Inside the Collection: Austin Quinlan

I first met Austin aka Miss Adventure at a Scents of Wood event at Ministry of Scent two years ago. We were there early and started chatting; then, we walked around the shop and showed each other scents we liked. I love how easy it is to start talking to perfume people, especially when you meet at events and immediately realize you share a common passion.

Austin is a traveler. He’s curious, creative, and has a kind, easy energy to be around. He’s also always wearing incredible jewelry. I think I learned the first time we met that he collects vintage makeup and perfume. Earlier this year he was kind enough to send me a package full of treasures, enough that I now have a little collection of my own too.

I thought it would be fun to learn more about his collections and get a close-up look at them. I came away wishing I lived nearby so I could attend one of his epic-sounding perfume parties. He's a bit of a world traveler and will absolutely get on a plane for a great perfume event, so maybe you'll be lucky enough to meet him IRL one day. Until then, enjoy this glimpse into his beautifully curated world.

“When I started collecting makeup compacts, I actually didn’t care about perfume at all. I didn’t own any perfume, I wasn’t interested in wearing it, and I always passed over perfume bottles when I went antiquing. But as I started researching my compacts more and more, I began to learn about perfume history by proxy.”

Only three?? I guess I’ll have to go with Lune Féline from Atelier des Ors, Black Tie from Celine, and Oyédo from Diptyque.

Lune Féline, by Marie Salamagne, is a beautiful cardamom vanilla fragrance that I wear almost every time I leave the house. It’s mostly my fall/winter scent since it’s so spicy, but I find the freshness of the green notes in there to be great in the summer as well. It’s perfect for an invigorating morning on a desert island!
Oyédo, by Akiko Kamei, is THE summer scent for me, and is pretty much the only citrus scent in my collection. This is a yuzu, mandarin, lemon, and lime forward scent that I wear all summer, especially on sunny days here in Seattle. Yuzu has just such a nice sparkling quality to me, I can’t help but feel uplifted when I wear it. Plus I think it blends well with sunscreen, which I assume I’ll have plenty of on this island.
Black Tie, which is uncredited but probably goes to Hedi Slimane as the Creative Director, is my all-time favorite right now. It’s powdery (which I never like), filled with orris butter (which I also never like), and smells like a freshly cracked open can of A&W Cream Soda. I don’t know why, but this scent just WORKS for me. I wear it whenever I want to feel enveloped in a soft blanket of nostalgia. This fragrance will get me through many cold and lonely nights on the desert island!

The first bottle I’d bring to a fragrance swap would be anything tomato leaf or fig scented. It’s not that I don’t like those notes, but rather I know everybody else loves them to a degree that I don’t quite understand. I think bringing a tomato leaf perfume to a room full of strangers would be the fastest way to make friends – it’s such a crowd pleaser!

The bottle I’ll keep forever but never wear is definitely a perfume that I made myself at Experimental Perfume Club in London. I made my semi-custom scent back in 2024 on a birthday trip to the UK and I absolutely fell in love with the fragrance. The three accords I chose to use were Cardamom Moss (clearly I like cardamom), Tonka Extraordinaire, and Ambre Iris. At the time, this blend was what I considered to be the perfect perfume. However, a little more than a year later, I’ve gone back to smell it and WOW I absolutely cannot stand it. It feels so hollow in my nose, and it reminds me so much of that sensation (and taste) of when you’re sick and your sinuses are draining at the back of your throat. I suspect it’s the iris in it (sorry iris fans, I’m really trying!). I don’t think I’ll ever wear it again, but I can’t part with it because it represents such a magical birthday trip!

“Something about the size and shape of it, the weight of the compact in my hand, the textured design of the metal shell – it just felt so correct. Like I was meant to have this compact.”

My collection has really taken off. I have over 100 solid perfume compacts, over 100 vintage lipsticks, and probably over 200 blushes and powder compacts. I wouldn’t be surprised if my hoard collection is over 500 pieces in total. The crazy thing is I only started collecting a little over 4 years ago.

When I started collecting makeup compacts, I actually didn’t care about perfume at all. I didn’t own any perfume, I wasn’t interested in wearing it, and I always passed over perfume bottles when I went antiquing. But as I started researching my compacts more and more, I began to learn about perfume history by proxy. For instance, as I read about some of my favorite Coty compacts I learned about Chypre, the famous bergamot+labdanum+oakmoss composition that Coty created in 1917. This was the first time I actually became interested in perfume history.

