In a Men’s Journal article this year, Juniper Ridge founder/perfumer Hall Newbegin said:
The fragrance industry is dictated by the narrow grammar set up by the French 200 years ago — floral equals feminine, musk equals masculine…. This idea that only 10 noses in Paris understand fragrance, it’s just smoke and mirrors.1
Newbegin thinks many of today’s colognes smell like crap2: “…thin, fake, grody, and turned up to 11.”
The contemporary perfume world is a big and varied place; and the women=flowers, men=musk idea is outdated; now, mainstream perfumes follow a formula that’s more women=candy and men=tonka beans and ozone. Today, musk is white (and decidedly unisex) — clean and redolent of the laundry room in full swing: dryer sheets swirling, detergent bubbling.
Juniper Ridge makes its perfumes “in the field”: collecting raw materials from a particular wild place using “machetes and chain saws and pickup trucks”3 and a whiskey still that’s been altered to process all manner of herbs, leaves, wildflowers, and bits of trees…
