Note deep dive
Tobacco in the oil houses: dry leaf, sweet pipe, boozy cabin
Three indie oil houses label the same material four different ways, and the qualifier on the note list tells more than the family tag does.
Undernotes4 min read
Undernotes
The Journal
22 piecesMon / Wed / FriRSS
Reading about independent perfume: what the season smells like, who is making what, and how one material behaves in a hundred different hands.
Note deep dives. A single material, followed everywhere it goes.
Note deep dive
What oakmoss is doing in 265 indie fragrances
Sorted by house type, the lichen behaves differently in natural extraits, oil-house chypres and attars, and several makers build the same damp forest…
4 min read
Note deep dive
What 'ambergris' means on an attar's ingredient list
Whale-derived material runs past $100,000 a kilogram and cannot legally be traded in the US; the synthetic that replaced it costs a few hundred.
4 min read
About the journal
Three mornings a week the journal publishes one piece about independent perfume, drawn from the same catalogue as the rest of the site: 22 articles so far, every one of them linking back to the houses and the notes it talks about. It is published by Undernotes; nothing in it is sponsored, and no link is an affiliate link.