Fanghorn

When I first discovered Nick's creations, there really weren't any reviews up. I have since sampled quite a few core offerings, a handful of prototypes that Nick was generous enough to share with me, and I've purchased a few bottles, and wish to buy many more. I've had some semi-lengthy communication with Nick, and I personally feel as though I'm qualified to provide an accurate, unbiased opinion of Pineward, simply because I've been so enamoured with the house since the day I discovered it. With that said, I know there are many others who have a deep-rooted obsession with conifers, and the imagery that their aromas evoke (Christmas, mystical forests, mountains, remote wilderness, fantasy, Narnia, Tolkien, etc...). I understand. Pineward is the only perfume house, perhaps along with Slumberhouse (to some degree), who seems to have a full grasp on this concept, and is more than capable of delivering those impossible dream perfumes to weirdos like us. Fanghorn is what I consider to be the "core expression" from Pineward. If you could only sample one offering, and you're in the market for photorealistic natural conifer, this is among the best, if not the very best out there. NOTHING synthetic here. This is dark, deep, sticky, resinous sappy perfume extract. Pure fir sap. This is the scent of your hands after cutting down a Christmas tree. It's also quite similar to black hemlock. It isn't pine. It isn't spruce. It isn't cypress. This is fir and hemlock. Sappy, sticky, and sweet, in a resinous fir sap way. It's bracingly green, a bit bitter, and mossy, and that's because it's very clear that there's REAL oakmoss in here. Yes. Real oakmoss. Between the oakmoss, and the soil tincture, there's a thread of damp, musty, untouched forest floor. Lichen, conifer needles, and wet soil along a hidden babbling brook, tucked deep within the dense silver fir trees. If you've ever ventured deep into the untouched depths of the forest, perhaps after the first big snowfall, where the fir trees are draped in their soft white blankets - the boughs gently bending downward and the cold dry air carried that sappy Christmas tree scent through the air - this is that. Could also be seen as the forest in spring, with lush new needle growth, dewy wet ground, and sappy bark, but I prefer the former image. You know the scene in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, where Lucy is playing hide and seek, and accidentally discovers Narnia through the wardrobe - pushing her way through the fir boughs until she emerges in the magical winter wonderland that is Narnia? This is that. Bears some resemblance to Norne, sans the spicy clove note, with much more emphasis on fir resin (and not just hemlock), and the sappy magical aroma of conifer forests. Dare I say, this is the superior conifer perfume between the two. Magical stuff. The pinnacle of fir. Longevity is stout, and heavy spraying will project well, albeit for a short while. Stains skin if sprayed too close. Stains clothes from a mile away. Sticky and sappy feel. Not a safe blind buy, but if you know what you want, then this will deliver, in spades. A true masterpiece in natural coniferous perfume. 10/10 Do yourself a favour and sample the rest of the Pineward lineup. It may just be the revelation you've so,desperately been waiting fir.

Ooh I like this. It is dirty, but its a clean sort of dirty. Conifer needle compost, not muck. There's layers to Fanghorn II, and I ended up doing an interesting unintentional experiment: I was going out to an event this evening and wanted to shower first, but I also wanted to try a test spray on my wrist. So, I ended up doing that test spray and washing it off in the shower, which gave me an interesting speedrun of the fragrance before I put it on for real. On first spray, the top notes of fir, spruce, and maybe a hint of cedar/juniper come through strong, like young aromatic green conifer needles. Not crushed needles, living ones still on the tree. Immediately upon getting wet, the conifers vanished, and were replaced by a bloom of moist earth geosmin smell and damp tree bark. Even once I was done washing (and I only use unscented soaps/shampoo) there was still a faint but extremely persistent base note of oakmoss and what I think is Iso E Super, but I haven't smelled that on its own before. Wearing it out, its obviously a lot less abrupt. The conifer-forward top notes yield their place more gracefully, fading out over time, but leaving a lingering sweetness that sticks to your clothes. This isn't the harsh turpentine pine-sol conifer smell, this kind of balsam smells so sweet and jammy you'd almost think it was edible. Its the smell of a coniferous forest, not a sawmill. As the conifer smell dries down, it first turns more woody, almost like a spruce chest of drawers, but it quickly becomes earthier and dirtier. The lingering conifer wood scent blends into the underlying earthiness, leading to a kind of decomposing tree-bark smell, like loose sheets of decaying bark on conifer limbs that have piled up on the forest floor and started growing moss and lichen. Its almost as thought the drydown smells like the process of conifer needles decaying. At first they smell fresh, green, and resinously sweet. Then they smell dry and woody after they've sat out for a while, dried out, and turned brown. Then damp and earthy as they get layered under next year's needles and start to decompose. And finally moist and alive as they've turned to rich fertile loam. I feel like a forest nymph wearing this; Somehow inexplicably smelling like I just crawled out of my bed of pine needle litter while dressed well, downtown, and perfectly clean. I love it, and it certainly lives up to its namesake of an ancient mystical fantasy forest. I'm ready to get lost in the moss.

