How do you capture a feeling in scent? It's one thing to create a perfume inspired by a place or a thing that has scents all its own but to represent a feeling in fragrance requires a whole other level of deep thought and experimentation. So much so that you might find yourself asking "What is a feeling anyway??" Or is that just me? :)
And so, we embarked on the scent journey that would eventually lead us to Fragaria. We set out to define some quintessential "PNW emotions." Things like the never-gets-old awe when the mountain is out, the mixed emotion at the arrival of the first rain after a particularly hot summer; the respite from the heat is nice, but it also portends the end of summer.
We here at Sound Fragrances are huge fans of berry season (and foraging in general). Even our pups have learned to eat berries from the bush (they seem to be much better at avoiding the thorns!). On our summer hikes, you will most definitely find us out on the trail collecting berries when they are finally ripe.
The waiting is the hardest part during berry season! We walk past unripe berries for what seems like ages until they finally begin to ripen and even then there is more waiting until they will actually be sweet enough to enjoy. And so we settled on trying the essence of the happiness and excitement that comes with finally getting a big berry haul.
It quickly became clear that we needed something on which to build and that we couldn't try to capture this feeling out of the air. What better to build off of than the berry? But which berry? There are no shortage of berry varieties her in WA, with the invasive Himalayan blackberry perhaps being the most ubiquitous. But invasive plants do not spark joy! But that doesn't stop us from eating them. What berries do we get particularly excited about finding out in the wild? For us, that would be the wild strawberry, or fragaria vesca. And so the name was born!
Fragaria Vesca (Wild Strawberry)
Strawberry itself evokes a sense of joy with it's fresh, juicy, and sweet scent. Vanilla was a logical next choice, because it makes me happy. But is that just because I'm a recovering sugar addict?? Actually, as we found, there is much study on the topic of vanilla's effects on mood. Yay science and not just my crippling love of cake!
And so we continued down the science-y path, asking ourselves things like "what are we really feeling when we feel joy or happiness? What's happening in the body?" A boost of energy, surely? We knew we needed to add some ingredients known for perking people up. We settled on citrus and eventually a blend of bergamot and grapefruit worked beautifully with the strawberry and vanilla.
We were missing something with the berry though. Strawberry on it's own proved to get lost in the mix, so we decided to boost the fruit notes with both raspberry ketone and peach aldehyde. The raspberry ketone gave our strawberry more depth and staying power and the peach aldehyde bridges nicely with our creamy vanilla bottom note.
Fruit, citrus, and vanilla. Sounds nice, right? But a bit boring! Now is the fun part where we really flesh into something we can call a finished fragrance. For pretty much every fragrance we make, we try to incorporate a green/herbal/spice note, a musk, and a bit of something woody as a fixative. For Fragaria, we settled on a sweet pea accord for our green note, a floral fruity musk, and sandalwood for our woody fixative. Additionally, jasmine sambac was an easy choice for adding a floral depth, as it blends easily with pretty much every ingredient mentioned thus far.
As most often happens in perfumery, we were left with a good fragrance, but there's always something missing! After many trials and errors, pink peppercorn brought this whole crazy idea together. Just a touch of pink peppercorn as a top note adds a sparkly touch that really makes this a joyous fragrance, rather than your run of the mill sweet vanilla scent. It just has "It"!
What we are left with after this long scent journey is an unequivocal sweet, happy, and fun fragrance. Some experiences should just be pure joy, without needing to overthink it, just like being stupidly happy to eat a berry pie from berries you picked out in the woods. It is just fun! That's all it has to be! And we love it!
