Local Fragrance Maker Finds Smell of Corvallis

The world is changing and as sad as it is to write this, we might need little bottles of nature someday to remember how it used to be and where humans came from so many years and generations ago,” wrote Lisa Lindner, owner of Firn Handcrafted Fragrances, in an email interview recently discussing why she’s decided to create a business based on Oregon scents. 

Walking around Oregon State University’s Corvallis campus in late winters, Lindner would know that spring was coming by one of her favorite scents – one that could float in the air up to tens of feet away – that of the Daphne Odora flower.   

Smells can trigger memories, and for Lindner, smelling this particular flower will always bring her back to the joys of an early Pacific Northwest Spring during those special college days.  

A Powerful Sniffer 

Lindner told a favorite story: “Growing up, I loved to smell things, especially nature.  In grade school I even had to smell the spoiled milk in the little pints in our cafeteria! Not that I liked it, but my curiosity about what created the scents. I didn’t want to smell it but I had to smell it, if that makes sense.  

“I love being outdoors – the scents of flowers, the forests, the coast.  At a family reunion, my sister teased me by giving me the nickname ‘Creepy Nature Girl’ – a badge I wear with honor!”   

Lindner grew up in southeast Portland, moved to Corvallis for college, and recently bought a house in Monroe – all places that allow her to be out among the smells of the Pacific Northwest. 

At OSU, Lindner studied anthropology, and under that her favorite subject was ethnobotany – the study of plants and people.   

“I was more interested in the uses for plants – you know, spiritual ritual aids, household – like indigo and plant roots for making textile dyes, as natural medicine as it relates to fertility, and what I call personal enhancement beauty products – like henna,” she said. 

It was while working at the First Alternative Natural Foods Co-op that Linder first started making natural fragrances. 

“For about seven years, I worked in the wellness department and I had the awesome responsibility of placing orders with our essential oil distributors,” she wrote in an email. “Certain companies would ask if I wanted a free full-size vial of essential oil each time I placed an order, so over the course of a few years, I’d amassed a small collection of pure plant materials in super concentrated form.  

“As a hobby, I started making my own scents. My first was a really pine-rich blend that was inspired by the MacDonald-Dunn forest in Corvallis, and that later evolved into ‘Cascadia’, which is now more inspired by camping in Oregon’s evergreen forests.” 

A mentorship with Hall Newbegin, the founder of Juniper Ridge – one of the West Coast’s leading natural home and body care companies – guided Lindner to grow her Pacific Northwest-based scents into a business called Firn Handcrafted Fragrances 

 

“He’d [Newbegin] give me costing tips, we’d talk about personal life stuff, and we’d geek out about Fir species,” she wrote. “I always admired what he had started with Juniper Ridge, and I love that the brand continues to carry his legacy even after his tragic passing a couple of years ago. He was a visionary and a huge inspiration for me.” 

Creating Scents 

“When I am outdoors, I inhale the smells around me, to remember them deeply, like when hiking Bald Hill or the Mac Forest, to discover what the forests have to share.  My natural fragrance – Mer –  [which] I created after a trip to Yachats, isn’t just smells of the ocean, but what I feel is the true essence of being there walking the trails to Cape Perpetua,” said Lindner. 

When asked how she creates her scents, Lindner referred to her website description: “I want to rewild humankind using my favorite — and in my opinion, most important — sense.” 

“Nothing compares to the butterscotchy goodness of a ponderosa’s bark on a late spring day, or the bitter greenness of a dandelion’s milky stem snapping in your hand. What about briny seaweed drying on a beach, bright lavender opening in the dewy morning air, or the pungent dankness of a forest floor? And spruce?! Don’t even get me started on spruce,” wrote Lindner on her website about her “why” for natural fragrances. 

Lindner described how she comes up with her scents, pointing to her website where she wrote “The typical creative process of Firn goes something like this: [Lindner] goes somewhere wild to connect with the outdoors, and smells something beautiful as her “mind tries to catalog it for safekeeping later.” She then obsessively journeys to replicate the scent and the memory of the scent in the plant materials she has on hand. 

“If I’m able to ethically harvest some of the plant matter in that area for distillation, tincture or infusion later… Well, bonus!” she wrote. “Sometimes I’m able to exactly mimic the scent, and other times the end product is more of a personal interpretation.” 

Found in Nature 

Lindner doesn’t want her essential oils to be confused with some of the other, heavily marketed companies.  She has taken care to grow her small business with high quality in mind, using reusable, recyclable, and compostable packaging materials as well as responsibly sourced plant materials.  Lindner refers to her scents as “natural personal fragrance – perfumes – made from essential oil blends and organic bases, such as alcohol or fractionated coconut oil.”   

Testimonials on her website show that customers often praise how long the smells linger. 

“I work as often as possible with Oregon-based manufacturers so that the environmental impact is minimized in terms of packaging and fuel required to transport goods, etc, and so that some of the profits can stay localized,” Lindner wrote. “I don’t grow any of the plants that I use. I buy the essential oils pre-distilled from ethical purveyors, and I occasionally – rarely actually distill my own sagebrush essential oil.  Then I blend them in a studio in my home.” 

Per her website, she also donates 10% of sales of the “Badlands” scent to “the Institute for Applied Ecology’s Great Basin Sagebrush Project, a nonprofit initiative that connects prison inmates with nature by teaching them to cultivate sagebrush for the species that rely on it for food and shelter.” 

The Smell of Wildness 

 

Lidner sums up her mission by saying, “The way we humans live now is far removed from our ancestors due to our own imposed modernization and evolution. Most of us live and work in spaces that are manufactured to be comfortable and consistent regardless of the time of day or year. We don’t spend enough time outside; nature deficit disorder is a real thing. 

“As a result of this, our senses don’t get used enough the way animals get to use their senses, and we’ve lost some of the access (and in some cases, the ability) to tap into our own wildness, like sniffing subtle things in the air like elk musk or the changes in the seasons. 

“I think it’s important that we hold onto those abilities and to retain that access, so that we never forget that we’re part of nature.” 

If you’d like to try her scents, she offers sample size options on her website, Firn Handcrafted. She also sells full size bottles online as well as at The Golden Crane at 110 SW Third Street in Corvallis, the new Mountain Rose Aromabar in Eugene, and The Workhouse or Earth Body Massage in Bend. 

By Stacey Newman Weldon 

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