Premise: the notes here on fragrantica are wrong. There is no silver fir, that was in Fanghorn 1. Fanghorn 2 has a special mushroom extraction substituting the fir. The notes are: pine, mushroom, lichen, moss, soil, damp vegetation. Fanghorn is the original name of Treebeard, one of the Ents—the living trees—of Tolkien’s world. Here we are faced with one of Pineward’s most artistic creations and, in my view, a singular treasure within the global landscape of forest fragrances. Fanghorn is a telluric concentrate of humus and living earth, saturated with the energetic currents that transform what once lived into the substance of what is yet to come. The olfactory experience closely resembles pressing one’s nose into the purest, dampest, and most vital soil of a conifer forest. Living and dried pine needles coexist with decaying foliage, while decomposer flora and fauna are fully at work—everything speaks of cycle, transformation, and continuity. In filigree, rhizomatic and root-like facets emerge—earthy and fibrous, present yet never intrusive. They are notably less intense than in its sibling Oxylus, yet essential in lending depth and three-dimensionality to the composition. The earthen heart is enlivened by a restrained, still-vital sweetness of sap, alongside developing strobili—green, nascent, and laden with promise. The terrestrial complex is moist, almost saline, threaded with gentle acidic nuances that are perfectly counterbalanced by the sweet and balsamic traits of the green counterpart. In the background, a dark and profound aura can be sensed—faintly smoky and lightly incensed—far more restrained than in its darker sibling, Murkwood. Fanghorn is not a fragrance to be worn casually. It is a total immersion into the forest floor, an olfactory meditation on time, decomposition, and reborn life. A radical perfume, for those who do not seek aesthetics in the woods, but truth.

So I finally bit the bullet on getting the full Pineward sample set, and Fanghorn II is the first one I tried as soon as it arrived. First thing I noted: this perfume is dark (as in optically dark), and it stains! A single spritz on my inner wrist turned the skin in that spot the colour of an old greenish bruise, so definitely exercise caution around light coloured clothing and fabrics. Anyway, onto the scent. Burying my face in my arm smelled like faceplanting into the autumnal conifer needle-covered ground of the forested parks I frequented growing up where I live in the temperate north island of New Zealand, with unexpected and impressive accuracy coming from a USA fragrance house. There's a childhood scent memory of scrambling over partially decaying tree bark and cracked wooden playground beams mottled with patchy blooms of silver mosses and yellow lichens all damp from recent rain. It's musty, green, bitter, and sappy all at once. A very realistic atmospheric and not at all perfume-y; this is something I'd put on occasionally to be transported to a specific recollection of the outdoors, replete with all its earthy gritty funk, and it accomplishes that flawlessly. Performance appears decent insofar as I've tested this indoors in cool weather, with one conservative wrist spray creating a foresty scent bubble in an arms-length radius. Now 3.5 hours in, the bubble has shrunk much closer, but the fragrance itself has retained all of its character and will likely remain detectable on skin for several more hours. All in all a very satisfying introduction to Pineward. I don't know that I'd fork out for a full bottle, being rather expensive for what will probably be very occasional wear, but I'll cherish my little sample for whenever I'm in need of experiencing some extra olfactory grounding.

