horse girl perfume

When I was a young girl, maybe eight or nine, my grandmother handed me a copy of Black Beauty.

My grandmother, an English teacher, didn’t mess around when it came to books. She commanded me to read it and had a one book at a time policy - there would be no more stories until Black Beauty was finished.

I loved to read and was always happy to be given a book, but must admit that when it came to reading Black Beauty I hated every single second. I remember lying in the upstairs bedroom, my sister sleeping across from me, the nightlight shining above my head as I cried tears of frustration. The copies of The Folk of the Faraway Tree and Narnia taunted me from the shelves with their bright covers, their happy protagonists’ faces. It was no good. I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to start another book until I finished fucking Black Beauty.

Safe to say I knew early on that I would never be a horse girl.

But the aesthetics of the horse girl, the concept of the horse girl… yes, this was something I loved even when I was a child. It’s similar to the way I loved the concept of a ballerina, I think - I loved the performance, the contrast of the femininity to incredibly difficult and athletic things. The purpose of it enthralled me. Brushing down the horse, setting up the saddle, the specific clothes almost like a uniform, hair tied back in practical braids.

Plus, of course, the near magical mind-soul connection between girl and horse. We can’t forget about that.

I didn’t understand then that being a horse girl was as much about wealth as saddles and spurs. I didn’t know that only rich girls rode horses. Even after the trauma of Black Beauty there remained that dream-like fantasy in my mind of simple days where you dressed up in your horse girl outfit and went out riding into an enchanted forest or across sun-dappled fields with an animal that was also your best friend.

The freedom of moving fast, the wind in your hair, leaving all the world behind, Freedom, and yet not having to be alone. Isn’t that the lure of being the horse girl? Isn’t that her rebellious hidden dream?

So I get it. The concept of the horse girl, the romanticism of it, is familiar to me. The smell of horses I also know, and also from childhood.

In my corner of Australia we have the annual event called The Royal Easter Show. Though it is like a fair anywhere, with pluto pups on sticks and people hawking overpriced showbags, there is also a delightful old fashionedness to the Show that enchanted me.

There was a woodcutting competition, and a carnival quarter with unwinnable games run by slightly ominous clowns; there were stalls selling damper rolls and Anzac biscuits and fat shining squares of boysenberry fudge. The Show was a place where the modern world sat at the edges and the center of the universe was still licorice sticks and pig jumping competitions and the Country Women’s Association stall.

If you grew up in Sydney you went to the Show at least once in your childhood, maybe even every year. And after the showbag hall and the food stalls, the place you could find all of us poking our noses was the equestrian pavilion.

There is nothing like the smell of barnyard animals, nothing on earth. For us television watching suburban children, it was a shock akin to getting dunked in cold water, the smell like a wall of animalic funk rushing at you and pressing down on your shoulders. There is a thickness to the smell, a texture. You can almost taste it on your palate, feel it moving through your sinuses. Hay and dirt and manure, leather and soap and well trodden grass.

Dry but not dusty, rich but not decadent. The smell of the earth. The smell of our ancestors. The smell of wet tilled soil. I haven’t been the show since I was a young girl, but I can still remember that smell. I will remember it, I think, until the day I die.

There seemed to my young self to be such a hidden knowledge, a wisdom of nature beyond my knowing, in that smell. We didn’t have pets growing up and I looked at all animals with affection and fascination. I was unfamiliar with the way they moved, their capacity for sudden motion or still quiet calm. This was a world so distant from my own that I could only glimpse it on school trips to farms or in the years we went along to the show. It felt so far removed from my life, the classroom and the television and the square backyard, that it seemed like a fairy tale.

I have always liked the smell of the barnyard, of horses. I secretly think that a lot of other people do too, and I think horse girl perfume is a way to capture this smell in a socially acceptable bottle.

In the grand tradition of social media micro trends, the horse girl perfume (and the wider horse girl aesthetic) trend had a moment a few years ago. There is a long and storied history of equine inspiration in the fragrance world - Habit Rouge, Brandy eau de toilette, pretty much everything going on at Hermes - but the horse girl perfume is something different. What we are trying to capture here is not a precise smell but more smell as a vehicle for emotion, for transgression.

What is the horse girl perfume if not a framework through which women can enjoy a traditionally masculine coded leather? Every horse girl perfume I’ve ever smelled would immediately be categorised as the most hirsute masculine if not for the concept, the name, the packaging. The more horse girl perfumes I smell, the more I ponder on this. Had I loved the aesthetics of the horse girl as a child because it had signaled freedom from the constraints of society - of societal concepts of femininity? Animalic perfumes reach out and scratch against the untameable in all of us. I guess that includes the horse girls, too.

