Our Mission

Deep Field Aromatics was born out of a love for the natural world, a longing for connection, and a belief that rich, sensory experience makes us more fully alive.

Scent is illuminating, immediate and visceral. The part of our brain that processes scent is tangled up with the area involved in memory, which is why aromatic experiences can be so transporting and evocative. Deep Field has been a journey to connect with this experiential aspect of scent.

Deep Field Aromatics offers a fully botanical line, white label perfumery, and bespoke perfume creation. Our philosophy of perfume reflects our values. We wish to share, through the creative art of natural perfumery, the same thing we seek for ourselves: a sensual connection to the natural world, filled with moments of mindfulness, intimacy, reflection, and joy.

- Russell Weiss, Founder, Lead Perfumer

About Russell Weiss

My name is Russell Weiss, and I am a multimedia artist, teacher, and perfumer from Chicago, IL. My creative output is diverse: painting, video, experimental sound design and performance, and of course, natural perfumes. I am especially interested in the way each medium allows one to communicate or reflect on different aspects of our sensory experience. My journey with natural perfume started in 2015, when I received a diffuser and a few essential oils as a gift. As an avid backpacker, I found them transporting: suddenly I was right back there in the woods, the sunlight filtering through gaps in the fir trees, dancing in jagged fragments on the trail. I quickly assembled a sizeable collection of oils, spending hours creating blends to diffuse. I began taking copious notes on how each blend made me feel, where it took me, what memories it called to mind, how each oil interacted with the others... I was transfixed. During this time I began to learn about natural perfumery - blends designed to be worn rather than diffused - and this hobby of mine developed into a full-time creative practice.

Perfumery… is a challenging craft to perfect. It requires patience, diligence, and careful study. I’ve spent so many late nights in the studio buzzing with excitement, and almost as many tossing my hands up in frustration. Over time, as my practice developed, so, too did my vision for Deep Field: to share my work through the synthesis of perfumery, visual art, and storytelling. My experience of creating perfumes is immersive. Each one is a different journey through thoughts, feelings, associations, memories… My goal with Deep Field is to invite others to have little journeys of their own.

Deep Field? Like… the Hubble Deep Field Camera?

It may seem strange to name a Natural Perfume Company after a space telescope, but hear us out. One of the most fascinating aspects of working with botanical aromatics is their deep history - some of the same materials we work with every day have been in use for millennia. Archaeologists have recovered incense burners in Mesopotamia that are over 5000 years old. What’s changed since then is the technology we use to process these materials. Advances in extraction techniques, such as supercritical CO2 extraction and fractional distillation, bring modern botanical extracts ever closer to the aromatic profile of the living plants. So there is a sense of wonder when working with botanicals, of looking into deep time and being part of a tradition that reaches back to the dawn of civilization, with a bit of help from modern technology. Kind of like the Hubble Deep Field Camera, which looks into the dawn of the universe itself, connecting us to the very beginning of it all.