Scents That Make You Go Om
Right at the moment, I don’t want to smell like a rose. I don’t want to lift myself up with bright notes of lemon and bergamot, or dose myself with the sensual fragrance of vanilla, patchouli or musk. What I want right now is to be calm. To walk down the street wrapped in the sort of serenity that usually only descends at the end of a yoga class. If only they could bottle that, I’d splash it on in abundance.
And so starts my quest – a search for instant Zen, preferably delivered in an elegant bottle. I know what I’m looking for in a vague, not-quite-defined way – something that transports me to a verdant landscape, the sort of place where you breathe deep and let the scents of nature fill your lungs. I want a forest bath in a bottle, and I think I know where I can find it.
At the sleek Aesop shop near me, I reacquaint myself with the Hwyl scent launched a couple of years ago. Parfumeur Barnabé Fillion, who developed the woody, smoky perfume, described it as a fragrance built around the concept of stillness, celebrating “the silence and verdancy of an ancient Japanese forest, and the wind in the canopy.”
The notes of cedarwood and moss do conjure up a forest, but when I inhale that smoky undertone and those zesty, peppery top notes, I am transported not to a virgin treescape but to a forest temple sitting in a shaded glen, where moss grows on the flagstones and the tips of incense sticks glow like fireflies in front of the shrine. It’s undeniably peaceful, but it’s not that heady sort of stillness that comes from a complete immersion in nature.
After some intense aromatic browsing at a number of my favourite parfumeries, I hit the jackpot with a bottle of Coven, the best-selling fragrance from Icelandic parfumeur Andrea Maack. This is a full-throttled forest fragrance, with an added layer of voluptuousness. Some green fragrances are as crisp as a freshly-ironed shirt; this is not one of them. Rather, Coven conjures up a rain-soaked old-growth forest, a place of trackless depths where fallen trees sprout lichen and mushrooms.
“It’s a scent that is muscular rather than subtle, with top notes of galbanum and clove giving way to a heart of cedarwood layered over base notes of oakmoss and vanilla.”
“It’s a fragrance for people in big cities who want a big fix of that crazy nature feel,” according to Andrea, who says that she wanted a muddy, rainy feel to the fragrance. It’s a scent that is muscular rather than subtle, with top notes of galbanum and clove giving way to a heart of cedarwood layered over base notes of oakmoss and vanilla.
Maack says she was inspired to create the scent after taking some foreign friends on a road trip through Iceland. “They kept saying, ‘These natural landscapes are amazing – we wish we could bottle this and take it with us.’ That’s what gave me the idea,” says Andrea, who is also a successful artist.
The irony, of course, is that Iceland has no forests, but that didn’t stop her creating a scent which has the heady intensity of nature after a downpour. That sense of being immersed in nature stokes my feeling of serenity like nothing else.
A few days after discovering Coven I discover another very different shortcut to serenity, and one that already sits in my bathroom cupboard. Nuit de Sable, from BDK, is a scent I usually turn to on hot summer nights, but I discover that it is just as striking when worn under winter woollens.
Inspired by the gardens of Palais Royal in Paris, where you stroll along sandy paths past manicured rose beds, the scent is as far from the forest as you can get. Its spicy notes of cardamom, cinnamon and nutmeg dance over a redolent Turkish rose absolute, but for me the dominant aroma is the hot sand accord at its heart.
It’s a powerful scent that conjures up instant memories – not of Paris, however, but the deserts of Namibia, a place of towering sand dunes that are some of the most dramatic landscapes on the planet. Stand atop the tallest of these red sand giants and all you can see, stretching to the horizon, is an ocean of sand, seemingly caught mid-ebb. It’s a still and silent place, a place where utter calm descends as unstoppably as nightfall – and with one spray, I am there.
Words_ Ute Junker
Photo_ Chelsea Shapouri/UnSplash