Why Natural Perfumes are Expensive?
When it came to food and nourishing herbal medicine and bodywork and health, our ancestors always said, “You pay now or you pay later.”
Well, the term expensive is a malleable term. What does it mean to you?
- Does it mean it is not worth the asking price?
- Does it mean it’s poor quality?
- Does it mean it is more money than you can comfortably afford?
- Does it mean it pushes the envelope of market thresholds?
What, exactly, do you mean, when you say, “too expensive”?
Let's jump straight forwardly into our story as it's little long process to understand the various expensive attributes attached to our products.
Handmade
We do everything by hand, usually by ourselves. We wear all of the hats from marketing to customer service to artistry to accounting to creative director, editor, producer and manufacturer.
Personally, our labor goes beyond just blending oils. We wildcraft plants. We grow plants. And while these plants sometimes make up a small percentage of a composition, they are crucial key ingredients to the overall factory profile and are our work’s intimate fingerprint.
Wildcrafting Plants Requires Time
Locating an ideal harvesting spot with enough plant abundance to respect its continuation, taking a day off from regular responsibilities, waiting for the weather to cooperate, waiting for the perfect timing for the blooming/seeding/rooting/leaving of the plant itself. The act of harvesting is slow and rhythmic, one clip at a time, perhaps a long dig of deep roots, possibly the endless plucking of the tiniest violet flowers. Searching for the highest quality sticky fresh poplar buds that have just fallen from the trunk, but not sat on the ground, and you’re freezing cold on a windy February day, adding bud by bud by bud to your bag.
A voyage to the rose patch – once a year – to collect the freshest, most fragrant wild rose petals. One by one. Arriving home late at night only to stay up later taking care to lay out all the precious petals so that they dry perfectly without browning, and stuffing jars of fresh petals into jars of menstruum's to extract – which takes another 6 weeks to occur.
The sticky, messy, clumpy job of gathering drips of resins from conifers … your clothes will never be the same. Glob by glob you collect these pearls of tree medicine, so fragrant and beautiful with strands of gold, red, amber, topaz. Bark bits remain adhered to the resin, later taking more time to extract, remove, strain.
The gathering and processing of plant material is long, slow, laborious, dependent upon the whims of nature, heavily detailed, and requires immense patience and attention to detail. Not to mention the decades of study it took to learn botany, harvesting and plant properties. It’s nearly impossible for me to calculate the cost of my many hours of labor of being a plant processor. It is also deeply satisfying, connecting, and immersed in sensory pleasure – so yes, I love my work. But it’s not free nor machine made.
Materials
Not including the aforementioned plant materials that we create from plants we gather, we have plant material that is sourced from aromatic companies. Essential oils, absolutes, Co2 extracts, cold pressed oils, floral waxes and concretes, etcetera etcetera. These precious extractions are what I use to build my perfumes, and while I am not doing the actual growing, harvesting, processing, waiting for nature, or distilling of these plants, someone is. And cost reflects this.
The list goes on and on like that. Real ingredients are exponentially more costly than synthetics. Trust Us – We WISH We could bring the cost of our perfumes down! We would probably sell a lot more.
