Ere

One of the best pine scents i have of the probably 40 i have in my collection. Super strong, pungent direct, smooth coniferous, woodsy, green, fern, pine scent! It is simple but very deep and strong. Very well done. High quality ingredients. Maybe not for every day as it is quite pungent and strong. A nice weekend scent at home on a cold day. :-)

Ere is one of Kiler's personal favorite works. According to Kiler's website, he harvests a plant called the Kit-Kit Dizzie Fern just for this blend. That care and devotion is absolutely noticeable in this fragrance, and if it weren't for one little fluke, this would absolutely be full bottle worthy for me, despite the cost. My immediate impression from Ere is "THE WOODS," caps intended. This is definitely a green fragrance--not a bright, herbal green, but a dark, mossy forest green, absolutely at home in a Thomas Kinkade painting. I detect dry branches, sappy trees, and pine needles. I also get a note that straddles the border between green and syrupy; I'm pretty sure that's the aforementioned fern. But something else will catch your attention here, some form of spice. When I first sniffed this fragrance, I had some trouble placing it; I jotted down "cinnamon?" in my notes. After another half an hour, I realized I was smelling cloves, and quite a hefty dose of them. I felt like I was at a secluded cottage in the woods, sipping a hot toddy on the porch. Over the next hour, more woodsy notes and herbs came foreward. The vetiver, juniper, and fir notes become more prominent. Angelica and Boronia, plus a dash of tea leaf, keep it all from smelling dry. Ere maintains a resinuous, sappy-but-not-sickly-sweet quality that I find incredibly appealing. But what remains dominant on my skin is the clove. Now, I love the scent of cloves, but they're incredibly strong. And it's a bit odd to me why that one note lingers so long, and why it's so overpowering in a fragrance that's meant to elicit images of the mountains. You can smell those firs, ferns, herbs, needles...but always under that haze of clove. In the middle of my journey with Ere, I noticed a bit of a powdery, dusty feel creeping in. This seems to be part of the Kiler DNA: powdery notes that never feel old, they simply soften everything. I think this is the rose coming forward. After about 6 hours, the fragrance dries down to a resinuous, balsamic finish with none of the herbal notes remaining. The clove lingers, though it's not as overpowering at this point. There's also a tinge of something like o-zone or fresh air. I have absolutely no idea what magic creates that, but it's very impressive. It's the end of a hike through the woods, when you reach the precipice of the mountain and relish your journey. Ere has moderate to heavy sillage on my skin, depending on how much you apply and how long it's been on your skin. The lasting power is pretty impressive: I get well over 8 hours of wear from this one. Overall, this is a great fragrance. I just wish the clove wasn't so strong for so long. While it's an interesting note, it can drown out all of the great stuff that's going on in the rest of the composition...and it's some pretty great stuff.

First thing that sprang to mind was TF Oud Minerale. This is greener and woodier and better imho but think of that slightly oily blue-green style and walk it away from the beach and into the deep woods with lots of sticky pine resins. Bold and not for everyone I'd guess but a nice one for me this, might get a bottle.

I love forest-inspired scents, and I really wanted to like Ere, but for me, this is an example of a perfumer trying way too hard. The note list is sprawling, and instead of blending into something cohesive, it feels like a jumble of ideas competing with each other. It’s disjointed and overly busy. The result reminds me of a beginner artist given every possible colour and feeling compelled to use them all, creating a chaotic painting rather than a focused work of art. The result is a muddled canvas rather than a clear composition. I respect the craft and the use of unusual materials, but ultimately, Ere feels more like an experiment than a finished composition. I chose to review only this fragrance from this house, but I found the same pattern across the brand’s other perfumes. The perfumer seems to equate “complexity” with vision, piling on note after note, but the result feels forced and overwrought. The outcome is not visionary, just cluttered and lacking in harmony. To me, these perfumes come across like a tacky, mismatched outfit—loud, busy, and lacking style and refinement. For all the talk of rare materials and years of work, this brand’s perfumes smell more like vanity projects than fragrances worth wearing.

Ere is a crisp, green aromatic that modernizes coniferous forest-floor type scents while simultaneously referencing the historical trajectory of men's fragrance. Opening with a bracing surge of greenery, Ere deploys an unusual semi-sweet fern alongside a prominent galbanum to situate you within the undergrowth. Grassy notes of vetiver are supplemented by a touch of clove bud to attenuate the bitter presence of roots, maintaining instead a brighter sensation of forestry rather than overemphasizing the soil itself. And this is one of the first striking components of Ere: the scent is highly naturalistic, yet spares the wearer some of the more fetid aspects of nature—not by eradicating them per se, but instead by locating the fern/galbanum as the prominent focus of the composition. It's here that the scent first seems to cite aromatic powerhouses, recalling vetiver-based classics, but without any overt sharpness. Yet the modern twist the scent provides is that the citrus notes generally featured in the opening of such classics are re-imagined here through a hint of rose that doesn't fully emerge until the scent has settled onto the skin. While Ere's opening is courteous enough to keep you from getting your feet too dirty, what follows is an intriguing notion of ascension as the bright head notes lower to reveal a body that's as refreshing as the opening, only now sweetened further by the full emergence of the rose and what appears to be a hint of berry. This effect creates an impression of movement in that the coniferous forest seems to separate and open into a clearing of sorts, allowing for an additional level of natural brightness to emerge that reflects more upon the homophonic title of the fragrance itself. Rather than simply replicating a static environment, the scent feels animated in that a narrative progression is deployed to transport you from one aspect of the forest into another. As the rose develops and assumes a more pronounced role among the ferns, a new tension emerges through the pairing of notes that work seamlessly yet raise the question: can roses grow within the soil of coniferous forests? This, of course, underscores the challenge faced by representational perfumery—recreating elements as they might exist in nature rather than simply pairing complimentary notes. Yet what this rose note seems to do more than anything is to accentuate a subtle and mysterious floral texture already present within the coniferous fern. It's here that I'm reminded of Lubin's Itasca in which harsh greenery is softened by bitter-sweet notes to present a new twist on a classical scent. Ere's indeed doing something similar, but the sense of movement up from the undergrowth lends a more dynamic texture. As the scent settles, the impressionistic reference to clean air becomes most apparent. The bracing greenery and coniferous notes continue to drop away maintaining the notion of ascension and rendering the shrubbery as a detectable, yet distanced trace. It's here that the clove and the baronia carry the scent through the remainder of its wearing, providing a clarity that avoids becoming overly soapy, nor does it derail into the abrasive territories of "chemically clean." What's captured is a sense of air with Ere that's quite stunning, and this is a fragrance that accomplishes a number of feats impressively. It's well-suited for lovers of men's classics as much as it is for lovers of modern fresh scents. Although others selections from the brand speak more toward my own personal preference, for fans of crisp, green aromatics, this one's distinctive enough to warrant further exploration.