The soulful scent of soil … and why it’s a must for your perfume collection

One spritz of this earthy perfume will take you back to your roots, delving deep into the ground where life begins. Through careful consideration, Cape Town’s Wild Olive Artisans and UK landscape architect Jojo Gibbons have created Erde – a scent that goes beyond the typical floral or spicy notes of perfume and instead captures the rawest form of Mother Nature – soil. 

The soil-passionate duo’s vision and experience have borne a powerful and visceral perfume that is simply named Erde (“Mother Earth” in Anglo Saxon). Not supposed to be just a pretty smell, Erde’s intense, loamy notes plummet the receiver into the depths of the dynamics of soil. It dares to explore the conceptual, by creating a sensorial celebration of our landscapes and hopes to raise consciousness at the olfactory level. It is environmental activism in a scent … a message in a perfume bottle.  And a strong message at that. Erde raises what some might consider to simply be the dirt beneath our feet to a desirable luxury, thereby alerting our attention to soil and amplifying its importance in our lives.

Developing this unusual perfume required pushing the boundaries of conventional perfumery, incorporating tinctures of soils, grasses, mosses, roots and various decayed barks and woods. The perfume is then packaged in a glass test tube-like vial and a box made from recycled paper, with a design inspired by the Munsell Soil Colour Chart – an aid to the identification of soils by colour with varying degrees of hue, value and chroma. 

Erde can be purchased from the Wild Olive Artisans physical shops and the online shop, with shipping to South Africa, Europe, and the UK, for now.