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Ah, the sharp-sweet smell of the High Desert - Yatagan

By Anonymous
Just returned from a short vacation in the high desert of Colorado and wore absolutely no scent for the trip. Which gave me the opportunity to test the scent memory. Craig, Colorado sits in the high "cold desert" lands between the Wyoming border the Yampa river, and the native plant life is cottonwood trees along the aquifers, junipers and spruce, rabbitbrush (Chrysothamnus), sagebrush, and a good amount of prickly pear cactus. It's an area rich in minerals, and the air at times carries the aromas of all of those plants as well as the aroma of the dusty desert soil. In monsoon season, the sweet grasses are also fragrant. The evening air is often redolent with a combination of those aromas. My father keeps horses up on a pasture on a mesa near town, so there is also a hay and leather scent in my particular scent memory catalog of the place.

Caron's Yatagan is a scent that evokes that place quite well with its dryness, its heat, resinous woody smells and then the warm sweet hay. So yes, I was quite right to say that Yatagan is the smell of high desert Colorado. The vintage Yatagan does so in a bit less sharp way than the current formulation, with a little more of the sweet hay note than the celery salt note of the current.
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  1. UnknownAugust 7, 2010 at 2:10 PM

    Oh the vintage sounds so nice. That's depressing because I hate the smell of celery.

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  2. AnonymousJanuary 3, 2011 at 6:29 PM

    I hear that if you spritz this scent beneath your clothes the scent is less pungent. But yes, it does have quite a celery note. Goes quite well with a day when you are making soup stock and need a scent that won't clash! (but it is a fine scent indeed. Just like the smoothness of the vintage more than the current.)

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