Primal Forest Organic Perfume Girl

Primal Forest - primeval forest. One almost inevitably thinks of tropical jungle, heavy, sultry heat, damp earth. Oud. Maybe patchouli. Quite different is “Primal Forest” by Organic Perfume Girl. You have to take a second sniff, initially surprised by such a bright, resinous, needle-like cool scent wafting towards you. You wouldn’t necessarily expect that, but then you think it over and have to admit that you’ve fallen for a cliché. Why is that? Because there haven’t been any real primeval forests around here for a long time. But of course, they don’t only exist in the tropics; they can also be found in temperate regions. From California’s Huntington Beach, the home of Organic Perfume Girl, that’s actually much more plausible. You just have to follow the coastline north to the bordering states of Oregon or Washington, where you can find such forests. Temperate rainforests with Douglas firs, coastal spruces, and the famous sequoias. And even further north, the boreal forests.

It’s lovely how expectations and stereotypes are played with here, without ultimately disappointing those expectations. Because you definitely have a primeval forest here. Just a cool northern one. After the ethereal, herb-needle resinous pine and fresh-woody oak notes of the opening, it becomes a bit darker, more balsamic, spicier. Moss, indeed also oud, allows you to slowly sink from the treetops to the forest floor, down to a lightly ambered base, where the musky nuances of ambrette seeds hint at the fauna of this forest more than they actually let you perceive it. The herb-cool overall impression remains dominant. This is probably why “Primal Forest” is marketed as a men’s fragrance. However, this is somewhat puzzling, as the majority of comparable artisan scents in this segment are rightly declared unisex today. What lies behind this may be that “Primal Forest,” although undoubtedly a conceptual fragrance, is also a quite wearable perfume - or better: a “botanical cologne” as the self-chosen genre declaration expresses. And here, gender assignments may still play a larger role. Be that as it may, from my perspective, there is absolutely nothing against “Primal Forest” appealing to women as well, and not just to a man.

The term “botanical cologne” points to two things: on one hand, the unfortunately rather limited longevity of the fragrance, which is a pity, because one could really get used to it. On the other hand, it refers to the organic origin of the raw materials. Dawn Stewart, the founder and perfumer of Organic Perfume Girl, writes that each of her fragrances is based on a self-made tincture of herbs, flowers, or wild plants, which is blended with additional essential oils, extracts, and resins.

Stewart further writes that one of her most important inspirations, besides nature itself, is music. Of course, it is presumptuous to speculate about what melodies might have crossed her mind in connection with “Primal Forest.” Nevertheless, this background information is welcome, as it inspires one to think of music to accompany the scent. Because the images of North American forests quickly remind me of Jim Jarmusch’s “Dead Man,” where the birches watch you with black eyes and the trunks of the giant trees partly fill the entire widescreen, Neil Young’s guitar comes to mind. But that is of course very idiosyncratic, and this is not meant to be a diary…