First Cut

An afternoon break, laying on a freshly cut hay bale. Around you, the meadow is dotted with weeds and prickly wildflowers, crushed from the thrasher, and still oozing sap. It's summer, and the grass holds warmth from the sun. You close your eyes, lean back and take pleasure in the sweet smells of nature. First Cut takes you there in a beautiful recreation of this experience. Diane St. Clair, founder, knows all about this. Her home is a farm in Vermont. And the hay harvest of grasses to provide winter food for the cows is an annual event. She has a passion for fragrance that runs deep, with her mentor being a Grasse trained perfumer. This combination of knowledge and love of scent is expressed in perfumes that reflect her life. First Cut is amazingly multi-faceted. You not only enjoy fresh hay, but the plants, flowers and warmth of the setting. Lite sillage, a facet of most naturals, is offset by an array of nuances make up for it. It opens with a camphorous blast from the pasturage, and softens during the drydown to let countless other details shine thru. I kept sniffing to capture new subtleties. I visited my grandparents farm as a child, and this brought back vivid memories of the rich smells in the county.

I am disappointed. Not by the smell, to be sure. This is beautiful. Unique, honeyed. It does indeed smell like a meadow full of wildflowers and hay in the sunshine. But the ONLY way to smell it is by planting my nose directly against my arm. : Zero scent radiation at all. It wears like an oil based perfume (which don't work on me, at ALL.) If I dose myself in multiple (MANY) sprays from the sample vial I get a very light scent perceptible without smashing my nose to wherever I sprayed. But given how costly these perfumes are I expect better. (At $125 for 30ml these are some of the most expensive cost per ML of anything I own (much more than say the Chanel Exclusif line).) At that cost I expect one or two sprays to last me all day, and to give me a really nice cloud of scent. I'm on 4 sprays and it's barely detectable. I would love to own this, it is just what I'm looking for, but it doesn't have the performance to make it worth the cost, sadly.

First Cut touches me the most out of Diane St. Clair's works: it feels like Vermont to me, and brings to mind the many visits my partner and I have made there in summer and early autumn, windows rolled down, the smell of the air saturated with grass and hay. It recalls all the many great memories we've made over the years. It also recalls that melancholy that seems to surface from the pastiche of wildflowers, herbs, grasses, and hay and the waning warmth as we enter the colder days, the often more challenging times in life. I think of lavender fields in Magog, Quebec during July; drinking sweet woodruff lemonade in August; overflowing wildflower meadows in September; burning braided sweetgrass on chilly nights in October.

I love this scent. The first thing that hits me is yuzu, bright and tangy and bitter and not at all sweetened and soapy the way a lot of citruses go, which I really love. Then a whole herbal bouquet of fresh cut grass, sweet honeyed flowers, savory tomato leaf and green pepper tumbles out, all mixed with the dry, sunny immortelle. As it dries down, you get very light tobacco, and any bitterness from the greens gets smoothed and sweetened by vanilla. This isn't a hugely powerful or long lasting scent, but it's so lovely that I don't really care. This scent captures the pastoral romance of haying season, minus the itchiness and diesel fumes and broken tractor parts. Rural idyll in a bottle.

This scent is gorgeous. I especially loved the juicy, aromatic, citrus opening, the particular cocktail of which reminds me of old school "petrol-like" full powered, skin-sensitizing bergamot with its fruity, tea, and herbal facets. This segues into a beautiful hay note that feels representative of true hay absolute with its facets of raisin, tobacco, and damp wood. The florals exist to color and shape the scent, though no one floral note stands out. The herbal-citrus-cacaphony of an opening meeting sweet, coumarinic hay brings to mind these clashing accords in Jicky, though this is a different beast than that. Unique, elegant, and yet infinitely wearable!