Then, it wasn’t until I read The Essence - Discovering the World of Scent, Perfume & Fragrance that I actually became interested in perfume as storytelling and art. This book is what inspired me to start taking perfume classes; now I’ve taken perfume workshops in Spain (with Bravanariz) and Bulgaria (with RoseOverdose), and I’m in a year long natural perfumery class with Marina Barcenilla. I hope to one day have my own perfume brand (not that the world needs it, but who’s gonna stop me?)

My vintage makeup and perfume collection started very innocently – I watched this video from Lisa Eldridge about her vintage makeup collection back in early 2022, and started collecting shortly after that. Looking at beauty through a vintage lens was an interesting side to makeup I hadn’t thought of before (I was doing drag at the time so I was very familiar with modern makeup). But the next day after watching her video, I was at an antique store in Highland Park and I came across some vintage blush and lipstick pieces – a Colgate mini lipstick, a Ponds mini lipstick, and an Avon rouge compact. These three pieces started my vintage collection, and it’s been downhill ever since. Every antique store trip after that has been a hunt for more pieces. I then started going to as many estate sales as I could to see what people had on their bathroom counters in Pasadena, Altadena, Brentwood, etc. (LA is quite a great place for estate sales, especially compared to Seattle). I also perused eBay a lot more frequently so I could find the next big thing I could add to my collection. I don’t think I considered myself a collector though until I started buying furniture to accommodate all my pieces.

It’s grown a lot over the years, but I still have my original Avon compact sitting in my collection; as for the two mini lipsticks? I accidentally dropped those down the bathroom drain of my Los Feliz apartment in LA. RIP.

“Collecting vintage makeup has absolutely changed the way I see beauty today, mostly because I see how wasteful packaging is now!”

Earlier this year I hosted a solid perfume making party/workshop at my apartment; my friends came over to compose their own solid perfumes and we put them into a couple compacts of their choice. It was such a fun party, and everyone got to leave with mementos that they created themselves!

To start them off, I gave every person a blank printout with all the potential ingredients at their disposal (about 35 bases, mid notes and top notes). We then sniffed each base note one at a time and I had them give their thoughts out loud, as well as write them down on their worksheet. After that, they each began creating their base accord. Once the accords were done, I started asking them questions; “What heart notes do you want to add to your resinous base? Who wants to lean into florals more? Which top notes do you want to use to lift up your heavy woody base accord?”

A couple hours of sniffing and ideating later, and everyone had their formula. Now was the really hard part for me – I had to convert their formula from drops to grams and individually melt down the solid perfume ingredients. Beeswax, shea butter, jojoba oil, and their raw ingredients each went into a small beaker to heat over a hot plate. It was a little painstaking to do for each person; I should have economized the process. But watching my friends excitedly grab their vintage Estee Lauder or Max Factor perfume compact, filled with their unique scent, was so worth it.

You know in Dragon Tales when the kids hold up the scale for the first time and they get enveloped in a warm glow before being transported to Dragon Land? That’s exactly how I felt the first time I held my large Coty Airspun Powder compact. Something about the size and shape of it, the weight of the compact in my hand, the textured design of the metal shell – it just felt so correct. Like I was meant to have this compact.

But these Coty compacts aren’t my only special pieces. I also have 3 of the Volupte ‘Golden Gestures’ hand-shaped compacts. These ones can be pretty hard to find, and there are many variations with each one being more rare than the last. Right now I have the plain one, the ‘Gay Nineties Mitt’ white lace opera glove variation, as well as the ‘Engagement Ring’ variation.

But probably my most prized pieces in my collection are my mascaras. Not only do I have an original ‘Lash-brow-ine’ tin and newspaper ad from 1915, but I also have its successor: Maybelline Mascara. I believe the early Maybelline cake mascaras I have are from 1917, 1922, and 1930. These are all solid blocks of mascara that come with a small brush that would dampen with spit (ew) and brush through your lashes. It wasn’t until Helena Rubinstein created the Mascara-Matic in 1957 that mascara took the first form of the wand and tube that we’re familiar with today. And yes, I have the 1957 mascara wand as well!

A holy grail for many people, myself included, is the Elgin American compact made in partnership with Salvador Dalí called Bird in Hand. It’s a really elegant compact in the shape of a bird, and it folds open to reveal a mirror, pressed powder, and a pill box. And the head can be removed to reveal lipstick! This compact is pretty rare, and even harder to find in good condition. Every now and then one will go up on eBay for about $1,500, but I’ve seen them on other sites for up to $3,000. This is one of those pieces where if I ever see one in person I will buy it immediately, no questions asked.

