoin, sandalwood.
Sonder, by House of Mammoth
Thanks to Benjamin Esposito of House of Mammoth we have a draw for a registered user in the US ONLY for a 48ml bottle of House of Mammoth Sonder. To enter the draw, you must be a registered reader. Please leave a comment with what you found fascinating about Benjamin’s path to perfumery. Draw closes 6/22/22
Benjamin Esposito is 166th in our American Perfumer Series, which officially began with Dawn Spencer Hurwitz of DSH Perfumes on July 11, 2011
All photos belong to Benjamin Esposito unless otherwise noted.
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