03/29/2026
Scent is a funny thing.
Your sense of smell is really strongly tied to memory, and it's also largely subjective. Meaning what smells good to you may not smell good to another person. As someone who deals in selling scented products online, I've got a very large vocabulary for describing fragrance and I like to think I do a good job of communicating how things smell to someone about to buy it, sight-un...smelled? But that is much easier with something like lavender compared to more atmospheric scents.
One of the fragrances I'm working on for the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire is King Arthur, and it definitely falls into the "atmospheric" category. It has notes of fresh air, tree moss, cedar wood, amber, and musk. I would describe it to someone as King Arthur, fresh from felling trees for the Round Table, kneeling on the mossy banks of a clear forest stream, the cedar chips still clinging to his wool cloak. But to me, it smells like my grandparents' garage, specifically in Grandpa's woodshop, when the heat of a summer day warms the sawdust and the dried grass clinging to the lawn mower parked just outside.
The first description, I hope, would convince someone else to buy a bar. But the second description is the reason that sometimes I keep a bar to myself. Because when I read the scent descriptions on the fragrance oil I couldn't have guessed that I'd be so viscerally transported to a specific time and place. And you never know when a scent that just smells nice to you might mean the world to someone else.
