Cowboy Grass

"Cowboy Grass is the first fragrance I ever made. It is wild. It smells wild because of the wild flowering herbs, thyme, basil, lavender. It has lots of sagebrush and the switchgrass that you find all over the plains in the Western US. It's an herbal vetiver. Almost smoky, crackling dry wood. Like a true trail dust cowboy fragrance."

This is the fragrance that put us on the map in ‘08. A strange combination that used to be made with a homemade tincture of herbs, citrus peels, and flowers. As I was learning how to make perfume, I experimented with many older methods. This helped me to understand the aromatic relationships between plants themselves. There is no better way to learn a skill than to just start doing it. That is the ethos of Cowboy Grass. Though it is strange, it was immediately a hit.

Cowboy Grass is a play of contrasts. The freshness of bergamot with the dustiness of thyme. The medicinal notes of clary sage and basil against the softness of rose otto. And ultimately the dry peanut wood crackle of vetiver against the warm amber of benzoin.

Cowboy Grass evokes the American West.

The landscape is filled with grasses, herbs, and shrubs that were used as medicine, food, and ritual for thousands of years. It is impossible to describe just how big the Wild West is.

When I first drove across the country on tour with a band in college, I remember one plant kept getting all over the front of our van. It was blowing everywhere that year. I found out later it was clary sage. I was shocked to see real tumbleweeds, the Rockies, the deserts, etc.

Clary Sage is at the heart of Cowboy Grass. An herb once used for “fissures of the eye” or some ancient horrific malady, clary sage is pungent, whitish green, fresh and powerful. It can be pulled in many directions. In CBG the green grass notes are expanded upwards towards the top of the fragrance intersecting the rosewood-bergamot’s red woody freshness. The grass effect is modified at the bottom where a rich mapley accord of vetiver and amber reside. The expanse of grasslands almost sacred to an American.

Cowboy Grass is dirty-leathery. Not the warm aristocratic leather of drawing room sofas, but rather the saddles worn and ragged from years of use by riders who transversed the West. Perhaps there’s even a nod to the ashy-oily scent of an antique Colt 45 revolver strapped within the seat. This may be what Mick smells like when he whines out the chorus in "Torn & Frayed" (part of the Stones epic "Exile on Main Street"–a masterpiece of American musical idioms).

Side note. One time an Italian man who is influential in the beauty industry told me that Cowboy Grass smelled nothing of Cowboys.