What Do Elves Smell Like?

Hmmm! It smells like elves!” thinks Bilbo Baggins, as he and his companions slither and slip their way “into the secret valley of Rivendell” early in The Hobbit. The scent of trees is in the air, we’re told, and the smell of pine has just made Bilbo drowsy. Is that the scent he means?

And can Bilbo really be trusted to break down a smell, anyway? Does he have any training, say, as a perfumer’s “nose”? I think we all know the answer to that.

Even as dazzled as we are by the beauty and general glamour of all things elven, one might pause to wonder what exactly these shimmering creatures smell like—because you know that a creature as fabulous as an elf doesn’t just smell like a tree. Most important, how can we simple mortals smell like elves too?

Our resident perfume enthusiast Timothy Schaffert, who authored the delicious novel The Perfume Thief, imagines that elves might have a signature scent or two. “Djer-Kiss,” launched by Kerkoff in Paris in 1908, “is what comes to mind, based on its use of Maxfield Parrish’s art in the ads,” he says, “though to the modern nose it would smell less elven than simply flowery. Nonetheless I associate Djer-Kiss with wispy figures in fantasy. Or Scents of Wood’s Vetiver in Bloom. Smells of flowers in the woods. Jasmine, juniper, the cut-grass scent of vetiver, with the late spring lilt of a Korean lilac shrub.”

Beauty and wellness expert Rona Berg imagines that elves carry a scent of “sharp green grasses and a hint of honey. Or violet and tuberose, with a heady note of pine.” Our cover photographer Marketa suggests that an elf queen would smell like “the air after rain and flowers, like the scent that fills the air when spring trees are in bloom.” Theodora Goss imagines that one would smell like “linden flowers, sort of green and golden” but that elves generally “could smell like forests: like pine and oak trees, and the smell of last autumn’s leaves underfoot.” Or like “linden flowers and wild apple blossoms.” Or maybe like “meadow flowers and wild honey from the bees.” She believes that elves adore all of these: “Things that have strong scents: honeysuckle, wild roses, lilies of the valley. Elderberry flowers also have a lovely scent. There’s also a wildflower called meadowsweet that’s wonderful.”

Recently I was perusing the site of Sorce, perfumer Caitlin Hayes’s line of small-batch perfumes made in Charlotte, North Carolina, and came upon a scent called Strings of Light in the Forest, which sounds awfully elven to me. The description of the scent reads: “This warm and ethereal scent replicates the visual and olfactory experience of strings of light in the trees, with the playful addition of a vanilla milkshake note. Beeswax absolute is the star of the show, softened with Ambroxan … and made aromatic with lavender maillette and a very clean, light vetiver from Haiti.” Hmmm … can elves carry a note of vanilla milkshake in their scent? I can see an elven queen smelling like strings of light, with a touch of milkshake thrown in. Can’t you?

I also like Redditor Naive-Angle-3134’s idea that Galadriel specifically would smell like “pearls, the warmth of sunlight on skin, wet moss, faint white flower, gold, mildew, ivy, and the metals of her dagger, oakmoss and cotton.” In answer to the same question, what perfume would Galadriel wear, I was happy to see Redditor kitschwitch_ name one of my personal favorites, D.S. & Durga’s Steamed Rainbow, which attempts to capture the scent of a rainbow—a rather elven mission, one might say—and to me has a gorgeous grassy, dreamy after-rain fragrance. And then there’s this suspiciously confident answer from IdleExpatter on another Reddit thread titled “I want to smell like an elf from LOTR”: “All the wood elves smell like Diptyque Tam Dao except for Legolas who smells like goddamn Santal 33.”