I actually have one piece in my collection that comes with a bit more back story already – this Max Factor blush with the name Dennis Safren on it. This piece is the only one in my collection that has both a first and last name, which makes it easier for me to look up its history. Presumably, this blush was owned by him from his early film days, and he held onto it for many years.

After searching his name I found his IMDB page that lists 3 things he starred in during the 60s and 70s; Insight (1960), El Hombre Que Vino Del Odio (1971), and Mean Mother (1973). I also discovered a post from FirstStage, a playwright group in Los Angeles, that shared Dennis’ passing back in 2018. I reached out to them to find out more about Dennis, and here is what Felix from FirstStage shared:

“Dennis was an aspiring actor and playwright who performed in a number of professional productions on the East Coast and LA. For many years (at least two decades) he was the Manager/Director of FirstStage LA, the longest-running play and screenplay workshop in LA founded in 1983 by members of Sundance Institute. He was also an award-winning produced playwright himself. His play, Straights!, was developed at FirstStage, then produced at Trustus Theatre (South Carolina) and Bailiwick Theatre (Chicago); his play, Offsides, for which he was co-writer, was produced at the Stella Adler Theatre and then at Love Creek One-Act Play Festival in NY where it won first prize. Dennis was an astute writer and encouraging mentor to many aspiring playwrights, including myself.” – Felix Racelis

Collecting vintage makeup has absolutely changed the way I see beauty today, mostly because I see how wasteful packaging is now! When you walk into Sephora or Ulta today, you have dozens of aisles of makeup that’s designed to be thrown out – you take off the clear plastic wrapper and toss it in the trash. You hit pan on your eyeshadow palette and you throw the whole thing in the trash. You get the wrong shade of foundation so you bring it back to Sephora and they… throw it in the trash. It’s all completely disposable, and a vast majority of it is non-refillable.

Contrast that with a large swathe of my vintage collection where it’s almost all refillable, reusable, and recyclable. Most of my collection is made of metal that can be melted down to be reused, the compacts all have a space for you to replace the pressed powder, and the lipsticks have swappable cases! That means you can buy a nice quality metal compact you really like, and can KEEP IT for years and years and years. Products like the Revlon Futurama Lipstick cases were meant to last – you buy one case (or multiple) and buy the lipstick refills at a steep discount so you can fill the case, put it in your purse, and carry it forever. I think this is such a cool concept that we don’t really find at an affordable price point anymore. Dior has lipstick cases and refills you can buy, but at $530 for the case and $65 for the refill, that’s not offsetting the thousands of <$20 lipsticks in Ulta and Sephora. Lisa Eldridge, fellow vintage makeup collector (she’s kind of the blueprint really, since I started collecting because of her), has started selling cases and refills too for lipstick and eyeshadow palettes, so I’m happy that someone out there is at least trying to bring back that vintage principle of items being built to last.

There are two big reasons I’m so generous with my collection. Firstly; at the end of the day there’s nothing I love more than giving gifts to people to make them happy. Sometimes I’m worried I’m like No Face in Spirited Away, but instead of luring people in with gold I’m luring them in with full sized perfume bottles and whatever random craft I’ve hyper fixated on that week. I also love hosting elaborate parties in which a big, time consuming activity is the main focus; my party attendees NEED to leave with some sort of keepsake. Even right now as I’m writing this, I just finished up a three hour scent discovery hangout with some friends where we all smelled 50+ samples from ScentFest SF, and they left with plenty of goodies. It really brings so much joy to my heart to give someone a thoughtful gift.

Secondly, being generous with my collection is part of my ethos. Frankly it would be antithetical to my collection if I didn’t give pieces away all the time. What I love about my collection is that all the pieces can be reused, refilled, and repurposed. What good is it to collect them if they’re just going to sit in storage? Why boast about how a compact is refillable if I’m not going to refill it? That’s why I love refilling my solid perfumes with new modern scents, pressing powder into an old compact, and giving my pieces away to friends that will love them. And selfishly it helps cull the herd of my collection!

1. Read perfume books! The Forgotten Sense and In Search of Perfumes are two of my favorites. And Jean-Claude Ellena’s books are great too.

2. Take perfume classes! I like taking classes through the Institute of Art and Olfaction, and with specific perfumers like Marina Barcenilla. And the two perfume retreats I went on have been great highlights in my life.

3. I didn’t use AI to write any of this, I just really like using emdashes because I do a lot of copywriting at work lol. (editor’s note - it’s true this went through Pangram and these beautiful words are all his!)

Thank you for sharing this look into your world with us Austin!! I’m so grateful for your time and feel lucky our paths crossed. 💖