“I never liked fragrances when I was a kid,” perfumer Josh Meyer tells Forbes.

It’s an unlikely story: the kid who doesn’t like perfume grows up to become a perfumer. But Josh Meyer, the founder of Imaginary Authors, has a penchant for unpredictability. In 2010, he began experimenting with scents and launched his own line of provocative scents two years later. “My goal was to create atrocious, brutal fragrances,” Meyer tells me in his fragrance laboratory in Portland, Oregon with a coy smirk. “I just really wanted to make extraordinarily interesting, experimental fragrances.”

Using natural raw materials like essential oils and safe synthetic molecules, Meyer created a line that is vegan and free of parabens and phthalates. Once he had a standard in place for safe, ethical fragrances, Meyer could play, and he has spent the last 12 years creating scents that—as the brand name implies—prompt the imagination to run wild.

One day, a particularly imaginative mind—that of Salt & Straw’s head ice cream maker Tyler Malek’s—encountered Imaginary Authors while shopping for a gift for his girlfriend in Los Angeles. Similar to his thought process when creating flavor combinations in ice cream, Malek’s imagination lit up at a single whiff of perfume and he found himself repeatedly returning to the scent at home. It struck Malek that ice cream is so cold it doesn’t release aroma. Given that scent affects 40% of our taste, the Salt & Straw chef saw a missed opportunity. So he reached out to Meyer with a wild question: could Imaginary Authors create edible perfume?

The answer is yes. Meyer says creating their first scent—waffle cone—was easy, since he already had toasty-smelling ingredients on hand. It was an immediate success and so the two began experimenting to create scents that would enhance Salt & Straw’s ice cream flavors. Today, Salt & Straw customers can request to have their scoops spritzed with one of three culinary perfumes in line as they go through their tasting experience. They can also re-create the experience at home, with the Imaginary Authors set of three edible perfumes.

We chatted with Imaginary Authors founder Josh Meyer to learn more about his creative process and the overlooked interplay between taste and scent.

Explain the brand name ‘Imaginary Authors,’ is there a storytelling aspect to your perfume?

Perfume is more than just the juice and the sum of its parts. It’s an entire world of memories you forgot you had and worlds you have yet to experience. Imaginary Authors distills this idea into fragrant magic. We have so much fun writing stories to help people understand what’s in the bottle that’s bigger than, say, jasmine, frankincense and raspberry. The perfume has so much more to say than just a few notes by themselves and we get to use books, that we make up, to help give a bigger picture.

How do you make perfume edible? What ingredients and processes are required?

I started by contacting one of the best essential oil suppliers on the market and getting a list of edible materials. I then diluted down those ingredients and started playing with different blends. Part of the process was taking 20 or so different bottles of individual accords and presenting them to the Salt & Straw team to show how many different scents we could experiment with. The project has been so much fun.

Tell me about the relationship between taste and scent.

Taste and smell are separate senses with their own receptor organs, but they work together intimately to create our perception of flavor. While taste buds on the tongue detect basic tastes—sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami—our sense of smell provides the nuanced flavors we associate with specific foods. The closely interconnected senses work harmoniously.

The scent of something contributes to how you think it is going to taste. It’s commonly cited that 70-80% of flavor perception comes from smell. A study from 1977 found that when subjects’ nostrils were closed, as much as 80% of the perceived ‘taste’ disappeared. Another study from 1969 showed that subjects were drastically less competent at identifying foods when they couldn’t smell, with a decrease in accuracy of at least 80%. Your nose clues you in first, creating perceptions of what you think something should taste like.

Do you think scent should be used more in cooking and taste in perfumery?

Smelling perfume is like a fine dining experience. Combining the two shouldn’t be connected in most circumstances. But, if they are it should be intentional, and in that case it’s a huge world to discover. A spritz of our ylang-ylang floral perfume ‘A Plume of Blooms’ over a tomato salad is a unique experience. A tomato salad is a canvas for a garden and smelling flowers is like tasting herbs with the Plume of Blooms. Just like basil adds a bright peppery flavor, adding a floral scent to the tomato dish gives it a new dimension entirely.

Can you give some examples of popular ice cream flavor and perfume scent combinations you’ve created? Why do they work so well together?

The ‘Cloud of Cocoa’ is a full chocolate explosion when paired with chocolate gooey brownie ice cream. It also works spritzed on burrata, olive oil and sea salt after dinner—it makes the fatty, creamy appetizer a decant experience. The ‘Swoon of Citrus’ gives a full perfume to a gin martini so it can be enjoyed longer and more fully than it would with just a spritz of a lemon. The double fold vanilla with the ‘Plume of Blooms’ is my personal favorite. Perhaps it’s the perfumer in me, but I love an exquisite vanilla experience, and the florals in ‘A Plume of Blooms’ are out of this world.

What are your most popular scents?

The ‘Cloud of Cocoa’ is really popular, it’s a rich chocolate fragrance with a note of booze. It’s hard to think of a dessert or cocktail it wouldn’t work well with. I’m hopeful more people share how they’re using them, it’s really fun and inspiring to see. Personally, I’m excited about the ‘Plume of Blooms,’ and I’ve found a bunch of ways to use it in my own kitchen. But, I also know I’m only brushing the surface of the possibilities.

When and why did you expand the line from perfume to make candles, soaps and body oils?

It was a natural progression. You don’t always want a fine fragrance to be on your body. So candles were the first step and the concept for The Abandoned Mansion was born. It has this incredible cedar oil with bitter quince fruit. It smells absolutely divine and is just so much better as a room fragrance than a personal scent.

What’s next for Imaginary Authors?

We have so many exciting projects right now. After 12 years in this little niche perfume space, we’re growing fairly quickly and starting to spread our wings—it couldn’t be more fun. We just released a horse perfume which is called ‘Untamable’—it is not for the faint of heart! It’s blended with leather and cactus flowers that take you immediately to the Texas Hill country.

For something that’s more immediately pleasurable we have a new limited edition coming out this holiday with Salt & Straw, ‘Dipped in Chocolate’ that will be delectable. If you are new to the world of unique fragrances we have a beautiful book of samples to explore and experience a wide range of what is possible in fragrance and what makes it such an immense joy.

The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.