Sunny Side is a fragrance that packs a punch. If you enjoy strong ouds and/or middle-eastern scents, Sunny Side might be for you. We recommend starting with only one spray, it's that intense! This is not by mistake though but rather an intentional decision to bring the wearer to a certain place in time: the high desert forest in early summer.
A high desert can be defined as an arid to sem-arid landscape at high elevation. Here in the PNW, the high desert can be found east of the Cascade Range. In WA, we quite literally have the Wet Side to the West and the Sunny Side to the East. I've had a long appreciation for the high desert, so I knew going into creating the Evergreen Collection that I wanted to create that an offering captures the essence of this interesting place.
Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in Eastern WA
WA's high desert is arguably at it's most compelling in early summer. The heat is on - very much so compared to the wet side - but not dialed all the way up as it will be in the coming months and there are still lingering signs of spring. Wildflowers are still in bloom, streams are full, wildlife abounds. This transition time from the excesses of spring to the harsh and long summer days makes for an intense olfactory experience.
One of my favorite experiences is driving from my home in Puget Sound (aka the Wet Side) through the mountain passes, over to Eastern Washington during this time of year. Summer frequently comes slowly to Western WA, the spring rains can seem to drag on forever. In years when this happens, driving from one side of the mountains to the other can feel akin to traveling to an entirely different part of the country or even the world. But instead of a long plane ride, it's only a few hours drive. With that sudden change in climate, imagine how the smells change too. This is what I wanted to capture with Sunny Side: that first rush of desert air as you step out of your car and into the forest.
What I first notice is the dryness in the air. It's almost as if you can smell the dirt under your feet as you make your way from the paved parking onto the forest trail. We achieve this impression in Sunny Side by using just the tiniest bit of geosmin. While geosmin is known for having the scent of fresh, wet earth, it also gives the impression of the first rain after a dry period. We found that including just a minuscule amount with the much drier and headier ingredients in the formula, we could capture that intense earthy smell.
As we make our way further down the trail, we smell "The Sunscreen Smell", so called because prior to perfuming, this is a smell my partner and I would smell ALL THE TIME in the forest. We had no idea what it was. Fast forward many years and after learning much more about the forest as well as delving into perfumery - the culprit was named. The cottonwood tree. The cottonwood is easily overlooked in the winter time when it's leaves have fallen but come spring, their golden yellow leaves glimmer in the breeze and create a soothing whispering sound that is unmistakable. Their buds are the olfactory star here. In early summer, they have plumped up full of warm balsamic scented resin. The smell can be caught on the breeze but also, buds that have fallen to the forest floor release their scent as you traverse the trail. Capturing the essence of the cottonwood seeds was a small feat of its own. Sadly, I have yet to find a purveyor of cottonwood bud oil that actually captures the scent of the resin. We even tried making our own but that...did not go well. So a lot of experimentation went into getting that scent just right. We settled on incorporating the divine styrax resinoid offered by the wonderful Fraterworks which is just spicy enough without making this a spicy fragrance and has a pleasant sweetness to it and benzyl salicylate which gives us that undeniable "sunscreen smell" without sending this into, well, sunscreen territory, as well as some other notes.
Cottonwood buds
As we settle in to our journey, the light dry breeze sends sweeter smells our way, that of sweetgrass and Ponderosa Pine. Sweetgrasses are another fleeting and hard to identify forest smell. One second you are engulfed in their hay-like aroma, and the next second its gone and if you're like me, you go chasing that smell again and again. Luckily, we have a perfume ingredient that almost perfectly captures the sweet, delicate aroma of sweetgrass (with a few tweaks of course): tonka bean! Like many other plants found in the forest (or even your own backyard), sweetgrass is rich in coumarin, as is tonka bean. I could go on and on about the wonders of coumarin. It not only smells incredible but it also has many, many uses! Coumarin is one of the few scents I find in the forest throughout the year, not just spring and summer and is one of my absolute favorite smells to come across in nature.
The Ponderosa Pine trees emanate a sweet vanilla-like aroma from their bark. It's another stop smelling and you'll miss it fleeting scent in the forest at this time of year. Capturing this scent was another long experiment and had many iterations. The seemingly obvious solution would be to incorporate vanilla but none of the ones we tried worked with the intensely dry and woody character we wanted for Sunny Side. Most led us into a more sweet direction which we did not want. Instead, we leaned on the tonka bean, which already has a vanilla character and introduced other ingredients including Santaliff for a creamy twist, a woody amber accord to soften things up and increase the woody facets, and a touch of lavandin absolute which blends impeccably with the tonka bean.
Ponderosa Pines
Of course, this wouldn't be perfuming if we didn't have way more going on this Sunny Side than the aforementioned notes but I hope this gives a sense of the very specific olfactory experience that inspired this scent. If you are a lover of the forest, especially a dry forest in the summertime, we invite you to give Sunny Side a try!
If you've made it this far, thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed this scent journey! More to come as we discuss the rest of the fragrances in the Evergreen collection!
-Ciel
