Something is happening to me. I can’t seem to get my head (and nose) out of the woods these days. It’s a trend that seems to be popping up in all parts of my creative world: in my own (paltry at the moment) design time at the studio, in my classes with private students, and even in terms of what I am wanting to photograph right now. Of course, I have been working with conifers and fougeres in my studio for awhile now, but I think that this shift in my psyche really set in in 2011, right around the time I got pregnant (hmm…) with some more classical constructions as well as some more modern ‘abstractions’ in the making. The thing is that while I have been dancing around this concept I have had few actual launches to show for this line of exploration.
Last year’s Matsu, which was a rather abstract, Japanese influenced ‘pine’ scent expressed a humid, green woody concept with a brilliant bergamot flash at the opening (and containing no actual pine of conifers) is really the only launch that I have managed. Until (sometime close to) now. Well, I’m not ready to launch this particular design just yet but I think that it is finished. It’s a much more literal experience of a pine / spruce fragrance but it doesn’t read at all like pinesol or worse, in a way, a bad interpretation of Polo or Pino Sylvestre.
Something that may have spurred on this creative indulgence in the conifer arena has been a lovely friendship that has sprung up between myself and the micro-distiller, Eric Bresselsmith and his wonderful company that features *rocky mountain region* materials. I have been getting new materials from him for years without having the space or time to really jump in and work on crafting the perfumes I have in mind when he shows me samples. Finally, I have little by little managed to get something going with some very wonderful and rare aromatics. I want to take a quick moment to touch upon a few of my favorites that Eric has brought me: Concolor White Pine (distilled from recycled Christmas trees in Aspen, CO), Common Juniper (a shrub that I have torn out of my own yard to make way for a rose garden but yields a lovely, GREEN take on juniper oil), Engelmann Spruce (a delicious, slightly fruity, airy, clear as a bell, spruce) and Great Western Sage (a dry, spiky but gorgeous sage scent. If you like smudge sticks, this is for you!). Eric also makes some very wonderful and creative co-distills using the woods, leaves/needle and cones of the conifers sometimes mixed with shrubs and sometimes different but similar species of evergreens. I really like some of the juniper and cedar co-distills that I have tried.
One of the most incredible and very rare oils that I have gotten (and used in this new design) is an infusion of 50 year old resin crystals in pure pinion essential oil. It is magical in the extreme. It was also a labor of love as Eric told me that he was out with the ancient felled pinion armed with tweezers picking the crystals off, little by little, by hand. As soon as I smelled it I just said, I want this. I didn’t ask how much; I just knew that I needed to get as much as I could afford. Seve de Pin (Pine Sap) is based upon this beauty. There is wider story than just wanting to showcase a new material, but I had started this design years ago and it seemed to be waiting for this last ingredient to make everything fall into place.
Seve de Pin was partially inspired by the smell in the night air on my first overnight trip away from my parents when I was 4 years old and in pre-school summer camp. *The trees were speaking to me all night long* and in this construction, there is the distinctive smell that was in the air (in the drydown) that night. I would know this smell anywhere. It is mysterious and ancient and all-knowing. Like the earth itself. And that there are secrets that may be revealed to those who listen (and smell it). Along with this sense of peering into other realms, there is comfort and protection, too, inherent in this aroma. Like lying cozily on a soft bed of needles, nestled in the trees with only the night sky above; you are sure to see the shooting stars.
There is another inspiration, which was simply the incredible sensation of the first clear, oozing pine sap from the pine trees in my own back yard each Spring. Maybe the reason this scent has been so long in the making is that I can only really work on it during a few weeks in Spring; I need experience that wonder first hand. The new sap is unlike the aged sap that you find incrusted upon a more worldly tree and I wanted to really capture the airy freshness of that first exudation.
It has been interesting to construct this from almost all natural ingredients (99% botanical) with just a touch of green note accord in the top and an augmented resinous base to give the architecture something firm and stable. Naturals have their intrinsic beauty but many times it is just impossible to get the structure to hold it’s form. At least the form that I am working to sculpt or to use the former metaphor, build. The tendrils of the naturals want to collapse on themselves and rush to be together in the middle. It sometimes takes a lot of skill to get the pieces to confirm to the shape that you have in mind; something that is quite vertical as opposed to horizontal (landscape) or rounded / voluminous (a bouquet of sorts). These few synthetic structure “poles” support the flickering nuances of the different shades of green leaves and needles, the cones and most of all the sap that dries into the crusty, delicious resin. The fluidity of the design needs to be upheld. It is sap and air after all.
