“It has been mentioned, and really, that every thing within the desert both stings, stabs, stinks or sticks,” wrote the creator and environmentalist Edward Abbey, who spent a lot of his life exploring the excessive deserts of New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. “One can find the flora right here as venomous, hooked, barbed, thorny, prickly, needled, saw-toothed, furry, stickered, imply, bitter, sharp, wiry and fierce because the animals.” Nonetheless — unsavory inhabitants however — the arid, sandy swaths of the American Southwest have attracted generations of artists, mystics, hippies and cowboys. And now perfumers are following their lead, trying to translate the desert’s resilient vegetation and otherworldly aura into perfume.

For David Moltz, who based the New York-based fragrance model D.S. and Durga along with his spouse, Kavi, it was a go to to the Chihuahuan Desert Botanical Backyard and Analysis Institute in Fort Davis, Texas, that sparked his fascination with desert shrubs and, extra particularly, their use of scent as a protection mechanism. “These vegetation are coping with intense solar and warmth, and animals eager to eat them,” he says. One bush specifically, creosote, an evergreen with waxy, pointed leaves, “produces a candy, earthy perfume that wafts throughout the desert when it turns into moist, touring lengthy distances,” says Lisa Gordon, the manager director of the backyard. To Moltz, creosote oil smells like “gasoline and desert rain,” which made it simply the best addition to Candy Do Nothing, D.S. and Durga’s olfactory collaboration with the lodge El Cosmico in Marfa, Texas, the artwork vacation spot about 20 miles from Fort Davis. To spherical out the system, he says, “we used notes of issues that we may discover in that space, like orange blossom, fig and the inexperienced, moist scent of an open cactus.”

The Los Angeles perfumer Linda Sivrican’s attraction to the desert couldn’t be captured in a single scent. Impressed by her frequent visits to Joshua Tree Nationwide Park in California, she launched a full perfume assortment, Saguara Perfumes, in 2016. “The vegetation there have an animalic high quality that’s actually uncooked,” she says. “There’s an earthiness that I don’t assume you’ll find elsewhere.” Her Sagebrush scent — a mixture of blue cypress, Texas cedar and sage — is supposed to evoke the scent of Joshua Tree within the early morning. She added a contact of hashish flower, she says, as a nod to what “a variety of the individuals do once they go to the desert.”