Softly Snowly

The snowdrop comes up while the snow is still crunching.

Winter meets spring and neither concedes. A small snowflower blossoming is as likely as boots going through crisp, fresh, white snowfall. Hope after a long winter has cold still in it. The snowdrop is a harbinger of warmer temperatures ahead, and it arrives with chilly ozonic air and a twinkling of citrus. Cedarwood and soft florals sit behind that, and verdant oakmoss and pillowy musk hold the ground. The sun lingers a little longer each day, and the air is still cold enough for a cocoon of blankets.

Scent Trunk commissions its fragrances one at a time from independent noses working across the world, and prints their names on the page beside the work. It looks for cultural heterogeneity and industry experience, and works with the self-taught as readily as the academically trained, the bootstrapping entrepreneur as readily as the corporate nose. Each year it also picks unconventional noses, chefs or writers or musicians with an exceptional creative streak.

Most releases name one material as their focus and one place as their provenance, and each carries a signed passage in which the person who made it says what they were after. Winternights is hay cured on Swedish poles. Tears and Smiles is pineapple cake and oolong in Taiwan. Stroopwafel is a canal house in Amsterdam with tulips on the table. The material and the place come first, and the writing follows them.