About the author: Trish Vawter is the creator of Scent Hive, a blog dedicated to natural perfumes and beauty products. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and two boys, and is a practicing nurse midwife.
I come to this guest post with sincere excitement and admittedly, a dose of trepidation. Since I write primarily about natural perfumes and beauty products at Scent Hive, I am acutely aware that discussions can get heated around the “natural” topic. While I do prefer natural perfumes, I don’t want this post to become a natural vs synthetic debate, mostly because I don’t believe one to be superior to the other. But I do have reasons for my preference which I will share with you.
Beauty is ephemeral, and I appreciate that in a fragrance. It’s not quite the first thing most people regard as a virtue in perfume, but there’s delight in reapplying perfume over the course of a day. Oftentimes it’ll be a different perfume depending on my mood or where I am going. But there’s a balance to be struck: a perfume that’s too fleeting is frustrating, so I want my perfume to last a few hours, if not longer, which most high quality natural perfumes do. Yet, I don’t like a perfume to last into the next day, or to have huge sillage. Less tenacity and more intimacy are the qualities I seek. Additionally, longevity and sillage are commonly enhanced in synthetic perfumes with phthalates, a petrochemical I try to avoid in all beauty products.
While I find the evanescence of naturals compelling…
In my early 20s, I lived for a time in Copenhagen, Denmark, a land of my ancestors and a country known for fabulously long summer days filled with blue skies, beaches, beer-drinking down by the harbor and lingering candlelit dinners with friends outside, sitting cozily tucked into wool blankets against the midnight chill. But those of us who have endured the winter know there is a time when the sun first tentatively appears mid-morning and by mid-afternoon has already set, when the sky is one long sheet of gray from November until March, and the minimalism of the Danish modern look feels like part of a conspiracy to deprive one of any warmth or luxury.