If you’re the type of individual who likes to keep a close tab on all things up and coming, you might have heard the rumors flying around the underground that some plucky people are attempting to make a perfume based on the fine aroma of our favorite plant species. A high-grade fragrance if you will. Now, I spoke to a few people who dismissed the idea as a pipe-dream and others who felt it was their chance to pull out the old soap-box and start spouting off about something before they knew all the facts – ‘why would you want to smell of weed?’, they said, ‘surely you want something to hide it, not make it more obvious!’. And maybe they had a point. I love the smell of flowering crops and freshly cured buds but there’s always that worry that you might be picked up on someone’s olfactory radar when you move into a ‘clean zone’. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by the idea.
After talking to a few people in the know I finally found my way to a new website called www.skunkfragrance.com and, lo and behold, there it was: a bold, bright green, cannabis leaf-shaped bottle presented in a sleek, stylish and stunning way. It looked amazing. A genuinely well-designed piece of ‘bottle art’ which, at first glance, looks almost too good to be true. Before I even really thought about what I was doing, I used the site to get in touch with the company behind this brand new daring product to see if they were really what they claimed to be. A few emails and phone calls later and I found out that the product hadn’t even been released, but it was nearing the end of the manufacturing process for its first batch. I explained that I wrote for Weed World and they agreed to send me the last remaining sample bottle of their launch fragrance: Skunk Mandarina. Turns out I was in for a few surprises.
Two days later a package arrived at my door in a plain brown box. I half-expected it to be accompanied by the boys in blue, however I was probably even more stunned to notice that the outer package barely had any smell coming from it at all. Eagerly (yet gingerly) I gently pierced the sealing tape and reached in. A tussle of white paper came away in my hands and I began to get the first hints of something which I wasn’t expecting – I couldn’t place it but it wasn’t the hardcore skunk scent which I was preparing for. I suppose I had let myself be drawn into the name of the brand, Skunk, without thinking that perhaps there was more to it than just appealing to the average stoner. It was a mellow, slightly citrusy smell with something underlying the main scent which I couldn’t quite place. I unwrapped the bottle and it looked even better in the flesh. There’s no shying away from this brand’s flagship bottle and there’s no doubt that this is something which would catch your eye from across the room – it’s certainly a conversation starter piece – but when you press down the diffuser and unleash it from its container it hits you with a plethora of balanced aromas. The initial spray is slightly tangy, but this quickly settles and leaves a subtle floral trace with a light woody base. Gentle-yet-sharp sprinkles of a slight ripe orange tickle your nose at times, yet is it difficult to place exactly how to describe the overall fragrance as it changes on the skin over time and has multiple layers to explore. This is not ‘skunk’ as you know it: this is a much calmer beast with a softer side. I asked my wife (and even my mother) to offer their opinions and they both agreed that it had a unique pleasing scent with real depth and complexity which would suit men or women. All wrapped up in a striking package to boot.
I got back in touch to find out how this little beauty came to exist and when I could get hold of a bottle to keep.
Surprisingly, the brains behind the operation is not some fancy-pants, well-established designer with a huge marketing budget and a desire to shock for the sake of sales; this is the dream of an everyday normal guy from the North of England who is chasing his own dreams…and thinks he might finally have cracked it. That’s not to say that some well-regarded (and slightly unscrupulous) people from the perfume industry haven’t tried to do the same thing (or steal his ideas before he gets to market), it’s just that nobody else has done it right. Scott Morgan is a life-long cannabis enthusiast and entrepreneur who loves to take a chance. An electrician by trade, he’s tried his hand at all kinds of thing across a range of industries with cannabis as the one constant. I caught up with him to find out more.
Published in Weed World Magazine 125