Hall Newbegin of Juniper Ridge talks to Racked about his brand and their 'wilderness perfume' approach.
Juniper Ridge Winter Redwood 2014 ~ new fragrance
California indie brand Juniper Ridge has launched Winter Redwood 2014, a new unisex limited edition fragrance. It’s the brand’s third annual edition of Winter Redwood…
5 perfumes for: a Desert Sun-seeker
Like many kids — including, currently, my daughter — in elementary school, I dreamed of becoming a marine biologist. We lived in Steeltown, Central Canada, but my parents humored me by giving me books on whales and sharks. Then, when I was ten, we moved to the Pacific Northwest, to live within walking distance of the ocean, and my mother realized humoring me now was going to involve keeping tanks full of weird, wet, smelly sea things in our laundry room. She was a good sport about it. Eventually, I went away to do half my double major in biology as an undergraduate and in the meantime, my parents had moved to the other coast. I spent two university summers living with them, working for an Atlantic fish conservation agency, and those months spent in hip-waders, prying errant eels out of fish ladders and tagging traps, cured me of the childhood career dream. But my love affair with the ocean has not wavered.
For a while after I left home, then, I was suspicious of any vacation destination or employment opportunity that lacked access to saltwater. Once I was married, though, my husband coaxed me into moving to Alberta. After I got over the nosebleeds, I found I enjoyed the famed high blue skies of the west, and day-trips to the badlands to the north and in Montana suddenly appealed. Again, I started reading, desert stories like The English Patient and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, books about Mexico, Wilfred Thesiger, the Battle of the Little Bighorn and, oddly, Los Alamos. The reading led inevitably to vacation plans and traveling, trips to New Mexico, North Africa and to the arid edge of the South American altiplano…
Juniper Ridge Caruthers Canyon and Siskiyou Backpacker’s Colognes ~ fragrance reviews
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…
Holiday fragrance gifts 2012, part 3
Our series of holiday gift posts continues with home fragrance of all kinds, from candles to sachets. If you missed them, check out part 1 (scented body products) and part 2 (travel sizes & coffrets).
Maybe some year, Diptyque’s holiday candles will look so dull that we’ll leave them out, but that year has not yet arrived. This year’s set includes Amber Oud (red; “…inspired by the Arabian Nights resembles a precious stone where rare spices infused with warming resins and balsams plunges the user into an Oriental dream world”), Oliban (purple; “A mysterious creation showcasing the precious resin frankincense. This fragrance will transport the user straight to the heart of the Arabian Nights.”) and Sapin Doré (green; “…pays homage to the most celebrated fir tree in the world, it transports the user straight to the heart of a forest of golden spruce trees.”). In mini candle (70g for $32) or full-sized (190g for $68), available at Nordstrom…