07/30/2026
Last week, we were delighted to host workshops on making ancient perfume, led by Dr. Sean Coughlin (Junior Star Research Fellow at the Czech Academy of Sciences and lead of the project Alchemies of Scent) and Barcelona- and Berlin-based olfactory artist Klara Ravat. Participants followed a seventh-century recipe for Metopion, an Egyptian-styled perfume from the Greco-Roman period, produced in the ancient city of Mendes at the time of Cleopatra VII.
On Friday, Sean and Klara led an all-day workshop for students participating in this year’s Scholars-in-Training Summer Program and a few area instructors, who joined as co-learners. For the Saturday workshop, which was open to the public, the CHS hosted a small group made up of aspiring perfumers, educators, and those interested in the antiquity.
In these sessions, participants learned about the uses of ancient Greek perfume, about the impossibility of ever “recreating” an ancient scent, and, through working with raw materials that would have come from diverse parts of the Europe, Africa, and Asia, about the interconnectedness of the ancient world. Participants developed a shared vocabulary for scent by smelling raw ingredients themselves and, guided by Klara, modern equivalents used in contemporary perfumery. Finally, Klara and Sean guided each attendee through making their own batch following an adapted recipe, along with two interpretations using modern ingredients.
Would you like to hold a similar workshop? As a result of this event, the CHS has a toolkit containing much of the equipment required—scales, glassware, mortars and pestles, raw ingredients, and the like—available for lending to local educators at the secondary and university-level.
If you’re interested, please reach out to [email protected] to learn more.
