Olympic Rainforest
Olympic Orchids (2010)

The scent opens with a camphorous note that is reminiscent of oregano essential oil. This note lasts for about 15 minutes before giving way to a smoother blend of myrrh and cedar. The fragrance does not evoke the scent of soil or rotting vegetation on the forest floor, but instead captures the essence of the forest air flowing around balsam trees. The sweetness in the fragrance likely comes from the myrrh and beeswax, and it balances out the astringent medicinal notes in the opening. While the sweetness can be a bit overwhelming at times, it is gentle and natural rather than sugary.

This is different from Chypre Mousse or Coven. Those ones have more dirtiness and dampness. This one has more sweetness and isn't as earthy. However, this one smells more like a forest than Chypre Mousse, so I give it credit for that. But I still prefer Chypre Mousse's overall smell. I think this smell was aiming to capture the cool crisp forest air instead of the earthy undergrowth. There are far better fragrances that capture those elements. The sweetness and fresh balsam make this feel more uplifting. It's the opposite of walking through a dark cold forest. To me at least.

The performance isn't as good as I hoped it would be. It's still decent but I wasn't getting as strong of a performance as Woodcut or Salamanca. It's still better than 70% of all the other green foresty scents so I'm not complaining. I was hoping to love this fragrance but it's alright. My expectations were too high. I'll just stick to my patchouli-dominant scents if I want something forest-y.

A light and transparent forest scent that's thinned and obscured by a misty drizzle. But honestly, I find this one a bit peculiar.

The evergreens, dirt, and wildflowers are a nice combination, and I like that this doesn't go into deep dark pine territory as it easily could; though I love that genre, this take sets Olympic Rainforest apart. There's a soft earthiness from the soil, balanced by wet greenery, but then it all rests on a sweet but almost minty base that reminds me a bit of the original flavor of Trident gum. Maybe that's just the way the camphoraceous balsams expresses themselves against the softer backdrop, but I also get the sense that it's an odd whiff of some underlying synthetics that are just a bit too dialed up for me, trying to overemphasize the smell of rain.

I'm glad some others seem to find this a true-to-place take on the Pacific Northwest. I don't dislike it, but it's also not quite clicking for me.

Much as I have relied on Scent Detective's reviews to guide me in building my conifer-based armoire, this one is dead to me. Very strong sense-memories of that orange sawdust stuff they used to sprinkle on my classmates' vomit in primary school in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Gets a little citric-cedar-y after the first hour, like how a Flintstone's Chewable Vitamin used to taste in the 80's. If you ground up and snorted one.

An excellent green fragrance that is natural smelling in the way essential oil perfumes are. I'm surprised to see sword ferns listed as a note, as I've come to understand that ferns don't have a scent, which led to the whole fougere fragrance genre's creation. Anyway, this does have coniferous notes, which I absolutely love, but it also has the undergrowth vibe, complete with just a hint of mustiness, which must come from the mushroom. There is also a slightly sweet note which I assume comes from beebalm and the florals. Performance is of a shorter duration than I typically like, but I would love to have a bottle of this one.

This is a beauty. Dry, resinous, coniferous. Excellent. The spruce and fir are immediately apparent. The coniferous notes are so bright they are like eucalyptus. The mushroom and earthy undergrowth notes are a nice background, as are green notes of leaf and moss. There is a gorgeous woody dry-down. A complete winner in my opinion.

This is pure memory for me. I am walking in the woods near my home growing up, in Durham, NC. The minty note reminds me of picking mint leaves with friends to add to the tea we made by soaking tea bags in cold water in large glass jugs, the bags of tea suspended by the strings wrapped around a twig laid over the opening - thinking back, we perhaps might have considered cheesecloth to keep out flying pests, but we were 7 or 8 years old and we played in creeks and thought we were invincible.

The mint is joined with the smell of forest undergrowth, which in NC is dominated by yellow and white pine, and a multitude of other conifers and hardwoods. Virginia cedarwood ran everywhere and ferns were in bunches, as were daffodils and other colorful flowers that can survive the sparse sunlight available in a forest. Pine needles scented trails, and sap dripped on everything from both pine and gumball trees. Then, there was the fungi - and the moss! It was everywhere and so many varieties! Thankfully, we had been taught well enough that most was poisonous, or I am certain I'd have died from having attempted to eat some of it!

But, I digress - I am reviewing a scent, after all. This is not something you wear for compliments, or for others. In fact, you may not wear it at all - for me, this is a feeling - a story - a memory. It's certainly nice, and evocative of place and time. This is a good thing. It's more than a perfume - it's a scent.