Fougère Composté

notes: hay, animal fur, farmland
key ingredients: hay, wool absolute, hyraceum, patchouly
Historical Inspiration: Fougère Royale (1882), by Paul Parquet

The iconic Fougère Royale (royal fern) was the first fragrance to incorporate a synthetically produced material: coumarin, known for its hay-like scent. Named by its creator for what he thought ferns might smell like if they had a scent, it gave rise to an entire fragrance category known as "fougère."

However, today this style has reached something of a dead end. Fougère today are pigeonholed into clean, derivative men’s fragrances. Examples include Old Spice, Sauvage, and Axe body spray.

Fougère Composté can then be understood as a "pre-historic" fougère. Digging into the dirt to unearth the roots of Parquet’s 1882 invention and going temporally backwards beyond it, it is a fully natural and genderless blend. Green, earthy, animalic, agrestic, and deeply evocative. It incorporates ethical animal musks hyraceum & wool (entirely harmless to these animals), and replaces coumarin with real hay absolute, a material which was unavailable in Parquet’s time.

This imagined fern grows in wild manner, far beyond the confines of a barbershop window—instead thriving in a rustic pasture, untamed.