When Kimberly Pimentel first walked into the newly leased commercial space in downtown Eugene’s Miner Building, it was bare and white with ugly lights, a cold cement floor and a large architectural gash in the wall. She knew she had found the perfect place to open her perfumery, and she was never going to change a thing about it. “This is a 100-year-old floor,” she says. “It’s seen so many things.”
Pocket O’ Posies Perfumerie is a sophisticated, high-end gothic apothecary in an otherwise sleek and modernistic building. It bears a plague doctor surrounded by flowers as its logo, whose essence is present throughout the dark minimalistic gray and red shop. The room is warmly lit with vintage lamps, illuminating bottles of niche fragrances from all over the world alongside displays of novels such as Nosferatu and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Its grand opening is Oct. 4.
Pimentel is a self-professed “frag head,” meaning that she has a deep appreciation and devotion to the variety of fragrances in the world. “There is something so unique about the olfactory system in the senses,” she says, referring to the sense of smell. “For centuries, fragrance has been utilized for concepts of love and war and death and birth and medicine and magic.”
Her store was inspired by her experience at the height of the pandemic when she was a medical worker. On a daily basis, she was “witnessing the fragility of life, those moments of uncertainty, of loss and inspiration that arrived so unexpectedly.”
She compared this experience to being a plague doctor in the 17th century, when “those haunting images of the plague doctor cloaked in mystery with that beak” came to her mind. Plague doctors are believed to have carried in their masks “posies,” or a tiny bouquet of herbs and flowers, to protect themselves from the toxic air.
“Perfumes and scents were not so much just a luxury, but a way of having an armor,” she says. Conversely, during the pandemic, Pimentel says, “we were almost taught not to smell, and we were told, ‘Don’t do it. It’s dangerous. You might die if you do so.’”
Coming out of the pandemic, her goal with this perfumery is: “How do we re-engage ourselves and everybody else to experience these olfactory things?” She says smell is important because it is as fascinating as it is personal, and even singular to each individual. “How is it that you can walk into somewhere and you smell an oatmeal cookie, and you think of your grandma?”
She is opening Pocket O’ Posies because “I wanted to create something for the people of Eugene that would help them experience things that maybe they had never seen before, smelled before.”
Her collection is curated from eclectic and small businesses out of places such as Prague, Switzerland and even Romania, each with a single element threading them all together. “I wanted perfumes and smells that tell a story,” she says.
The first perfume line she brought into the store was Meo Fusciuni, an independent Italian perfume house. She brought it in because she was drawn to its scent, Sogni. The scent, she says, “actually smells like you’re walking through a forest, a pine forest. You smell the pine. You see a little cabin with a fire burning. You can smell the cabin. You walk inside, and you can smell this warm bowl of rice, and you can smell the tea in the cabin.”
Another perfume line she carries is Necalli, which is from Bucharest. The owners are a married couple who design perfumes together. Necalli’s NARCIS is derived from the word “narcissist.” She says that the fragrance symbolizes “something you do for yourself, and it smells like chocolate milk and mom. It’s just a really soft, sensual, beautiful scent that I just love.”
Necalli, she says, is all the more powerful because it is from an Eastern European Bloc country. “Twenty or 30 years ago, they were not allowed to even have this type of art,” she says. “Perfume is almost a way of liberating yourself,” she adds. “Maybe I can’t look a certain way, I can’t dress a certain way, I can’t say different things. You can’t stop me from smelling how I want to smell and feel. It’s the ultimate act of being yourself.”
Pimentel carries a wide variety of eclectic scents that won’t be found in big-box stores. Some smell cool and fresh like a glacier, others smell thick and ashen like a forest fire, while others smell like walking deep into a pine forest with newly rained-on dirt. One of her lines is Imaginary Authors, based out of Portland, with flavors such as Wiffle Waffle Cone, smelling like vanilla, salted caramel, heavy cream and sandalwood. “They develop their line like they’re writing a story book,” she says.
One of the most exclusive fragrances she carries is Nosferatu. “When you wear Nosferatu, it smells like the Earth. It smells like walking into this vampire’s castle. And you can smell the lilies of a funeral and you smell like what you think a vampire would smell like.”
Regarding how she curates her collection, “A lot of it is just smelling hundreds and thousands of different perfumes,” she says, “and then basically just contacting them, listening to their story, seeing if it’s a brand that I would want to bring together.”
She also says she has a mentor at a fragrance house in Portland who has taken her under her wing. “You did it,” she says her mentor told her. She says that her mentor has described her collection of fragrances as “kind of sad, but they’re beautiful. They’re introspective.”
Though her perfumes are high-end, “I don’t necessarily want people to think they have to buy something when they come in,” she says. “I want to bring this to other people so that they can experience it.” She says she invites people to come in, use her testers and simply “see what touches them.”
Pocket O’ Posies Perfumerie’s grand opening is 10:04 am Saturday, Oct. 4, at 132 East Broadway, suite 101. Kimberly Pimentel plans to stay open “until the barrels run dry.” The store will be open from 11 am to 5:30 pm Wednesday through Friday and 10 am to 2:30 pm on Saturdays. Call 913-687-1464 or visit PocketOPosies.com for more information.