I’m deliriously happy about the final result, I have to say. Ask anyone who has been around me as I test it. They will tell you of a crazy woman who can’t stop huffing the blotter (I almost NEVER do this) and swooning about, rolling her eyes in ecstasy. I am that child again under the stars hearing the whispering murmurs of the trees and dreaming of the possibilities of life.
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I’m not sure when I am releasing this new perfume BUT I would love to share~
So, I am offering a drawing for 3ml EdP deluxe spray samples to 3 lucky winners. Please leave a comment about your favorite conifer, or evergreen scent or better yet a favorite scent memory. The drawing is open until June 8 at midnight MST. Good Luck!
* images are all my own. you can view some and others by me at my instagram page.
Ooh, how exciting! I am dying to try this. Favorite scent memory: violet cologne that I had when I was much younger. Favorite pine perfume: Enchanted Forest, or Fille en Aiguilles. I also love Juniper Ridge’s forest-smelling soaps – to die for!
🙂 Oh, Elizabeth! Thank you for sharing your favorites,too! I share your love of Fille en Aiguilles and can only imagine that I would love Enchanted Forest (having read the notes / ingredient list). Seve de Pin doesn’t have any of the cassis bud – to – pine thing that I imagine EF has. It’s very true to the scent of pin sap; especially in the drydown where it turns from fresh, bright new sap to the aged, almost campfire-y smelling, ambery sap. Good luck in the draw!
My favorite conifer is the balsam fir; I really love its scent.
🙂 Oh, YES!, Anita! Balsam Fir is just wonderful! Thank you for your comment and good luck in the drawing~
Hi Dawn! I love reading your fragrance updates! You are so descriptive I can almost smell what you’re creating! I, too, love pine scents. I also love the scent of pinon and sage. We live near Santa Fe and in the evenings you can smell these in the air, especially in winter! I would love to enter my name in the draw!
Hi, Maddie C.~ Oh yes, PINON!!! I have only been to New Mexico (Santa Fe and ABQ) once but it was in winter. I remember driving with a friend between Santa Fe and ABQ and smelling the sage. It was so incredibly magical. I am so happy that you have been enjoying the blog; I am so happy to be writing a bit again. It feels good! 🙂 Good luck in the drawing~
Hello Dawn! What a wonderful back story for Seve de Pin! Inspirations truly run wild- I cannot wait to try this new creation of yours. My favourite evergreen/ pine scent would strangely be the soothing green of your own Celadon green and the syrupy green Fille en Aiguille. The scent I miss the most is frangipani flower garlands in temples back home in India… Thank you for this draw and good luck with thos exciting launch!
Hello, Yash! Oh I am so flattered to have one of my designs be one of your favorite greens! 🙂 Thrilled, in fact. Ooo, and frangipani garlands; they sound incredible. I hope one day to have an opportunity to partake in that delicacy!
I hope that you will love Seve de Pin and good luck in the draw! ox~ D
My favorite evergreen tree perfume memory is connected to summer and the seaside as there are parts of the Croatian costs where only some small kind of pines grow and that smell combined with the saltiness of air is just perfect. Well, I smell the sunscreen as well but that just adds spice to the memory. 🙂
Hello, Ines~
You know, I can so relate to the love of the smell of evergreens growing near the ocean. On Cape Cod, where my husband and I were married, there are scrub pines that exude a terrific scent and that mixed with the sea air is divine. I love that we share a similar fave aroma. 🙂 Good luck in the draw and fragrant hugs, Dawn
Dawn, this sounds like a lovely and special creation. My favorite evergreen memory is also my earliest memory of trying to “make perfume” as a little girl by collecting leaves, evergreen needles, and flowers in my parents backyard, and mashing them between my fingers to extract the scent. The beginning of an obsession with perfume!
