Precious Woods
April Aromatics (2012)

I've been loving and wearing this gorgeous expression of woods for going on two years now, on and off, and I have yet to tire of it...yet I have forgotten to type a review. For shame.

This is one of my very favorite "woody" scents - it fulfills my need for cedar wood (the good kind), pine (sappy), sandalwood and a sensual patchouli. There is a deep warmth, yet the scent does not shout. It has a respectable amount of silage and longevity, and it's received several compliments and inquiries from complete strangers.

I love the packaging - except for the crystals. I'm not into "new age" stuff, and the crystals feels a bit over-the-top. But the bottle design and box are a nice break from the average rectangle.

If like me you enjoy woody scents, you may be forgiven for asking the next question on the list: "which woods do you like?". A hard to answer question as there are so many out there - patchouli, oakmoss, vetiver (or is that a grass?) and the more well-known cedar and sandalwood.

Precious Woods takes all of them together and presents them to you in one go. The first puff of this scent is woods overload. Dark and balsamic at first, you could easily judge this one as a scrubber. But good things come to those that wait, so the more patient frag-heads will appreciate what happens next.

The deliciously woody and hazelnutty (is that a word?) dry down is pine, cedar and santal. Creamy yet not sweet, smooth and refined. The 'hazelnut' aspect comes out quite prominently, but it isn't immediately obvious which ingredient(s) is/are causing that effect.

This well-blended scent is hard to find as the brand is not very well known and the 30ml bottle is a disappointment. Also the 'new age' feel of the brand with its associations to yoga and glass "pearls" in the bottle (you read that correctly) does not warrant full marks from me (it's a perfume - juice in a bottle - and nothing else!). But it still performes well as the blend is well-crafted.

There are definitely many other superb woody scents out there from many niche brands, but this is certainly one to spritz before you buy.

Overall 4/5

Precious Woods by April Aromatics is a wonderful woods perfume. Although natural perfumes can sometimes be rather squat and muddy, this has an impressive scope to it. There are several layers at work, and surprisingly I can smell them all quite clearly at different stages of the perfume's progression from top to bottom.

The top notes are pretty dark and oily – pungent almost, with fir balsam, pine, and the full-on lactic sourness of sandalwood. It's not pretty. Actually, it's so dense it almost feels like the top notes of something like Norne by Slumberhouse (not in terms of smell, but a general sense of notes crowding in on you too thickly). Each time I wear my sample of Precious Woods, I have to admit I have to brace myself through the opening.

Soon, though, I get my reward for being patient. Through the camphorous murk comes a wisp of incense smoke, weaving through and cutting the density, and paring back the oily balsams until you see the real object standing there unobscured – a rich, clean cedar. For much of the middle section of Precious Woods, there is an almost equal dance between cedar and incense. It smells richly spiced, slightly smoky, but clean and satisfying – never too oriental or ‘decorated'.

The best bit, by far, is the dry, creamy brown sandalwood that rises up from the base. Oh my God, it's so good. It has that spiced gingerbread sweetness that I catch in scents where really high quality sandalwood has been used, like in Neela Vermeire's first three fragrances or vintage Bois des Iles. I tolerate the opening of Precious Woods, thoroughly enjoy the heart notes, but I luxuriate and stretch my toes out in the base. It's more than worth the journey it takes to get there. It's a really expensive choice, Precious Woods, but the richness, the surprisingly well-worked-out development, and the delicious sandalwood in the base make this a strong ‘maybe' option for me. Highly recommended!

Now this smells like freshly cut trees. The pine note is excellent. I would have to say this is the most natural smelling wood fragrance I ever smelled. A quality fragrance that comes with a hefty price tag ($225 for 30 ml). Oh yeah, on the initial application, I know I get a civet or cumin note in there. Luckily, it only last for about 15 minutes or so. Fantastic fragrance. 8.5/10

Precious Woods is a cedar-dominant scent, but it features a number of other woody components to produce something that smells less like a natural space and far more like the wood aisle of a hardware store. Consider CdG's Wonderwood done with natural materials and you'll get a sense of what this is about.

The cedar is the most prominent note, and it's the scratchy, dry kind more than the balmy rich kind. This material tends to have a sharp, domineering quality to it, but here it feels deep and boomy–clearly the sub-bass effect of sandalwood. Buddhawood adds a boozy, smoky tone, and there's a touch of Bohemian Spice's patchouli involved too (I think), and that what's possibly responsible for making the scent feel more like a workshop than simply a pile of freshly cut planks. There's a touch of peppery spice, and the overall profile comes off as slightly charred (the burning scent of the saw blade, perhaps?) It's probably one of the most natural block-of-wood woody scents I've run across.

With that said, it's not necessarily a pretty or polite scent. In fact, it's surprisingly dirty and quite musky. Although it's predominantly cedar, the incense and herbal facets add dimension alongside the boozyness of the buddhawood. The sandalwood is hard to detect because most of the notes in this would ordinarily form a heavy base anyway, and so it's even harder to identify with such heavy materials piled on top of it. In this regard, it feels like a bit of a waste to use sandalwood in this way as the scent is so bottom-heavy that the richness and nuance of this material doesn't get chance to shine as it should. So, in sum, this is a touchstone scent for the natural wood fragrance fanatic–think Wonderwood or Tam Dao EdP made real. And given how well sandalwood / cedar works with rose, I can't help but wonder how this would work when combined something like Rosenlust. Anyhow, if you wear Precious Woods, expect to smell very natural, but not necessarily sparkling clean. A very good fragrance indeed.

Precious Woods has no top notes to speak of, instead moving immediately to its early heart featuring a sharp natural smelling cedar wood, green coniferous pine and radiant incense trio. The cedar is the key player but the pine and incense are very strong supporters. As the composition moves further through its middle the pine and incense gradually recede as relatively dry sandalwood rising from the base melds with the cedar. During the late dry-down the cedar remains, now taking a backseat to the sandalwood as effervescent vetiver sharpens the dry-down with traces of the coniferous pine countering its sharp woody nature through the finish. Projection is average and longevity very good at 9-11 hours on skin.

The first time I wore Precious Woods I couldn't help but notice a passing resemblance to one of the Lucky Scent Decennial collection standouts, Santal Sacre. That said, Precious Woods is much more cedar focused, natural smelling and better blended (not to mention pine is completely absent in Santal Sacre). The composition is quite linear and minimalist, with only a handful of notes detectable from start to finish. The transition between the middle and late-dry-down is completely seamless, and if you are not paying close attention it is easy to miss the hand-off. The end result is an amazing smelling natural composition that stays quite tightly focused throughout. The bottom line is the $225 per 30ml bottle Precious Woods is a wonderful minimalist composition that will particularly appeal to sandalwood and natural smelling cedar fans, earning an "excellent" 4 stars out of 5 rating. Based solely on how the composition smells a recommendation is easy, but the price per ml like the rest of the April Aromatics offerings is rather difficult to swallow...