The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Anabasis takes its name from the Greek word for a journey inland, an ascent from coast to high country, the same word Xenophon used for his famous account of Greek mercenaries, and Saint-John Perse for his modernist poem about movement through landscape. Holladay Saltz translated that literary idea into scent: the idea of climbing toward something wild and unpopulated. The fragrance begins in brightness and descends into green, wood, and mineral coolness, a long walk into elevation where the air thins and everything slows down.
What makes Anabasis unusual is its use of Japanese shiso as a structural note rather than an accent. Shiso, the leaf used in Japanese cooking, with basil and mint in its DNA, carries a green, slightly camphorated character that most Western perfumery avoids in favor of more familiar herbs. Here, it's not a novelty. It's the backbone. Paired with mint in the opening, it creates a double-green effect that reads as both fresh and deeply aromatic, like stepping into a forest immediately after rain. The cedar base anchors everything in a cool, dry register that never becomes sweet or heavy.
The evolution
The first minutes are all brightness and cold air, citrus hitting mint hitting shiso, the three elements creating a green accord that doesn't smell like anything you can easily name. The citrus fades within the first hour, leaving the mint and shiso as the dominant conversation. The shiso deepens as it settles, becoming more herbal and mineral, like earth after rain rather than the leaf itself. By the third hour, pine and birch arrive, birch adding a faint sweetness that keeps the forest from becoming austere, pine bringing a resinous edge that catches the light. The cedar doesn't announce itself. It arrives quietly around the fourth hour and stays. The drydown is clean wood, close to the skin, with a ghost of pine resin that fades slowly. On fabric, it can linger into the next morning as a faint mineral-green impression. On skin, expect six to eight hours of cool, quiet presence, intimate enough that someone would have to be close to notice it, memorable enough that they will.
Cultural impact
Holladay Saltz built her studio outside the traditional fragrance industry structure, bringing a background in product design and fragrance craft to her compositions. Anabasis has found its audience among people seeking a green fragrance that doesn't smell like a spa or a locker room, something genuinely unusual and quietly confident. It's a pick for the person who's already tried the obvious choices and wants something with more distance.