Hello, Michelle~ How lovely to see you here, Michelle! 🙂 Thank you for sharing that wonderful image of yourself as a little girl making perfume. I can so relate to that idea of crushing the plants to get the ‘juice’. I think that I made violet “crush perfume” every spring…
I hope that you will love Seve de Pin and good luck in the draw~ ox, D
This sounds like yet another scent I’ve been waiting for. Lovely article and quite reminiscent of many memories from my own childhood growing up in the Appalachian mountains. I remember as a child I would hike up the mountain beside our house and spotted along the trail would be newly sprouted pine trees that couldn’t be more than several months old. I would take the needles and crush them into my hand and wipe the oil and sap all over my hands and wrists…the smell was indescribably incredible.
As far as a scent memory goes (I don’t have one containing pine notes because I’ve never smelled a true one), the best one I have from a fragrance is Original Vetiver from Creed. That scent brings me back to those very mountains but without the smell of pine. Rather it brings out the sun on a very hot day and moisture associated with an ancient, worn mountaintop whose foothills are lined with fields and thick, green woods. In my mind, the sun evaporates the moisturized scents and the heat combined turns them into a spicy musk (which is obviously a note of ginger after I studied it on my skin). I could write a novel of the memories it evokes but nevertheless, I’ve always wanted something of a pine scent to do that for me as well. I look forward to giving it a try when it is released.
Thank you, Nicholas, for such an amazing trek with you in those mountains! It’s funny, I grew up in New York in a small town that has the Appalachian trail moving through it. I can really see and feel what you are speaking of so vividly. Thank you for that…what lovely memories. I will also have to search out the original Creed Vetiver, which sounds heavenly. I hope that you will love Seve de Pin as I, well we at the studio, do. Good luck in the drawing and all my best, Dawn
ps: “we” at the studio are all from the east coast and we all agree that there is something humid about Seve de Pin that is so reminiscent of a pine forest on the east coast. I hope that you will feel that, too.
i’ve been searching for ages for a scent which captures the smell of a walk in the woods, with the pine needles and leaves underfoot, and something which smells almost like patchouli but isn’t in the air. i am going to have to try this, regardless, but please enter me in the draw. it sounds heavenly.
Hello, Linda~ 🙂 Thank you for your kind words! I hope that Seve de Pin is just exactly what you have been looking for! Good luck in the drawing~ fragrant hugs, Dawn
Up in MN in the city, we don’t get the Colorado woods smell–earthy, piney, and of course the smell of mountain sage that has been warmed by the sun. That is one of the biggest things I miss about Colorado– the smell of the foothills.
Giselle!!! 🙂 What a wonderful surprise to see you here and thank you so much for your comment! Oh, I will have to send some of Eric’s oils up to you in MN… and if you win, some Seve de Pin, too! Yes, the smell of the CO woods are so beautiful and unique. Well, they and we miss you, in Boulder! oxox, Dawn
Oh my gosh, you make me want to try this so much! I am a huge fan of your perfumes anyway, but I too love conifer smells. I think it is a “return to nature” thing. A few years ago I went with my family rafting in the Grand Canyon. The sites and the experience will always be a hightlight of my life. I did love our hike down the canyon and the trees we smelled along the way.
Hi, Cynthia~ Oh, how kind of you… I am very happy to know that you have liked some of my work. Thank you for saying so. 🙂 You know, I have never been to the Grand Canyon but it is on my list (not sure it’s a bucket list, but…) you make the scents of the trees sound too delicious. I hope that Seve de Pin will evoke some of that. Good luck in the draw and thank you for sharing the great Grand Canyon memory! fragrant hugs, Dawn
Dawn, with the way you write, I would be thrilled to win ANY of your creations! Pine definitely delights my senses and I’m sure my limbic system fully agrees. I hope I win but if I don’t, I will definitely order when you release this sure to be favorite!
