Stel

Nobody agrees whether it was the parts or the machine.

Another one built on Jean Giraud's artwork. Two figures somewhere in a desert. One is under a downed hovercraft with a wrench, working the last torque out of it. The other is picking at the holes in a decaying leather seat and not helping. The parts came from a Junker, and one of them thinks they were ripped off. The other says the hovercraft is way past its expiration date. What is at stake is a shower and a bed at the next camp. A metal plate tacked to the side comes loose and gets thrown in the back. Then the key turns, the engine coughs, and the hovercraft lifts off the sand.

Motor oil and hot metal are the first things in it. Frankincense and oud give it a dry resinous smoke. Desert air holds the space between them open.

Hayden Grossman formulates every fragrance in the line, illustrates it, designs it and labels it, working out of a studio in an Oregon apartment. The route in was visual art and illustration. Each batch is mixed, bottled, labeled and assembled by hand, and the operation is exactly as small as that sounds. The illustration on the bottle and the liquid inside it are the same person's work.

Releases come with writing of their own, and one of them runs as short fiction with dialogue in it. The strength is decided per release rather than set to a house standard. Limited editions come in small batches, and past ones get re-released. The full ingredient list is published, down to the trade names of the synthetics, and a material that is not vegan is declared on the page it belongs to.