Jinx Smells: Black Metal in a Bottle and a Song for Every Perfume

Arthur Clayton Emrick makes perfume in a building that used to be a restaurant. It stands in Canandaigua, in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, and Jinx Smells is run out of it.

He is mostly self-taught. He has been collecting fragrance for close to two decades, and the appetite for experiment came out of making beer and wine and out of cooking. He grew up in a very rural part of Michigan, among wild flowers, deep woods, rivers and lakes.

Almost everything strange about Jinx happens in the making.

The amber Jinx would not buy

Amber in perfume is something a perfumer assembles out of other things, and there are suppliers who will sell it to you already assembled. Jinx's line on the trade is that most houses, major and indie, buy those ready-made bases. For JEMS7 Amber Jaya it took the long way home and built one.

Out came the woody, resinous parts of the formula. In their place went two things soaked in the building: an incense grade oud on whole vanilla beans, and a homemade extract on tonka beans ground by hand. The work ran for several months. It burnt out the motor of the stirring machine.

A litre and a half of vintage Mitsouko

In 2026 Moustafa of Yaseen Artisan Perfume House sent a litre of his Jungle Samurai accord to Canandaigua, with complete creative freedom attached. He also sent a litre and a half of vintage Guerlain Mitsouko, to serve as the carrier, the liquid the rest of the perfume is dissolved in. Wild, Arthur wrote.

A carrier is normally the least interesting liquid in a bottle. It is neutral, it disappears, and its job is to hold everything else. This one arrived with a smell of its own already in it.

He called the result Mitsamurai. Its carrier is 100 percent vintage Mitsouko. Arthur worked around the Jungle Samurai accord, which is enormously dense, and lifted Mitsouko's own notes wherever they came through. It opens on peach and neroli, ends in heavy oud, and swings between light and dark the whole way.

Two houses that opened their formulas

Formulas do not circulate in this business. Jinx and Elixir Attar opened theirs to each other anyway, so that each could remix a release of the other's.

Kyoto Klassique is the one Jinx made. Arthur took the other house's Taif rose perfume and turned it toward Japan. The Taif rose became Japanese rugosa, the sandalwood was split with hinoki, and under all of it went the base he had built for JEMS7, reworked until it sat right beneath a flower that was not his. The amber that burnt out a motor ended up under another house's rose.

The two leathers in Cuirassier

Cuirassier opens on violet, honey and currant, a softer way in than what follows. Then old French leather runs into modern Arabian leather, and the result smells like a Chesterfield somebody has already sat in for years. The leather is an accord, built out of other materials, and under it sit birch tar dated around 1940, castoreum and Cambodian oud. Birch tar is the smoke that makes black leather smell black. Castoreum comes from the beaver, and it smells like leather with something sweet sitting behind it. Soft flowers stay on top of all of it, and nothing in the perfume is trying to look new.

Forty-four oils from 1940 to 1950

Chyp Fritzsche is an old emerald green chypre, and roughly half of what went into it came out of a single auction lot. Arthur came across the lot late in 2024: 44 Fritzsche Brothers oils, dated somewhere between 1940 and 1950. The perfume does not imitate the period. It is partly made of it.

A song for every perfume

Bryce Linde does the music. He wrote and recorded one song for each perfume of the third collection, bossa nova at one end and black metal at the other, and the set was sold on compact disc.

The perfumes cover the same distance. Keuka, the first gourmand Jinx made, came out of a little ice cream parlour in the village of Penn Yan, New York. Geist III is black metal in a bottle: pitch black oud and incense, burnt and charred, made out of Arthur's love of heavy and aggressive music.

Ventriloquism, the last of the incense perfumes, blends all 23 incense accords he had built over about a year, and it came with 20 minutes of ambient music written for it and put out on cassette.

Frog Funeral, the final version of the first perfume he ever made, goes out now with added notes of sadness. The logo on the shirts is a skunk.

He could have bought the amber finished. He could have said no to a litre and a half of somebody else's perfume. The answer at Jinx is usually the longer one, worked out in a room in Canandaigua that used to be a restaurant.

Frequently asked questions

Who makes Jinx Smells perfume?

Arthur Clayton Emrick, a mostly self-taught perfumer who has been collecting fragrance for close to two decades. His appetite for experiment came from making beer and wine and from cooking. He runs Jinx out of a refurbished restaurant in Canandaigua, in the Finger Lakes region of New York. A small team is credited alongside him: Bryce Linde does the music, and Harrow was the first Jinx perfume Arthur did not compose himself.

Is Jinx perfume all natural?

Not across the board. The house's own FAQ answers it directly: many of its perfumes are all natural, many are not, and synthetic use is disclosed in the product description. Cuirassier's page prints 22 percent synthetic, Cœr de Minuit prints 1.8 percent, and the collaboration with Zanini, Natty or Not?, is a 100 percent natural fragrance.

What do Jinx perfumes smell like?

There is no single house accord. Geist III is burnt, pitch black oud and incense. Cuirassier is leather and tar with soft flowers over it. Mitsamurai runs from peach and neroli down to heavy oud. Oud and animal notes run through most of the line.

Is Jinx perfume vegan?

Rarely. Several Jinx compositions use natural animal musks. Other animal materials turn up as well: castoreum, which comes from the beaver and smells of leather with something sweet behind it, sits in the base of Cuirassier.

Why does a Jinx perfume come with music?

Because the person making it wants it that way. Bryce Linde wrote and recorded one song for every perfume of the third collection, from bossa nova to black metal, and the set was sold on compact disc. Ventriloquism came with 20 minutes of ambient music of its own on cassette, and Geist III is black metal in a bottle.