Headless Horseman

**Note: I will be phasing out the usual individual picture labels on my perfume bottles to a uniform brown handwritten label, so perfume labels may vary from current listing photos** The legend of sleepy hollow is a perfect story— I mean, what a place! what an atmosphere! It’s like a creepy blanket I wrap around myself and re-read again and again every autumn—sweater clad, and rested by an open window that welcomes in the cold and smells of the changing outside. You can smell Sleepy Hollow in your mind’s eye, but what about its premiere spirit, The Headless Horseman! In addition to Washington Irving’s original tale, my favorite version is Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow. It’s so easy to get lost in his characters, aesthetic, and those wonderful gloomy and atmospheric settings. The star of the film is obviously the horseman, but to me The Tree of The Dead is a close second(and needs more screen time)! What a fantastic movie moment— seeing the horseman jump out of that damned tree on his great dark horse Daredevil; it’s vines and roots wild, severed heads rolling after... it’s just the coolest! Anyway, that specific moment played a large part in the creation of this scent—the disturbed earth, the split wood and rot, the metallic scent of the horseman’s sword and armor, and the ghostly forest that surrounds him. If you were invited to the horseman’s house in the western woods, this is what it would smell like This scent starts off sharp, like a “midnight blast” through the dark woods, horse whinnies and hooves pounding on damp earth and leaves, a sound of a billowing cape whipping wildly in the wind. It eventually settles into a “drowsy, dreamy influence” on the skin after the horseman collects his head, while the faint chaotic ghost of the night before still lingers. Heavy oak moss and oak wood, sandalwood, clary sage, iris, pepper, cardamom, Amber, patchouli, disturbed earth, dead leaves, and the haunted domain of the Hessian.