The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Brook Harvey-Taylor built Breath Taking for Pacifica's Aromapower collection, a series of fragrances that treated scent less like accessory and more like quiet ritual. Breath Taking carried rose quartz, the stone the brand calls the love stone, and the whole idea was to make a blend that felt grounding rather than showy. The composition leans on warmth and spice to create that effect, layering cardamom and black pepper into a vanilla base that reads closer to a candle than a cocktail. The rose quartz association gives the warm-spice-vanilla profile a self-care angle that broadens who it's for, taking a blend that could have leaned purely gourmand and opening it up to wearers who want their fragrance to do something for them beyond just smelling good.
What makes the composition worth a second look is the restraint. Cardamom and black pepper are aggressive materials, the kind that dominate if you let them run. Pairing them with vanilla instead of fighting them with something darker, no oud, no smoke, no leather, keeps the whole thing readable. The warmth builds instead of smolders. It's a study in how much warmth you can stack without losing the airiness. Pacifica built it vegan and plant-powered, and the choice to work with real botanical materials matters in a blend this spice-forward.
The evolution
The opening is all cardamom, bright and green, almost eucalyptus-adjacent before it rounds into something sweeter. Not sharp, but awake. The black pepper shows up early in the wear, not as a burn but as texture, a grain you can almost feel. Then the vanilla arrives, and this is where the composition does its real work. It's not the sugary, marshmallow version. It's the warm, woody kind, the one that reads like the inside of a bakery at closing time rather than the frosting on a cupcake. The spice doesn't disappear once the vanilla settles. It threads through the drydown for hours, keeping the whole thing from collapsing into something too soft. Over the course of a full day's wear, you end up in mostly vanilla territory with a cardamom hum still working underneath, and that residual hum is what keeps the blend from reading as a one-note gourmand.
Cultural impact
Breath Taking sits inside Pacifica's Aromapower collection, a series that paired fragrances with specific crystals. Breath Taking carried rose quartz, the stone the brand calls the love stone, and that association gave the warm-spice-vanilla blend a self-care framing that made it land with wearers who might otherwise have skipped a gourmand-leaning composition. For the people who reached for it, it became a transitional scent, one that could carry from a cold morning into a long workday without losing its shape or becoming too much.
