46°N 08°E Richard Lüscher Britos 2013

Home - a big word and everyone associates something different with it. It can be the smell of your mother, a special dish from your grandmother, a particular circumstance, a room, a landscape, a place or an apartment. All of this also has a smell.

In this case, we are dealing with a fragrance dedicated to a tree species in the Swiss Alps. Many people also associate it with a sense of home. Especially in the post-war period, the Alps were a popular excursion and vacation destination for Germans. An ideal world that was then also found in households. Who doesn't know them ! The landscapes with mountains and lakes, with deer and farm workers.
The felt hats with feathers and the grandparents' loden coats. Shelves and living room cupboards were filled with wooden figures.
There were also plenty of movies in the idyllic mountain world.
That's all gone today and most of it ended up in the bin or was sold off at flea markets.
What a shame, really! Because who still remembers? Frank Leder from Berlin has done an excellent job of translating this theme into clothing. His collections can be seen in great pictures on his website. He even has "red press sack" soap in apothecary bottles.

Another clue comes from the history of mankind. Not so long ago, we lived in forests, close to nature and at one with our surroundings - timeless Trees were an important part of our lives. We built houses with them, the wood made the living room warm and food was cooked on the stove.
In this sense, the smell of wood has something archetypal about it (if you're interested in the subject, I recommend one of my favorite authors - Wolf Dieter Storl), but that's just by the way.

The topic of the past grabbed me again when I visited an exhibition by the artist Midori Mitamura many years ago.
She had the idea of an installation "Green of the Mountain" on the occasion of finding old black and white pictures. It was essentially about the question of what remains of us when we leave this life. Does something happen in the present when someone looks at our pictures? The installation was accompanied by music which I will attach here at the end.
A certain melancholy crept over me at the time, which may have been due to the peculiar Ave Maria.

But now I've digressed a long way and come to the scent of the Swiss mountains.
It starts very citrusy, although not listed here... light resins and definitely bezoin give a sweet light woody scent. It definitely doesn't smell to me like what I imagine "forest" to be about. Anyone who visits the forest will agree with me - it rarely smells like freshly sawn wood there. Rather, it smells of dry leaves, moss and earth.

The scent reminds me in some ways of ARC, which I find funny as I have only tested this one.
You could say it's a "light" version, as the sillage is very restrained.

All in all, Arve is a beautiful if light fougere.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xDNJMlObD5A&pp=ygUdR3JlZW4gb2YgdGhlIE1vdW50YWluIG1pZG9yaSA%3D