Aetheria Botanicals — perfume from wild plants, steeped cold for 180 days

Compose a scent of your own

Choose one note for each layer of the perfume: the first impression, the heart, and the base that lingers. Set how strongly each one speaks, and the bottle beside you takes the colour of what you make.

Nine wild tinctures, drawn cold over months. Twenty-seven ways to wear them.

Or begin from one of ours:

Top note

the first impression

Bright and fleeting. Gone within the hour.

Choose the top noteCold-Pressed BergamotReggio Calabria, ItalyWild YuzuShikoku, JapanCrushed Pine NeedlesHautes-Alpes, France

Knotted mountain fruit, sharp as frost on a windowpane.

strength of Wild Yuzupresent · 55%

This note makes 25 parts in a hundred of the blend.

Heart note

the character

Rises once the brightness fades, and stays the afternoon.

Choose the heart noteSmoked VetiverLes Cayes, HaitiDamascus Rose OttoKazanlak Valley, BulgariaCharred CedarMiddle Atlas, Morocco

Roots dried over a slow fire, earthen and dusky.

strength of Smoked Vetiverspeaks clearly · 70%

This note makes 37 parts in a hundred of the blend.

Base note

what lingers

The quiet foundation, still on the skin the next morning.

Choose the base noteDamp Forest MossArgyll rainforest, ScotlandAged Amber ResinDhofar, OmanFermented LabdanumCrete, Greece

Cool stone and deep shade, the floor of an old wood.

strength of Damp Forest Mossspeaks clearly · 60%

This note makes 38 parts in a hundred of the blend.

Heavier layers carry further: base notes count 1.2 times, top notes 0.85. All figures are illustrative.

your formula

Composition 010

yuzu, vetiver & moss

in a hundred parts

top 25 · heart 37 · base 38

Rest it 120 days in a clay amphora before it is poured.

Mostly earthy moss, then dry wood and green citrus.

Try this as a sample set

Provenance

Every batch begins in one place, at one altitude, on one morning.

One flacon of No. 019, fluted crystal with a brass collar and amber perfume, standing alone under a single light.

Turn the pages to see where each plant was picked, and what we measured when it reached Grasse.

Pressed specimen drawing of High-Altitude Maritime Pine, Pinus pinaster. — Pinus pinaster
Peloponnese, Greece
Plate III · lot 01, pressed for Aetheria · © 2026 HVNF Studios · do not redistribute

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lot 01

High-Altitude Maritime Pine

Pinus pinaster

Peloponnese, Greece · 37.51° N, 22.37° E · 1,420 m above the sea

Scattered stands on thin limestone scree, facing the Argolic Gulf. Sea air rises every afternoon and leaves salt on the needles.

Picked over one week in late June, between 05:40 and 08:10. Received in Grasse on 24 June 2026, entry VX-0624-PP.

It smells of green resin, salted needle and warm stone.

“Cut only the new growth, before the sun warms the resin. By nine the ridge smells of hot stone instead.”

field note, harvest team

distillation

34 °C

Far below a kitchen simmer. The plant is coaxed, never cooked.

Cold vacuum distillation, kept low so the brightest notes survive the still.

soil pH

5.6

acid · 0neutral · 7alkaline · 14

Measured in the root zone on the morning of harvest.

sun a year

2,840 h

dawndusk

74% of that light reaches the plants through slope and canopy.

altitude

1,420 m

summit at 1,420 m · the bar is about 500 m

The rules we forage by

We never take more than a third of any wild stand, and we always leave the roots.
We only harvest land we have walked with the people who tend it.
Every plant is weighed, dated and traced to its hillside in the ledger.
Maceration runs cold and slow: 180 days, with no heat applied.
Spent botanicals return, as compost, to the soil they came from.

Four slow steps from field to flacon

Every plant is picked by hand at dawn, frozen within the hour, steeped cold for six months, then filtered by gravity alone. Nothing is heated and nothing is rushed, so the scent keeps the shape it had in the field.

the terraces, at first light

Picked by hand at dawn

We walk the terraces before the sun clears the ridge, while the petals still hold the night’s cool and their oils sit closest to the surface. One stem in five is taken; the rest are left to seed next year’s field. Everything is carried out in baskets of woven willow, never sacks, so nothing bruises on the way down.

hand foraging

the press room, in the morning

Frozen, then pressed by hand

Within forty minutes of the last cut, the harvest is flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen so the fragile top notes cannot drift away as warmth. Two chilled steel plates then close slowly by hand, cracking the frozen cells open without the heat a mill would add.

cryogenic nitrogen pressing

the cellar, for six months

Steeped in the cold for six months

The pressed botanicals rest in grain alcohol held just below freezing, in sealed glass vessels in the cellar. The cold keeps the bright green edges intact while the scent slowly gives itself up. Once a week, every vessel is turned by hand, for six months.

sub-zero cold alcohol maceration

the bottling table, drop by drop

Filtered by gravity into glass

The finished extract finds its own way down through folded paper, one drop at a time. It falls straight into fluted crystal, stoppered at once and kept from the light that would dull it over the years.

gravity filtration