This perfume is so perfect, and exactly what I've been looking for. At the start of my fragrance journey, I wanted to find a realistic PNW forest scent: conifer trees, wet soil, dense understory vegetation. I tried Earthworm from Demeter, which was a very hyper realistic soil scent, but it was nauseating to me. I've tried many different woody scents, but none quite hit the mark. Most were too synthetic and went in the pine-scented cleaning product direction. I had kind of given up hope, thinking maybe this type of fragrance was not for me. And then I tried Fanghorn II... wow. I wouldn't call it hyper realistic, but it is very natural, and incredibly wearable. It is earthy, cozy, atmospheric, and slightly sweet from the pine. It also has a freshness to it, which starts out kind of spicy on initial spray but quickly fades into a subtle freshness, which I think makes it so wearable. It really invokes the feeling of walking through a temperate rainforest. I can definitely see it leaning more masculine, but I find it to be quite unisex due to how natural it smells. It also has the perfect amount of longevity and sillage for me; lasts the whole workday but not all day (that overwhelms me, even if I love a fragrance), and moderate sillage to where I don't think I would offend anyone by wearing this. I think this might be my signature scent, and I could definitely wear this every day. I'm interested to try it in the summer, I could see it being a bit too heavy in warm weather. If you're looking to smell like an entire forest, you should definitely sample Fanghorn II.

Yeah, I could drown in this. I realized as I was reviewing Murkwood that while I liked that a little more the second time around, the only reason I chose it today was because I was trying to conserve my sample of Fanghorn II. Side by side with an actual damp, upturned forest floor Fanghorn comes very, very close to the real thing but slightly optimized for wearability as a fragrance. If you were walking through a mixed temperate forest after the rain and tripped over a big root hidden by a couple inches of wet fallen leaves, falling face first into a soft bed of partially composted needles, what you would inhale is extremely similar to the earthy notes here. If you spray Fanghorn, you get all of that plus the gentle but firm embrace of a dark green slightly spicy moss accord that wears a bit closer to the skin than the realistic earthy notes. I rated the projection as moderate but it's still a chilly kind of damp here, just enough that you can enjoy a light rain without a coat but not quite warm enough to leave the windows open at night. I have a feeling though that if you wore this indoors on a hot humid day it'd whip out some gnarled old old vines and choke the shit out of everyone in a ten foot radius. Probably more of an outdoor or personal enjoyment wear in hot weather, but it's lovely if you're into realistic earthy scents.

A damp and dark forest, full of mud and stagnant mires and moss everywhere hugging the tree trunks! I understand that for most people it is not wearable and may not even consider it as a perfume, in the conventionally pleasant sense that fragrances have in our minds. But to me personally these type of scents create a formidably inexplicable attraction, I feel them like a lost part of me and every time I smell them they isolate me and everything around me suddenly seems foreign. Maybe it’s that primordial call of nature and our unbreakable bond with Mother Earth, a bond we’ve done everything to sever... or maybe is just me who trying to give it a deeper meaning, when it could simply be that I just love the smell of soil, as i like the smell of so many other notes in general! "Fanghorn" in Sindarin* means "the tree with the beard"! *the fictional Elvish language created by the philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien for his "legendarium", a lifelong evolving body of private works concerning the invented world of Arda, which served as the deep background for works such as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Fanghorn is a revelation for coniferous fragrance lovers. It's my new reference point by which I judge all of my other conifer fragrances and I own quite a few. I've been on the hunt for the best coniferous fragrance available since the end of 2014. I wore Polo beginning in 1983 and the original Polo had an amazing pine note that brought me such happiness that when it was ultimately reformulated, the joy of that pine note was taken away. Life being what it is, I didn't focus on that loss for many years, but eventually I realized how much I wanted the find the perfect coniferous fragrance and so I've been searching for the last six years and discovering many wonderful fragrances along the way. I can now say that finding Fanghorn has become the culmination of that search. Nick Nilsson has captured the most wonderful conifer experience I've had. Fanghorn is marvelous beyond words. If you love conifer needle resin like I do, then you can't miss this beautiful fragrance. Bravo to Nick and his most excellent Fanghorn as well as all of his wonderful Pineward Perfumes!

Thanks to one of my fragrance mates I own a sample/small decant of Fanghorn II. This is a true essence of conifer woods - the forest itself is wet and humid, maybe a forest right after the storm. Loads of tree juices and tree resins. I'm quite sure that fans of old Ralph Lauren's Polo are going to like this, and I'm pretty sure (like 90% sure) that fans of Slumberhouse Norne will like this as well. Loads of conifer, pine needles and green needles in general. It has a mossy quality to it what makes it more realistic and being VERY close to the nature. Maybe even more so than Murkwood is. Longevity is around 9-10 hours, sillage is slightly above average. It's similar in a way to Norne (however Norne is much denser and thicker); also - Murkwood (which seems to be darker and quite inaccesible in direct comparison) Fanghorn II on the other hand is lighter (in a good way), brighter and easier to wear than Murkwood. Both sillage and longevity are great. Conclusion: If you already own Murkwood you don't need to buy Fanghorn and vice versa.

