1 April 04
Earthworm Perfume
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on smell and place.
There is such a thing—honest. Amy Stewart, author of an excellent new book on earthworms and their achievements, writes in her book tour blog about discovering this fragrance:
Finally I pulled off the cap and sprayed it into the air. It hit me, instantly familiar. Worms. No doubt about it. It was the smell of dirt and rotten leaves and compost piles, and also the faint scent of skin, worm skin. I dont know how else to describe it. It was just vaguely—invertebrate.
The creator of this scent is Christopher Brosius, co-founder of a company called Demeter Fragrances, whose line of fragrances include many evocative of place. One, called Holy Water, comes from the smell of an old Norman church in England. Others in their list include bamboo, funeral home, New Zealand (by special request for the premiere of The Two Towers), and the most popular one of all, dirt.
As for Earthworm, Brosius says that the scent is “surprisingly popular…It sells at smaller upscale shops with a very sophisticated clientele.”
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petrichor (PET-ri-kuhr) noun
The pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell.
[From petro- (rock), from Greek petros (stone) + ichor (the fluid that is
supposed to flow in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology). Coined by
researchers I.J. Bear and R.G. Thomas.]
“Petrichor, the name for the smell of rain on dry ground, is from oils
given off by vegetation, absorbed onto neighboring surfaces, and
released into the air after a first rain.”
Matthew Bettelheim; Nature’s Laboratory; Shasta Parent (Mt Shasta,
California); Jan 2002.
“But, even in the other pieces, her prose breaks into passages of lyrical
beauty that come as a sorely needed revifying petrichor amid the pitiless
glare of callousness and cruelty.”
Pradip Bhattacharya; Forest Interludes; Indianest.com; Jul 29, 2001.