Hi, Lena~ 🙂 Thank you! I think that you are right, the the limbic system really digs pine (well why not? it’s stimulating and invigorating / energizing. Don’t we ALL need that???) I hope that you will love the Seve de Pin when it’s released and good luck in the draw~ fragrant hugs to you, Dawn
Fave evergreen is “Tree of Life“ – and the healthy, 36 year old one below my bedroom/scent haven window was just destroyed by my mean as dirt, 84 year old father…so extra thanks for this post!! Soothes wounds…
Oh goodness, Linda, I am so sorry to hear about your tree!!! 😦 I get very squeamish every time I see / hear a tree getting cut down and chipped. Even if I have no “relationship” with it. I am very sad indeed for you and your tree. Well, I wish you good luck in the drawing and I hope that should you win that the Seve de Pin will bring you come comfort and joyfulness. ox, Dawn
I know that feeling – I lost some magical woods a few years ago to a housing development. But I remember one early October day before it was taken… Walking my dog Knute (now also gone), and marvelling at the last drifting motes in the evening sunshine. Felt like fairyland – the scent of sun-warmed blackberries, dry fir resin (Whidbey Island, Washington), a puff of dusty fir duff and earth, and the soulful critter warmth of the best dog ever!
Was recently actually looking for a resiny, dry pine or fir, but with warmth and a bit of sweetness… haven’t found it yet, but yours sounds close and WONDERFUL!
Hi, Allegra~ I LOVE your description of Whidbey Island and your magical day… I was there once with a friend from Seattle and so remember the blackberries (which were in bloom when I was there) and the scent of the woods. (Amazing!) Thank you so much for sharing 🙂 And good luck in the drawing (I hope that SdP is what you have been looking for).
My favorite memories of pine:
Lying upon the dusty, resinous fallen pine needles in the Walden forest, looking up at the canopy, cathedral-like, and making love.
Second: clambering up pine trees in North Salem and Pound Ridge Reservation, in my bare feet. The resin clung to them for at least a week, and I loved both the stickiness and the aroma.
Chaya, how did I miss this and NOT reply…. ???? WOW, I love those moments! 🙂 Amazing and amazingly lovely. Oh deliciousness. ❤
I have been away from home for almost two years now, and my dear Redwoods have to be what I miss most. At night I dream I’m walking among them, pressing my fingers into their wet spongy bark, and inhaling deep breaths of dank redwood mist! I have a sap collection I keep in old jam jars and film canisters, and the one I wish I’d brought with me is my redwood. To your credit, I often long for my little precious bottle of Minuit that I’ve been savoring for years, as well. 😉 Many thanks to your creative spirit. ❤
Oh, thank you so very much for the wonderful compliment for Minuit! And oh, I just love that you keep a sap collection. I have been scraping bits off of trees for a couple of years now around here and also pulling fresh, sticky and clear-ish sap off of my trees to examine the aromas. I’d love to sniff all of the jars in your collection.. oh yes! And I hope that you will be reunited with your Redwoods soon! Good luck in the drawing; I hope that Seve de Pin could potentially serve to fill in that space where the Redwoods have been. 🙂
this may remind me of my happy childhood vacations in the Carpathian woods-never smelled that specific wonder ever since- thank you
I would love to try this new woods scent!
I love the smell of conifers, especially our Christmas tree in December. My favorite memory though, is the mix of evergreens, both live and dried found throughout the Sierra Nevadas and especially in Yosemite National Park. Depending on the elevation you can smell junipers, sugar/ lodgepole/ jeffrey pines, cedar, and western hemlock. It’s one of the things I look forward to whenever I return for visits. I’m sure the smell is not unique but it is unique and special to me.
Oh, yes, and the Giant Sequoias!
Hi Dawn,
I wondered if you have a time frame for when SdP will be released? Say, within the next month perhaps or will it be longer than that? I want to place an order for Scent of Hope and was going to include Seve de Pin in that order, so I’ve been waiting.
By the way, I think (but am not positive) that we’ve met. I remember going into a store on Newbury St. sometime in the 80’s and having a young woman about my own age sniff my arm and tell me I had sweet skin. She then put together a small vial of essential oils for me, and I remember loving it. We also talked about Madonna — she had just come in the store, and I think you had sniffed her too (she also has sweet skin, IIRC.)
I guess that makes me not only a very happy, but also a very longtime customer. 🙂
Hi, LB~
I think that we will be releasing Seve de Pin in either September or at the beginning of October; most likely mid September, though. I hope that you love it when it comes out! 🙂
How cool that you came to the Boston store back in the day! I love that!! I hope that it was me 🙂 Most importantly, I’m glad that you loved what you got back then.
Big hugs to you~ ox
[…] in mind. She was only four years old at summer camp and felt the trees speaking to her at night. On her blog, Dawn wrote about being aware of the distinctive smell of the forest air and the mystery held […]