Ashely with a prolific pink jasmine vine, outside her studio.

Ashley Eden Kessler grew up in Hancock Park, Los Angeles. She learned from a young age there were two valuable things to do with a life’s work: help people, and make useful objects of beauty. She was drawn to fields that required the dual skills of creativity and practicality. Ashley went on to study fine art, science, and architecture at Sarah Lawrence College and UCLA and began her professional career in film. These were the initial steps in her search for a mode of expression that would support both a dreamer and a pragmatist, a creative mind fascinated equally by science and by art. An unexpected injury and the subsequent recovery propelled her towards a very different discipline that grounded her in her physical senses. Perfumery, the science of the ineffable, is where the road finally took her. She began as an apprentice to a respected niche perfumer. Then, in 2010, Ashley moved to Grasse, France, to pursue a formal perfumer’s education.

 

In 2012 Ashley met Saskia Wilson Brown, the founding director of the Institute of Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles. As a non-profit, the IAO’s mission is to create access to perfumery for the public and to promote multi-disciplinary arts collaborations with an olfactive component. Ashley was offered the position of Perfumer in Residence and during that time she began teaching and building out an educational curriculum with the team. She creates rigorous programming on accord construction, materials evaluation, fragrance families, and the sensory intersection of mindfulness and a perfumery practice.

Her work has led her to develop a philosophy about perfumery as a dynamic art and reflective practice. In sharing this approach with students, she fulfills her childhood credo: offering tools for others to confront their fears, counter their tendencies, and learn to observe themselves in pursuit of the unknown.

In perfumery, Ashley found massive liberation, a realm where trekking back from failure and bad ideas was routinely integral to success. At the prestigious Grasse Institute of Perfumery, she distinguished herself with her final brief, winning a coveted award. After concluding her studies, she relocated to New York City to work as a Perfumer’s Assistant at Drom Fragrances International and Mane et Fils.

She later returned to Los Angeles and opened Studio Sentir, a private label fragrance lab. Ashley’s compositions are marked by refinement, complexity, boldness, and the quality of completely inhabiting and furthering clients’ ideas.