Fanghorn II: This is a really damp forest, there's an old abandoned building, you go to it's cellar, there's humidity, something growing on the walls. Very similar, but also very different to Alkemia's Saint Louis Cemetary, in which I also sense some mold and dampness. But as name suggests, Alkemia's is more urban, some stones, air and sweet greenery, as Fanghorn is the plants, the soil, the mold, the trees and swamps. At the same time it is very fresh and cool but also a bit sweet. It is beautiful. I am amazed. The drydown softens the dampness and moldiness, and it becomes actually quite fresh and usabe.

Fanghorn 2 notes: silver fir, soil tincture, oakmoss and green notes good projection forest greenery like wet leaves in the forest, earthy and green but realistic bitterness present. wet dirt no frills clean-cut forest green scent silver fir main player giving that fresh bled tree sap smell not sweet OAK MOSS actual oakmoss adds the bitter greenness of the forest The forest after a spring shower 9/10 Great and worth buying not a masterpiece however (projection, silage and longevity hold no bearing on point score) 3 words: Damp, Dirt, Leaves Edit that on re sniff it clicked more so then before 10/10

I am not by any means educated in perfumes, so this is all coming from the perspective of the average person. I saw a review of Fanghorn II many months ago, and had always been drawn to the idea of smelling like a coniferous forest. I purchased a set of samples from Pineward, and Fanghorn II was one of the ones included. Immediately, when I tried it out, I loved it. It reminds me of when I was little, helping my grandpa split wood after a small storm had passed the day before, and everything was still a little damp. Very nostalgic scent! I've also gotten compliments on it!

Perhaps the greatest forest perfume in the world. Certainly the most evocative. For earthy, naturalistic forest renditions, the only composition that can challenge this is perhaps January Scents Burvuvu. This is damp, wet soil, moss, lichen, fir. Conifers here are medicinal and somewhat mentholic, like in Profumum Roma Arso, but even moreso here, leaning into the medicinal quality. Very potent, lasts forever. Unfortunately, from the lengthy pineward sample set, nothing else from this brand reaches the same heights as this one.

My favorite from Pineward so far. Similar to Boreal but less sharp and alpine. Very true to the forest- it makes me feel like I stepped into woods. It's rained recently and the earth is damp but not waterlogged. Things are dying, but new things are also growing. This is a very pleasing scent to me. I've heard some people say that this company's scents are too synthetic-smelling, and I do get a bit of that from this scent, but only when I'm really looking. My favorite everyday wear.

Was extremely excited to try this as I've been searching for realistic, natural smelling pine forest based scents. Fanghorn II, reminds me of childhood spent in redwood forests, both damp forest earth and mossy logs, some bitter and tangy green, but also the warmer smells of drying pine needles and bark in the sun. If you ever wanted a very realistic and fresh pine forest scent, give it a try.

Smells SO good! It inspired my username when I made my account. It smells like a pile of nutrient-rich leaf mold that's been left undisturbed over the rainy season, dried out fully, and then crushed into dust in your fingers. There's an additional spicy note I can't place, but it's a top note that fades quickly. I have no idea when or where I would wear this, but is smells fantastic!

A very mossy forest floor. Amazing, it's damp, it's lichen, it's pine, it's everything! The reviewer below seems to hate it for the exact reasons I love it. I DO want to smell like dirt, thank you very much! It takes a certain darkness and a lot of personality to pull off dark earthy scents like this one. Perfect for goths, ghouls, and witches, not good for the faint of heart.

Photorealistic forest/woods floor. You can smell the dead organic matter cracking under your feet. It's a dense wood and the soil is rarely exposed. Instead, the fallen leaves, branches, and smaller wood fibers protect the earth beneath and help create an environment for living soil. Freshly mulched forest floor. Wonderful.

(Fanghorn II) this encapsulates walking through a dense pine forest after rain very well. if you love the smell lingering after freshly watering plants, there's a good chance you will enjoy this.