Perhaps this is a job for experts. Luckily, some of our favorite perfumers have imagined and even created scents inspired by (and for?) our leaf-eared friends and those of us who’d like to emulate them. Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, which has a scent for everything, has two explicitly elven scents, and then plenty more for fae creatures generally. Elf Perfume Oil is conjured from pale golden musk, honeycomb, amber, Parma violet, hawthorn bark, aspen leaf, forest lily, life everlasting, white moss, and a hint of wild berry; on my skin, it’s beautiful and light, all honey and berries in a dewy forest filled with elves played by Liv Tyler. And then Half-Elf is all white sandalwood, beeswax, white tea leaf, oud, with a hint of sophisticated urban musk, and to me smells more deeply woodsy and smoky. If you take out the sweet, floral beeswax I can even imagine it being Legolas’s new fave. BPAL also has a Fae Forest atmosphere and linen spray that conjures the mist-shrouded woods, with Siberian fir needles, white pine bark, aspen leaf, and other notes (including suspiciously otherworldly ones like “sun-star”); you can spray it on your clothing, bedding, and everything else to transform your surrounds from mundane to elven instantly.

Deep Midnight Perfumes offers a Company of Elves Perfume Sampler Set, which includes six vials, one of which, Lady of Light, is “a feminine blend that will surely please the most discriminating Elven Queen”; it contains notes of orange blossom, vetiver, and oakmoss combined with honey, azalea, and woods. It’s very floral and sweet, as is Evening Star, which is heavy with delicious, intoxicating night-blooming jasmine. My favorite of the scents might be Silvan Prince—an otherworldly green and woodsy unisex scent with a strong dose of … sandalwood.

Pineward Perfumes could not be more elven in its very mission: to make you smell like a pine tree. Really, really like a pine tree. These handcrafted essences use raw, natural ingredients and are, according to perfumer Nick Nilsson, “unapologetically brutal affairs.” Though all Pineward’s tree scents could arguably be called elven, the most explicitly so might be the gorgeous Murkwood. Murkwood smells so intensely and even ominously of the deep forest—with its notes of fir balsam, black hemlock, lapsang souchong, moss, incense, and bitter myrrh—that you can nearly feel the resin running down bark, sense the sharp needles and rough pinecone scales. Its juice is green and leaves a mark on your skin (which comes off), while its scent transports you not to a light berry-filled forest but to a place that’s dark and foreboding, filled with gnarled fir boughs and goodness knows what else that’s lurking there. But heck yes, we love those elves too!

Icelandic perfumer Andrea Maack’s Coven scent is described by the brand as “borderline elven” and like “the smell of a clean forest after rain at dawn,” though to me it smells more raw, spicy, perfect for spellwork (i.e. everyday wear). But these are not Tolkien elves and who knows what those Icelandic ones get up to. “Here in Iceland,” brand director Sarah tells me, “elves are not a fairy tale—they are our neighbors! Many of us know that they live right here, tucked inside the ancient rocks and lava fields that stretch across our incredible landscape. Wearing Coven is like being greeted by the fresh, earthy scent of wet moss and damp rock, as if you’ve just stumbled upon a secret doorway into the world of the Huldufólk.”

If you don’t want to commit to smelling like an elf, but still want to add an elven vibe to your life, olfactorily speaking, Firelight Fables has created a candle to transport us to an ancient elven sanctuary, “where ancient texts and healing powers abound” and “graceful elves roam the city” while “serene melodies of elven music blend with the soothing sounds of cascading waterfalls.” Well, yes please! Their City of Elves candle has top notes of ozone and citrus (this city is by the sea), middle notes of sea salt and jasmine, and bottom notes of violet, cedar, powder, and light musk. It also comes with its own playlist, mostly filled with music from the Lord of the Rings films. I didn’t necessarily smell the sea when I burned this candle, but I smelled all manner of springtime elven deliciousness that made me forget I live in the world of man.

So why not add an elven vibe, scent, and soundtrack to your everyday? Why not force your friends (and enemies) to cry out, “It smells like elves!” when they draw near? I think we’ve established that all elves—whether they lean light or dark, whether they emit the scent of berries or a deep, dark, haunted wood—smell incredible.

Follow Carolyn on Instagram @carolynturgeon.