JOHN STEELE
Fragrance Designer
DAY 1
16/2/24
John is a fragrance designer for his company Lifetree Aromatix, which offers rare organic essential oils and exotic floral absolutes to a discerning clientele of perfumers, healers and spiritual practitioners.
He enjoys communicating his passion for the spiritual use of aromatic plants in ancient civilizations and shamanic cultures. He graduated from UC Berkeley with studies in archaeology, anthropology and English Literature. His further doctoral research focused on a deep study of memory and mindfulness.
John has served on the board of the American Aromatherapy Association and consulted on future trends in aromatherapy for the Aveda Corporation. He has also lectured for the American Society of Perfumers, the Fragrance Foundation's Summit 2000, the Pacific Institute of Aromatherapy and the Psychology of Perfumery conference at Warwick University in the UK.
For NASA's Art in Space program, he designed a fragrance blend of 52 trees that was taken aboard a space shuttle for several revolutions around the Earth. Upon landing, the fragrance was taken to Thoreau's Walden Pond and embedded in one of the large local boulders.
John has also made several presentations for the Institute of Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles. He also consulted in Los Angeles for a Getty Museum exhibition, "Beyond the Nile: Ancient Egypt's Influence on Greece and Rome", where he researched Egyptian perfume materials for a walk-thru workshop where visitors selected top, middle and base notes to create their own perfume while moving through the line. For the Smell Culture Reader (Berg, 2006), John also contributed a chapter, "Perfumeros and the Sacred Use of Fragrance in Amazonian Shamanism."
He has been on fragrance-sourcing trips to the Himalayas of north India for roses and southern India for jasmines and lotuses. He met growers, distillers and aromatic plant harvesters while visiting flower fields, temples, flower markets and plant research stations.
John was a visiting lecturer at the University of London in Bronze Age stone circles and general systems theory, which explores meaningful connections across different disciplines. He was a co-ordinator of the Dragon Project, a ten-year investigation into subtle energies at sacred megalithic sites in the British Isles.
On three underwater expeditions in Spain and the Bahamas, he was an archaeologist searching for the legendary Atlantis.