I am a soil accord fanatic. This fragrance is perfect and I wear it almost every day. You’re sitting on the forest floor thick with pine needles, surrounded by wet moss.

For some reason this turns into a very hay forward scent on me, and I love it.

Oh this smell really brings me back to my childhood and picking out the Christmas tree at this one tree farm. It was right near my aunts house and early early (like baby) childhood home before we moved. The beginning of December meant snow, and a fair amount of it. The warm glow of the lights as they buzz and this picturesque lumberjack sits there with a 5 O’Clock shadow. You walk around and the smell of the snow melting off the pine, the mud of the beaten down, once dirt path, all mixing together to form this wonderful picture of the early holidays. I’ve let my sample age about a year (coming back to a VERY early purchase), and I definitely get a bit of dirt but the main focus for me is this Douglass fir with a shining dew all over it. I can definitely see how this would be picturesque “walk through the park”, but because of how forward the pine is I prefer the tree farm. Olfactory art. This one could be a bit challenging if you don’t like earthy scents, but you could pull it off in prolly fall-winter. NOT MAINSTREAM. Perfectly unisex; it’s an experience.

My immediate association with this was a little scented pillow I had as a child. It was bit bigger than my hand, printed with kittens on one side and green on the back, stuffed with fir and balsam. I used to hold it while falling asleep, as I found the dry pine scent peaceful. As such, this scent doesn't feel wild or raw to me, it feels like childhood bedtime. This scent is largely dry, without much moist earth coming through for me. It is extremely earthy and natural, but maybe a bit more like you've grabbed a clump of leaves and evergreen branches and stored them on your shelf til they're desiccated, rather than sniffing the plants in situ. Between the pleasant childhood callback and the realism I quite enjoy this, but I'm not sure I would wear it as a daily thing. It's more like aromatherapy for me, boosting my mood and bringing me a sense of peace. I think I might keep this as a bedtime perfume, so I can recreate the sensation of falling asleep with my childhood fir pillow in my hand.

**this rating is for Fanghorn II, as I assume most others are** I am a big fan of soil notes and earthy fragrances, but I hate when they lean powdery. This perfume does not have that problem at all. Fanghorn smells like soil alright, but not a crumbly dry dirt. It is densely moist, rain-soaked soil from the floor of a coniferous forest. Mulch-like, even. I have no problems closing my eyes and picturing worms and isopods wriggling through the heaping clumps of wet earth I imagine I have clutched in my hands. The breeze carries the scent of wet fir needles from nearby tree branches to mingle with the undergrowth. Smells like a healthy biome. Bravo, Pineward! As with most scents from the house, the longevity is great and the juice is optically dark. Would likely stain clothes if you’re foolish enough to spray on a lightly colored shirt.

This one really shines in the autumn. Fanghorn II is my first exposure to the Pineward collection, and I am not disappointed. To me, this opens up a little spicy and incense-y, and dries down into a fresher, damp fir. Worn outside in the fall, this is just gorgeous. Stains skin quite a bit tho so I don't spray it on clothes.

i honestly kinda like this one. ive seen people say it smells like dirt and that's true but it smells like dirt in a good way. like a walk through a rainy forest/park with wet soil and pine needles on the ground probably wouldn't buy a full bottle but it has a nice scent 6.5/10

Nicely green fir top note -- like a Christmas tree lot. Sweetly organic leaf litter, loamy forest floor. A hint of something sweet and tart like a red currant. This is one of two that I would wear again.

My first from the Pineward discovery samples; Fanghorn is reminiscent of pine trees. The only other note I am picking up is the soil tincture. What you get in the opening stays through the dry down only growing fainter. It’s pleasant, natural and easy to wear. I don’t think Fanghorn is unique or complex. Instead I would file this under a realistic pine forest. I was surprised by the performance considering this is a parfum extrait. My preference is to test from a spray as I assume a spray would behave differently. But the test from the vial dauber splash seemed to fade too quickly—which can be the compromise when the ingredients are natural. Performance issue aside, I do like the color of the juice and the name and I look forward to sampling the others from this line.

I received a dabber of the Fanghorn 2 perfume. Like the other Pineward perfumes I purchased, it will stain your clothes and its longevity and projection are weak. If you have smelled pure pine essential oil, you will be able to imagine the scent at the core of this perfume. It's so clean-smelling, it's almost minty. I love pine and conifer scents, but this one doesn't smell like a pine forest so much as it smells like I rubbed a handful of pine needles between my fingers. It's not an unpleasant scent, but I think this house has some better, more complex scents that I would recommend over this, including Bindebole and Broklain.

