The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
The Wonderland II arrived in 2025 as the second chapter in Folkwinds' woodland series. Where the first Wonderland leaned into autumnal beauty, golden light through changing leaves, this sequel pulls toward something darker, more insistent. Perfumer Jono Bornstein spent time in old-growth forests documenting how light changes at the forest floor: the way moisture, moss, and decay create their own kind of perfume. The result is a fragrance built from that research, plum and iris over castoreum and mitti, the sweet and the feral in the same breath. Eighty bottles were produced. The brand has since discontinued it.
The orris accord is the structural spine. Bornstein built it from multiple orris materials, powdery, violet-adjacent, with a mineral coolness that runs through the entire composition like a thread. Around it: green ivy resin, aldehydic brightness that lifts the heavier materials, and a handmade extraction of September plums that gives the top its distinctive fermented-fruit character. The animalics, castoreum, aged deer musk, don't announce themselves. They arrive slowly, adding warmth and weight to the base while the floral and green notes hold the surface. Mitti, the Indian attar of baked earth, grounds everything in a way that synthetic musks simply cannot replicate.
The evolution
The opening hits bright. Aldehydes sparkle against bitter almond, with plum sweetness hovering just beneath, like fruit left one day too long on the branch. Thirty minutes in, the iris takes over. Cool, powdery, slightly rooty. The ivy adds a green, almost medicinal edge that keeps the florals from going soft. By hour two, the oud arrives from below, warm, resinous, nothing like its Middle Eastern counterparts. The castoreum and mitti build slowly, adding an animalic earthiness that shifts the entire composition from pretty to insistent. By hour four, you're wearing something feral under the flowers. The drydown holds for another four to six hours depending on your skin, leaving a powdery iris-moss trail that clings to fabric like a memory of the forest floor.
Cultural impact
The Wonderland II arrived at a moment when indie perfumery was grappling with authenticity versus spectacle. Folkwinds, founded on North American natural sourcing, positioned this fragrance as an argument against the dilution of animalic materials in modern perfumery. The inclusion of mitti attar, aged deer musk, and castoreum represented a deliberate reclamation of ingredients that mainstream houses had largely abandoned due to regulation and consumer squeamishness. In releasing only 80 bottles before discontinuation, Folkwinds created artificial scarcity that reframed the fragrance as a collectors' artifact rather than a commercial product. This strategy echoed the broader indie movement toward limited editions that function as cultural statements.