There are many admirable perfumes in this sub-sub genre. Papillon’s Epona, Naomi Goodsir’s Corpus Equus, Perfumer H’s Saddle. There’s an entire brand, Maison d’Etto, that creates perfumes inspired by horses. What I love about perfumes in this genre is that they market themselves with pictures of dressage events, Bella Hadid in cowboy hats, Lady Di in full Sloan Ranger mode, and yet smell like the nastiest, dirtiest, mud-flecked burlap sack animalic perfumes you’ve ever smelled.

It seems surprisingly easy to make that particularly fleshy horse-stink smell in modern perfumery. Or perhaps the smell of the barnyard is one of a handful that makes such an imprint on your olfactive system that anything remotely close plays on that chord in your memory. This has certainly been true for me and any horse girl perfume I’ve smelled, which flings me immediately back to the dirt floor of the pavilion at the Easter show, to Black Beauty, my thick brown eight-year-old hair in a messy braid, a pony tail.

The perfume that has struck this chord the hardest is Riders.

Riders, which one can only hope is inspired by the Jilly Cooper bonkbuster novel of the same name, is a 2020 release from Sarah Baker Perfumes. I like Sarah Baker because I like niche houses that aren’t afraid to do weird shit. I like houses that are driven by the bizarre minds of discerning creative directors even more. There are some Sarah Baker perfumes that smell absolutely fucking unmarketable, which is usually a good sign for creative perfume. It’s a house to keep a keen eye on.

Riders is exactly what you want it to be, a nasty, sweaty little animalic hay-leather-horsehair concoction, so clear eyed in its intent that you can almost hear a whinny as the spray leaves the bottle.

I have smelled vintage perfumes with castoreum and civet and hyraceum and musk. I can picture the sad little faces of the hapless creatures in their little Fragrantica note icons as I type this. I know what a true animalic smells like - and yet it never fails to impress me how perfectly a modern perfumer can recreate the exact wet-skin smell of an animal without any of these notes.

It’s that thickness, that almost humid musky-hot earthiness that takes you immediately to the barnyard. Because these baser smell are ones that modern humans avoid at all costs it makes it easier to create scent association with anything even vaguely resembling an animalic smell.

It’s sort of like how we buy our meat in plastic shrink wrap from the refrigerated section of the supermarket, so clinically odourless that you pretend there was never an animal to begin with. Your mind might not know it, but your nose carries the evolutionary memory of a hundred thousand years. It knows the smell of an animal. It knows the smell of prey.

If you close your eyes and try to put aside your instincts to throw Riders into the barnyard, you can look underneath its horse-girl facade and smell the moving pieces: the dry, haylike scratch of tobacco, the earthy potato-sack bitterness of vetiver, a musk that could be lifted up and placed in a Marlou or a Serge Lutens.

Riders takes its structural cues from a classic leather chypre, overloaded in the top notes with a sharp green cut-grass whip that evokes the iconic Bandit. The green chypre is a classic for a reason, all the juxtapositions of nature set loose to blend and clash: the sharp bite of fresh grass crushed underneath the hot-metal hoof and horseshoe.

Riders is great perfume, but if I am honest I’ve yet to smell a horse-girl leather I didn’t like: I think the genre itself is clever, a modern SEO-friendly reimagining of the feminine leather classics. Social media hype and fast fashion micro trends make my eyes roll as much as the next person, but maybe the best we can hope for is that artists dig deeper beneath the shallow water and give these concepts some real gravitas.

I think this is one of the rare subgenres of perfume that has real substance. But maybe I would think that, because the horse girl and I have history. I think I loved Riders because it made me feel, for a moment, that I had lived a different life; that I had had a hidden memory of riding through green fields and that smelling it had reminded me. The freedom of leaving the world behind, and never feeling alone.

It’s a beautiful creature, a horse. Or maybe they are deeply bizarre and it is only their familiarity that breeds fondness. The domesticated horse been our companion for four thousand years.

In the equestrian pavilion at the Easter Show, the horses grazed by the fences, near enough to touch. Sable and grey, dappled white and black. Sometimes they let us pat the horses, if we were patient. Or maybe they were ponies - they seemed so big to me, but I must have been very small.

The smell of the stable surrounded us, as warm and dense as a winter coat, a cocoon. I can’t remember if I was lifted up or if the horse bent down. But I remember the short, soft pelt of horsehair. I remember feeling the living thrum of its body underneath my hands.

I am, and always will be, the girl who lied and pretended she finished reading Black Beauty. But I’m also the girl who likes to spray a perfume and pretend that I can go to a stable somewhere and dress a horse. I pretend that I can ride, and ride, and ride, until the world and all its troubles are behind me, and blue skies above, and only the smell of leather and horse hair fills my nose. ▧