Strong and sharp. High silage on me. I agree with the last review, the soil notes are damp and moist. This one opens up my airways and lingers. I like this one, but at the same time I don't. The smell is similar to how diluted ammonia feels. Despite that, I've gone back to smell this fragrance more than others. If you want to have a signature scent that people specifically remember, this would be it

Ordered a sample after reading how accurate and photorealistic the presence of soil and wet damp forest earth is, but I was disappointed by how simply this smelled of a generic fir-scented candle/deodorant/soap. Maybe I'm realizing how sensitive I am to conifers and their adjacency to "holiday/seasonal" themes, but I'm grateful to have spent a good amount of time in fir-dense forests and this scent read more Natural Foods Store leaning than mountain ridge.

Dark pine with a hint of sweetness. Wear this if you want to smell like pine needles and a little bit of dirt. Incredible longevity. 12 hours and still kicking. Survived even after washing and INTENTIONALLY trying to scrub it off (after 13 hours). The longer its on, it becomes more subtly sweeter. solid projection. I am reviewing fanghorn 2 here, which i believe to be the revised version of fanghorn pineward sells.

This fragrance was the first Pineward fragrance I came across online and therefore started my interest in finding a pine-centric scent. It's not gonna work for me and I'm sad. It smells like Fireball on me, and none of the listed notes come through at all. I'm curious what this smells like on someone that it will smell right on. Fragrance is so bizarre in this way.

I really, really wanted to like this. I wanted to like all of the samples I purchased from Pineward. On paper (in the figurative sense, not as in sprayed on paper), based on the listed notes, I should love all of them. But I don't. I've never had such viscerally negative reactions to scents before. To my nose, Fanghorn was, by far, the most offensive of the lot. I get all of the listed notes, but it's like they're just bubbling up through an acrid, tarry mire. The "tar" isn't anything like I'd expect from soil tincture, so I'm not even sure where that's coming from. But it's detectable, with some slight variation, in all the samples I purchased (not-inclusive of Hayloft, which they threw in for free, which I'd really love if it were a bit less cloying), with the exception of Icefall, which is just acrid, sans tar. Maybe they didn't travel well - I guess it's possible they might have ended up overexposed to heat / hot weather in transit. I really don't know. It seems like my experience with Fanghorn is an extreme outlier, so take it with a grain of salt.

Fanghorn 2: This sprays out green and smells like straight must. Have I unleashed some kind of mold? Gross! Total pretention. It's like smearing yourself with moldy dirt and calling it performance art. This is straight soil, oakmoss, fir, and green notes covered with the scent of moldy must. There are no redeeming qualities, however I stuck with it due to my professionalism ;) The gross ones always project and last forever, hence the garbage for this paper.

Musty and earthy, a bit moldy. A conceptual scent rather than a fragrance to be worn. My least favorite of the line.

I think this might be one of the most no nonsense realistic pineward offerings- which in theory sounds right up my alley but in actual practice i dont love it, despite appreciating what it is. It smells like a very murky damp wet leaves type of woodsy scent- and if that is your thing then this is a must try imo. A lot of scents that start off with a deep resinous quality quickly taper off and morph into something less bold, including many of pinewards other offerings- but this musty resinous quality really stays into the drydown here (im referring to the on clothes wear) and comprises the main core of the scent profile. I think it will be a little much for people who just like a simple naturalistic woodsy scent, you really have to have an affinity for that gothic musty earthy quality present in something like that encre noire flanker everybody likes. I myself enjoy it but dont necessarily find it addicting or a must have or anything, and i do think it can maybe create a unintended weird in air experience for other people you encounter which does make me feel a little self conscious when wearing it- but it becomes a lot more of a palatable fir scent the more it dries down. Very well made, not entirely for me but im sure it will be a love for many others I really have to disagree with the reviewer below me saying this smells like a candle- as i said i think it does have some palatable woodsy qualities to it, i can slightly see where theyre coming from- but this to me smells exactly like memories i have of falling into a pond in the woods and the murky stench pond water would leave on your shirt. This smells really too sharp and not mass pleasing enough and even a bit oud-y to be compared to a candle at all imo. If im not mistaken im getting a slight lift from cloves or something that is hard to detect off the bat but is a little bit candle like imo- however i really quite like that personally

