How Hilde Soliani’s fragrances invite a journey through the tastes, landscapes, and intimate memories of her past.
WRITER Diba Mohtasham
PHOTOGRAPHER Turbeville Studios
ART DIRECTION/STYLING Turbeville Studios & Melody Saradpon
Perfume artist Hilde Soliani still fondly remembers long summer drives through the Italian countryside with her father as a small child. Along the way, they would pull over at roadside farmstands to pick up a fresh snack: ripe yellow melon wrapped in slices of prosciutto, a dish typical to the region of Parma where she grew up. The fruit’s juicy sweetness balanced the savory depth of the dry, salty ham, made all the more satisfying as respite from the hot August sun.
Decades later, after becoming a professional perfumer, Soliani would return to that formative memory, attempting to bottle it in small glass cylinders. The result became Mlon e Parsot, its name a nod to her local dialect, one of more than a hundred creations that treat fragrance as more than cosmetic accessory.
These artistic interpretations of Hilde Soliani’s creative perfumes are a series collaboration between Turbeville Studios and Edible SF. All ingredients were generously donated by Gus’s Community Market. Above: Melon and ham (Mlon e Parsot).
Instead, they serve as vehicles for her own storytelling, drawn from the emotions and atmospheres that make up her native home: clean laundry hanging outside on a clothesline (Purezza), freshly fallen snow in the mountains (Lacrima), or vintage lipstick in an old theater dressing room (Vecchi Rossetti).
Food, as it happens, plays a big part in those stories, rarely confined to the act of eating. Milk over cereal, for example, might transport us to childhood; butter and oysters evoke the sea (Miss Tranchant); a morning cappuccino recalls the familiar cadence of each day. Family recipes are handed down across generations and so, in Soliani’s telling, is the memory attached to them, passed from one kitchen to the next long after the meal itself ends.
““Relationships and food… they go together in any people, in any country,” she told Edible SF in a phone interview, “because without food, people don’t exist.””
Above: oysters and butter (Miss Tranchant).
Just as food cannot be divorced from people, its flavor is inseparable from smell. Much of what we perceive as flavor is actually shaped by aroma—the scents released from food that determine whether an experience tastes pleasurable, unpleasant, or acutely familiar. It’s this unique ability of scent to preserve and revive time that gives Soliani’s works their pull.
Unlike the other senses, smell has a direct pathway to the amygdala and hippocampus, regions of the brain involved in processing emotion and memory. As a result, familiar scents can evoke autobiographical moments with remarkable intensity. Studies have even found that odor-evoked memories tend to feel more vivid and emotionally charged than those prompted by sights or words, a phenomenon commonly referred to as the “Proust effect.”
Soliani’s philosophy distinguishes her at a time when gourmand fragrances are enjoying renewed popularity. Once a shorthand for sugary notes like cupcakes and caramel, the category has expanded in recent years toward more savory and unexpected territory: bread, rice, matcha, pistachio, to name a few. Or in the unique case of Eau de Cuisine, notes of fish, cheese, anise, and chestnut.
“For Italians, going to the table means conviviality, the place to chat, tasting the food with others,” said Soliani.
Above: Eau de Cuisine.
According to Antonia Kohl, co-owner of San Francisco’s Ministry of Scent, the shift in gourmand fragrances reflects a growing appetite for ingredients that offer immediate comfort while doubling as playful self-expression, a trend she attributes in part to younger consumers’ discovery of niche brands through social media.
“But [Hilde’s] been doing it far longer,” Kohl told Edible SF in store. “And I feel like it’s coming from a different place. Like it’s more coming from her, and a very personal immersion in that culinary world.”
That immersion traces back to Soliani’s childhood in Parma, where she was surrounded by art, music, and theater. “In Italy, we are lucky because we grow up in an open-air museum, so unconsciously we have in our DNA engraved the taste of the beauty, of the good,” wrote Soliani in an email. “For us, beauty is life as it is food is life and culture.”
Above: “Hot” Milk—a combination of creamy milk and red chili peppers as a nod to one of Soliani’s chef friends with a reputation of being a hot-headed womanizer.
Although she would spend years working in marketing before later turning to the perfume world, fragrance was already woven into her upbringing. Her maternal grandmother, Marcella, created scents for local clients, tending a garden filled with flowers and introducing Soliani to raw materials from an early age.
Kohl has watched customers experience these various interpersonal connections and rituals firsthand. She describes couples who buy a perfume specifically to wear on their wedding day, returning to it only on anniversaries. Friends drift more and more into the shop as a group activity, intimately comparing what each scent becomes on their wrist.
The same scent can conjure up different moments for different people. In a review on the website Fragrantica, one user describes a scene she imagines while wearing Mlon e Parsot: “I’m by the sea; I’ve just stepped out of the water and salty rivulets are running down me everywhere. Someone tosses me a sweet, cool slice of cantaloupe; I grab it with my seawater-drenched hands and take a big, delicious bite... pure bliss!”
It’s a kind of reaction that Soliani herself recognizes and sees often: “[People] love me and my fragrances because [they] are true, not fake storytelling … any fragrance is lived life of myself.”
““Inspiration arrives suddenly. It happens when I’m sitting in restaurants: I taste something and tears start to fall. This is the starting point: from here I have to leave and make my own perfume.” ”
Above: Butter and noodles (Buon Pranzo, translates to Good Lunch). Perfume courtesy of Ministry of Scent.
Hot Milk, bottled. Perfume courtesy of Ministry of Scent.
Find Hilde Soliani’s products in store at Ministry of Scent in San Francisco.