The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
The name says everything. Shaped by The Wild was inspired by a journey across British Columbia's wilderness, a flight on a tiny seaplane over mountain peaks and deep coastal inlets, traveling toward the traditional First Nations village where Sunyata Calogeros-Smith's husband and daughter trace their ancestry. The fragrance translates that landscape: the green sharpness of altitude, the warmth of smoke left behind by a fire long extinguished, the quiet of deep forest returning to itself. Sunyata Calogeros-Smith, whose background in somatic psychotherapy shapes her approach to scent as embodied experience, built this fragrance as a kind of olfactory cartography, mapping a place that exists in memory and movement, not just geography.
What sets this composition apart is the use of cedar leaf, a material rarely featured as a named note, despite the cedar family appearing throughout. While most fragrances reach for cedarwood as a base, Shaped by the Wild opens with green, slightly astringent cedar leaf before layering in fir balsam, orris root, and iris for a powdery floral undertone that gives the heart unexpected softness. The frankincense in the top does not behave like frankincense typically behaves, here it reads cooler, more mineral, less sweet, creating an opening that feels like altitude rather than altar. The wood smoke base anchors everything in warmth without tipping into barbecue territory.
The evolution
The opening arrives crisp and resinous. Frankincense hits first, cold and almost medicinal, then the pine and sage cut in, green and bright, like stepping into a forest at first light. The first twenty minutes belong to the conifers. Cedar leaf dominates the heart, but here the fir and orris root shift the register. A powdery floral quality emerges from the iris, softening what could have been purely austere. This is where the fragrance earns its name, the wildness is green, not aggressive, but insistent. By hour three, the wood smoke arrives. It doesn't crowd out the cedar, it integrates with it, and the vanilla absolute begins its slow work beneath the surface. The drydown settles into something earthy and warm, smoke and vanilla holding hands for the final act. Six to eight hours on most skin. The next morning: a faint trace of woodsmoke and earth on fabric, like the ghost of a campfire you didn't want to leave.
Cultural impact
Independent Pacific Northwest perfumery occupies a specific corner of the niche fragrance world, less flashy than Parisian heritage houses, more personal than the Italian naturals movement. Untamed Perfumes fits here, alongside houses like MCMC and Strangecolour that treat landscape and memory as valid compositional material. Shaped by the Wild speaks to wearers who want fragrance to mean something beyond smell, who understand that a seaplane over coastal inlets can translate into cedar and smoke and still hold its own against more technically ambitious compositions.