20210903 Fanghorn II. Everyone who celebrates Christmas with spruce knows how nice the scent is together with sweets, dried fruit and for me with Fagerström's polarmint sweets. Well I will not go in advance now, tell about the blott first. Patschouli, mushroom forest, both a little newly cut pine, coniferous on a sunny late summer path. A certain honey sweetness with a caramel tone, maybe it's heather that blooms. Forest bath indoors, what happiness. On my skin, it feels a little strange to get the oriental patschouli on conifers, not wrong, but a little odd, and I smile. The cozy scents of Christmas Eve, spices, syrup, dried fruit. No mint. Along with wood, dried wood, with a little mushrooms and mold to the open fire. After an hour or so, a more vanilla tone emerges, a little buttery and nutty, like the Swedish cheese Greve. Further into the fragrance saga comes a honey note again, it transformate into an Amber with chocolate caramel and Sandel soft and warm on me. To dried fruit, raisins and some sweet flowers. A very close-to-skin scent, projecting on paper but not skin. Loveable.

I was searching for a fragrance that smelt like a swamp for ages (closest vibe I found was Empty Wishes Well by Toskovat) and was going to give up hope until I found an Australian Stockist for Pineward (Thank you again x1000 @Sweetfern Fragrance Boutique). I blind bought this thinking it was going to be a Variant of Coven by Andrea Maack which I was still going to be very happy with because thats my favourite perfume but when I sprayed it I was immediately transported to the muckiest, muddiest, mossiest, swampiest still body of water I have ever smelt and I was screaming with joy in the car. If you want a photorealistic swamp/still water fragrance, this is your holy grail. I say this as someone who urban explores and has smelt my fair share of still water ponds/pools and swamps. This is your quintessential bog-witch frag and I am a hag for it. I just hate that I only bought the 30ml and not the 50ml because I am going to run out of this so fast. This is now my 2nd favourite photorealistic fragrance.

Fanghorn II (i.e., Fanghorn) is lauded as the quintessential niche pine fragrance, and the signature from this house. I find it to be a rather good green-woody that is encumbered by a dense semisweet amber base, which steers its glistening evergreens into candle territory for thirty minutes. With time it counterintuitively lightens up, loses most of the sugar to a realistic pine needle scent, and its progression ends there. Nice, well made, but a one-trick pony.

In my quest to find the ultimate 'walk in the woods 'fragrance i ordered some samples from pineward. On paper the fir needles sing and give a distinct freshness that's almost minty. On my skin however Fangorn immediately turns into a very wood heavy scent. With some ambery smokiness even that's a very long lasting base. Think remnants of an open fire you come across during a hike. So definitely try before you buy.

First whiff the damp soil and moss rings out - it isn't a gentle scent at all at. Like you've tripped on your walk through the bog that borders the forest and broken your fall with your face. Some of the scent borders on moldy - but think more like the earthy smell of a relatively healthy compost bin as opposed to the unhealthy damp of a house. It sweetens nicely into the resinous fir smell, undeniably green.

Nice. Fanghorn is a bit brighter than Murkwood and less sweet, with an earthy forest floor petrichor replacing the myrrh and incense. Realistic pine in a summer rainstorm for an hour, then green lichen on the skin for the rest of the day. Semi-permanent on cotton, with the wet fir opening. Leans to unisex trees with rough bark.

10th Pineward Sample! this one isnt too good for me, its like falling in dirt and not washing it off. very earthy and green with good projection, but contrary to other peoples reviews the longevity isnt as crazy as they say, its a good 8-9h overall 4/10

I loved the idea of this since I enjoy woody and soil smells but this is less of a fresh dirt and more of a funky vegetal dirt. I would call it a bit challenging and masculine leaning. Very strong pine and rotting vegetation if that's your thing.

• Not the best from the house. • I love oxylus, ponderosa, greymist and some others from this perfumer. • This seems to simultaneously veer into a more generic mossy direction while also including a very unpleasant "mildewy" note...

Fanghorn smells extremely similar to the wet forest ground. Oily and moody concoction, not a wearable fragrance. Worth having a sample for days when you want to "experience" a walk in an October/November forest right after the rain.