KevinLeonard
“Just like that, and I feel that I am home.”
Kevin Leonard graduated in food technology, and the habit stuck. He describes himself first as someone who admires research, the exploring of new things, the developing and modifying of something through many variations of steps. Then, almost in the same breath, he says the two things that calm him are forests and mountains. A man trained to vary one factor at a time, who goes to the places where nothing has been varied at all. Fragrance arrived a year and a half ago and landed neatly between the two.
Acoustic, mostly. He says it makes him relaxed and focused, which are not usually the same request.
Eighteen months, and the job description changed
He is precise about the timeline. A year and a half ago he wore fragrance to feel clean and neat. That was the whole brief. It was hygiene with a pleasant finish.
What changed was not the bottles. It was that he started reading them. He began to understand the story behind it, and the art. Now he says fragrance is not a tool that completes his day, it is a statement. Then he goes further, and the sentence gets unusually direct for someone this measured: it is what he needs, what he adores, and what represents him.
An old wood chair, a cool breeze, and four separate smells arriving in a fixed order.
The order he lists them in
Read his answer slowly and it is not a description, it is a sequence. Dew on the mango tree. Flowers in the home garden. Morning sunlight on the terrace. Then the chair, then the breeze, and only then the smell itself: wet earth combined with tree sap and flowers, and he names them, tuberose and jasmine.
Then comes the part most people would have edited out. Next to it there is a garage that stores an old jeep, and every morning there is the smell of smoke mixed with oil. He does not offer this as a contrast or a flaw. It arrives in the same sentence as the jasmine, at the same volume. And the conclusion he draws is not about any single note. Just like that, and I feel that I am home.
Home, in his telling, is not the flowers. It is the flowers and the engine oil together, in that order, at that hour. Remove the garage and the memory stops working.
He refuses to have a rotation
Asked what he is wearing these days, he starts by declining the question. He cannot describe it, because every day he wears whatever he wants to wear that day. Only after that does he agree to generalise, and two shelves appear.
He keeps both. Which one opens is decided that morning and not before.
Coffee first, always. Then the bottle, which travels with him rather than being left at home.
Two things he carries
The ritual is short enough to quote in full. He brings his favourite coffee to the office, to feel more energetic and focused. And he always carries his perfume to accompany him through the day.
Note the verb. Not to reapply, not to top up. To accompany. The bottle is not maintenance, it is company, and it goes where he goes for the same reason the coffee does.
The question he will not answer
Thirty people have now been asked what good taste means. Kevin is the first to decline the premise. He says he cannot describe it, that good taste and bad taste are just preferences that he and others think about, and that it can be different for each person. Then the only instruction he gives: believe in what you like, and be confident about the things you like.
Pick whichever you think is the tasteful one.
Believe in what you like, and be confident with the things you like.
His entire theory of taste, offered only after refusing to give one. It is not a definition. It is permission.
Cause and effect
Asked for the one belief he would defend, he gives two sentences that fit together like a rule and its application. Everything you do has a cause and effect. Just be a good person to others and yourself.
The second sentence is the one to watch. Most people would have stopped at others. He adds and yourself, which turns a moral into a symmetry, and makes it the same shape as the thing he sent us to look at.
“Just keep exploring many things, and you can find what you really need and love.”