The Nose Knows…
Lisa Brodar owns Portland General Store, maker of natural scents for the rustic, modern hombre. Options include Moonshine, Moss, Tobacco, and Wood. Her new, cow-friendly cologne costs $110 a bottle and is targeted at the urban cowboy, “with the sun and dust clouds casting a warm light across his weathered skin” (a quote from the product description).
Many of Brodar’s scents are meant to be evocative, like Saltwater, designed to “conjure the sense of a dad in a 1970s photo, lounging on a sun-stained beach.” Or Whiskey, which doesn’t smell like whiskey at all (sorry boozehounds). But this new Farmer’s Cologne gives more than an abstract flavor of farm life – it was tested on cows.
Brodar got the idea from Fragrancefreeliving.com, after the site ran a post about a Canadian farmer. In this (somewhat dubious) story, the nameless farmer’s cows are acting weird; he decides they’re repulsed by his odor. Apparently his wife was using artificially scented detergent in the laundry — and his cows weren’t into it. Soon the farmer started keeping a stash of fragrance-free clothes in the barn. Problem solved…
Brodar’s challenge: Could she design a cologne that would appeal to both the sensitive bovine sniffer — and the stylish modern farmer?
Brodar tinkered, mixing natural oils and essences — sandalwood and sage, cedar and blue tansy (plus a few proprietary secrets). Finally, she hit on a balance she liked. It had a woody, earthen musk, with only a hint of the pungency found in mainstream fragrance (a writer in the Los Angeles Times is blunt: “Redolent of the grain and hay smells of the cow barn from my Vermont childhood … with an ever-so-slight medicinal note.”)…
Of course, it’s not the cows who will shell out over a hundred bucks for a small bottle of cologne. It’s the farmer — or the wannabe farmer. “This probably isn’t for the third-generation farmer who smells like whiskey and washes with Castile soap,” she says. “It’s for the guy in Brooklyn who wants to move back to the land, to become a homesteader … but who still likes going out at night.”
Read the whole story at Modern Farmer.
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As we wait for the cows to come home, we might celebrate critters of a different sort: it was on this date in 1969 that educational television in the U.S.– then National Educational Television (NET); soon thereafter, PBS– debuted the Childrens Television Workshop series Sesame Street.
