The economy and mnemonic value of using curlies is deemed worth this occasional extra hassle. This precludes true closures. This mechanism yields deep binding of variables. References are often returned by special subroutines called constructors. Perl objects are just reference a special kind of object that happens to know which package it's associated with.
Constructors are just special subroutines that know how to create that association.
They do so by starting with an ordinary reference, and it remains an ordinary reference even while it's also being an object. References of the appropriate type can spring into existence if you dereference them in a context that assumes they exist. Since we haven't talked about dereferencing yet, we can't show you any examples yet. That's it for creating references. By now you're probably dying to know how to use references to get back to your long-lost data.