Juniper Ridge’s Big Sur backpacker’s cologne
While ago, while looking for a new perfume, I stumbled upon a small company called Juniper Ridge. They are—as they call it—world’s only wilderness fragrance company. What this means is that they distill all their colognes and perfumes from real plants, bark, moss, mushrooms, and tree trimmings they collect while hiking the California backcountry.
As I started to look more into what they were doing, I found that they harvest and craft all their fragrances in small batches using steam-distillation, enfleurage, tincture, and infusion. These are the same methods that were used to make all perfumes hundred years ago.
As all their fragrances are made from real plants, each batch varies from year to year and harvest to harvest. That’s why every Juniper Ridge product has a harvest number stamped on the front of the bottle and you can go to their website and look up the harvest number to see photos of the plants used for your fragrance, and to see the crew who collected them.
All Juniper Ridge’s fragrances are named after famous backpacking, hiking and outdoor destinations of the US West Coast. Places like Yuba River, Siskiyou, Caruthers canyon and Big Sur.
While I really liked the Siskiyou fragrance, I eventually decided to go with Big Sur. Not only because I really liked Big Sur when I visited there some years back, but it had more of an “Finnish forest” feeling to it. Although Big Sur is as far away from Finland as you could possibly get, the earthy and foresty fragrance still works perfectly here.
What I like
Unlike most synthetic perfumes, Juniper Ridge’s wilderness fragrances only contain real plants. This makes them rather costly compared to synthetic brands. But if you value real craftsmanship and artisan perfumes, these can be for you. I really like the fact that I will hardly never walk somewhere and notice I share the same fragrance with an other person.
What I don’t like
There is very little to not like but the price-point might be too high for some people.