Spicy sample set with 10 Wild Veil natural perfumes and colognes: Pepper Musk, Caterpillar, Bastet, Chai Musk, Samhain, Pisces Rising, Gold Dust, Skin: Masculine, Snow White, and the Wild Veil spicy fixative.
Pepper Musk - pepper aphrodisiac. In the rainforest canopy, lanterns burn. Amber candles exude incense and botanical musk. My new formulation of Pepper Musk is an organic cologne showcasing some of my handmade pepper absolutes, including long pepper, and green and black peppercorn. With homemade absolutes from my tinctures of bushman candle wax from the Himba in northern Namibia, Socotra frankincense, and La Mancha saffron. A growl of leather. Spicy and sleek.
Caterpillar - vanilla-tonka pipe dream smoke. Pink pepper and olive fruits, a floating spice archipelago. Bright, juicy and spicy pink pepper dances with cardamom. Earthy coumarin caramel spattered with ylang ylang flowers' yellow drug. Suave olive smooths over Madagascar vanilla. A sleepy, sensuous dry down.
Bastet - Egyptian temple perfume inspired by Bast, goddess of cats and perfume. Mysterious, ancient palm fronds fan the goddess. From an alabaster urn she scoops out a hunk of black, sticky incense spun with crushed spices, honey wine, currants, figs, mossy tendrils, mint, sweet fir, and balsams imported from the Horn of Africa. Precious woods-- oud and boozy poplar-- coated in a sweet varnish, spearmint, and cinnamon dusted bread rise off of the sticky black cube as it begins to smoke. If kohl were candlewax, it would produce this warm, buttery, black glow. Inky, creamy, iconic. Saffron makes pungent stabs but melts into adipose petals of rosy honeycomb. Pine needle boughs brush the air. A soft rush, heart of fir set in dark paste. Cloves run wild. Pastilles of perfumed wax melt on your temples, dripping onto bare shoulders and feet pounding the temple stone to dust. Temple to temple, dust to dust. Bastet lingers in rich and spicy relief on a trail of cooling, licked skin like a scented fingerprint from a long-lost ritual.
Chai Musk - a milky amber sunrise at a spice market dotted with chai wallahs. Dawn mist twists with steam from decoctions of bed tea. There's curled Assam mamri along with gunpowder tea. Water buffalo milk. Jaggery brown sugar from the date palm. Molasses mother liquor dissolves in wild mother milk. Tiger fur and elephant breath. The warming spices of a cup of masala chai bed tea joined by an amber streak of musk make Chai Musk an intimate, creamy fragrance that is sexy and comforting.
Samhain (solid) - autumnal ritual in the witches' forest. Foliage turned to ash. Pass the hag pipe. My own burley and Virginia tobacco absolutes from cured leaf. Packed into lacquered wood. Joints rolled from honey paper, sealed with foraged fir goop and honeybee musk. Smoky amber resins, incense enfleurage, cloven spices and botanical musk. Moonshine tea: rum, lapsang souchong, oak barrels.
Pisces Rising (solid) - a savory-sweet, decadent, spicy amber perfume with my handmade lapsang souchong absolute, helichrysum, incense, and anise.
Gold Dust - a gold rush of opulent saffron infuses this spicy, fruity amber. Piquant and slightly bitter on its own, here saffron's red gold enhances the leathery facets of Tahitian vanilla, labdanum resin, and Haitian vetiver, while exalting balsam's sparkle. Liquid gold at once sweet and peppery, earthy and delicate. Gold Dust does a dreamy dance across a spiced citrus valley before settling onto the skin as a radiant amber.
Skin: Masculine - masculine skin notes radiating from an intense golden elixir. This cologne will smell different on everyone, amplifying your own unique skin scent. With very little to no top note, Skin is intended to bloom with subtlety like the gradual heat rising off of skin. This one starts out with a hefty dose of leather, dry rubbed with cumin and Szechuan pepper. After a moment, buttery leather curtains like silk part over my spicy, musky, handmade bushman candle absolute. Below the incense, something phenolic pools, almost like gasoline under a desert sky. More like gasoline stained cowboy boots. Not the skin of the leather, but the skin beneath the leather, burnished and intimate. Visible warm waves ripple on the edge of perspiration, fanning the skin to keep beads of sweat at bay. There is just the living, slightly damp aroma of outdoor skin cooling itself, vascular, veins pulsing over muscles. A rough, unshaven neck, clean but flecked with dust from a desert farm.
Snow White - ebony iris butter, white tuberose, and blood rose. As juicy as a ripe red apple and dark as a deer's heart. Snow white coconut flesh. Sweet as bitter almond poison in your cherry pie. Spices, wine, flowers and forest reflected by a magic mirror. Perfume lore in the distance like hounds bay-ing, picking up her scent.
Spicy fixative (solid) - spicy base notes from my handmade spice tinctures and absolutes: tulsi, ginger root, clove buds, true cinnamon, star anise, aniseed, cardamom whole and hulled. Green herbs laced with anise, earth, and brown amber.
Each liquid perfume comes in a 1ml clear glass perfume vial with an applicator cap. The solid fragrances come in hinge top pods. These are samples of approximately 20-25 drops, enough for 4-6 wears, per perfume. All ten fragrances will have handwritten labels, and they arrive nested inside a gift box filled with flowers, mosses, and plants that I have pressed and dried.
Photos: my handmade, organic black clove bud and cinnamon bark absolutes from long term tinctures.
r a w ☽•☾ m a t t e r
Wild Veil natural perfumes are composed by me, Abby, using homemade, wildcrafted and organic aromatics in Vermont. These include my handmade enfleurage, tinctures, enfleurage extraits, absolutes, resinoids and concretes, and floral waxes. I spend as much time growing plants and foraging as I do composing perfumes.
l i q u i d ☽•☾
Wild Veil oil perfumes are suspended in an odorless base of organic MCT coconut oil. As they do not contain water, liquid perfumes do not expire, and may improve with age. While the volatile top notes (the ones that hit your nose first) will fade after a year or more, the base and heart notes will deepen and grow more complex.
s o l i d ☽•☾ b e e s w a x
In solid perfumes this silky transparent base (above) mingles beautifully with the earthy, honey musk of organic beeswax. Raw beeswax traps the aroma molecules, releasing them over time for an intimate experience.
h o w ☽•☾ t o ☽•☾ w e a r
The best way to experience a natural perfume is to apply it to well-moisturized skin, without rubbing in (absorption only shortens the wear time of fragrance) and without scrubbing off. Natural perfumes are dynamic and take a minimum of 2 hours to reach their final stage, or dry down. Enjoy the alchemical changes as they unfold from the initial intensity of top notes, to the warmth of the heart, to the depth of lower base notes.
☽•☾ Wild Veil ☽•☾ alchemy between earth and ether ☽•☾
☽•☾ All aesthetic material copyright Abby Hinsman 2019 ☽•☾