The Full Story
About
Since I was a child I loved wandering around the woods and fields behind our house in North Seattle. I spent hours exploring, examining, touching and smelling everything: ferns, grasses, shrubs, leaves, flowers, herbs, mushrooms, bark, seed pods and cones. There was my favorite secret spot in a clearing full of moss and pine needles where I would hang out with books from the county bookmobile and wild berries I had learned to properly identify. I started “wildcrafting” long before the term existed; my early experiments with “perfumery” consisted of leaf and twig soups, flower and fern pies and enthusiastic but ultimately disappointing attempts to extract scent from overripe plums and crabapples. I made primitive “green cures” for my mud soaked dolls long before I knew that herbal medicine even existed. Whether my Welsh “wise women” ancestry had anything to do with my plant precociousness, only the nature spirits know!
From that early fascination and experimentation arose a lifelong study of botany, plant chemistry, herbal medicine, essential oils and aromatherapy. Creating natural perfumes requires an esoteric mix of science and art: knowledge of the various properties of the ingredients, which ones mix well together, understanding “top, middle and base notes”, and the “nose” required to put it all together. It is time and labor intensive, often taking weeks or months to macerate raw materials and to “cure” a combination of scents. Many ingredients are very expensive; in the case of jasmine or rose, it takes over 10,000 handpicked flowers to obtain one pound of essential oil. Artisan perfumery is truly a labor of love and it is my pleasure to be able to share my knowledge and special blends with you.
~ Gwendolyn Evans, Certified Clinical Aromatherapist
Perfume, Just For The Smell of It
For over 6000 years perfume has helped humankind to pray, heal, make love, hunt, even kill and bury the dead. Perfume has always been central to magic, medicine, religious and spiritual rituals. Our ancestors made offerings of smoldering aromatic woods and resins to their gods and fed their courtesans musk so that they sweated pure perfume. Fragrance no longer plays such a central role in our culture, except to mask our own natural scent. Many commercial perfumes that once relied on a predominance of natural ingredients now are laboratory created synthetic scents; their high cost is based on packaging and advertising. Fortunately, there has been a renewed interest in artisan perfumery and aromatherapy; utilizing ingredients from nature to reconnect with ourselves and our world. If breath is the soul of humans, perfume is the breath and soul of plants. Plant based perfumes combine with an individual’s unique body chemistry and heat, creating a subtle signature scent “that smells like you only better” (the way my clients often describe the perfumes). Try some and you’ll see!
Bio
Gwen Evans grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and has resided in Port Townsend, WA for the last 20 years. An avid wild crafter, woods walker and world traveler, she is grateful to her wise women ancestors who showed her the healing path; she hopes to continue to walk it a good while longer.
