Benjamin Esposito is the perfumer for House Of Mammoth and is what I like to call a silly goose, but a silly goose that makes you feel things. The concepts are nerdy, a little weird, comforting, philosophical and heartbreaking.
The first perfume that caught my eye was purely for the name - DinoS'mores. The classic camping treat enjoyed by the dinosaurs we know and love of the Mesozoic era. If there was ever a tasty treat that would let my beloved Brachiosaurus and Allosaurus hang out by a campfire for 5 minutes without fisticuffs happening...well, this is what that smells like.
Then I found Everett; it's based on a real boy. The description that is given for it sounds like the nostalgia of being 6 years old again. Now, that sounds like a pleasant enough story but I saw a video of Ben talking about the story behind the perfume and oh boy did I cry. Everett drowned in a pond when he was 3. The design of the bottle is a half-coloured image of the House Of Mammoth logo, colouring book style, with crayons lying around which was designed by Everett's dad. The artwork on the bottle represents a life unfinished. Damn, a knife to the heart.
Snippid is the life cycle of a leaf. A LEAF! Not a perfume that just smells green or woody or like an autumn day, oh no, no, no. Ben has decided to give us this particular leaf's backstory, from the beginning where he's (yes, it's a he) fresh and full of life to his eventual drying out. The idea to take something so ordinary and turn it into a journey of the life of a leaf. If photosynthesis was a note, I wouldn't even question it in this. I would smell the chlorophyll producing energy for our little leaf buddy.
And that's barely scratching the surface. There's the nerdy (Shire, Kryptonite), the philosophical (You & I (Will Die)), and the deeply personal (Embrace). There's seemingly no limit to where Ben finds inspiration.
I think that's what draws me particularly to House of Mammoth. The phenomenal way Ben brings you into the inner workings of the world through humour, curiosity, nostalgia and some very real human emotion. To me, House of Mammoth demonstrates the ability to find inspiration not just in heavy philosophical or emotional ideas, but in the seemingly insignificant, exploring them in a playful or deeply meaningful way. And I don't think one is any less worthy of artistic appreciation than the other. House of Mammoth has an extraordinary emotional range. One minute I'm emotionally invested in an imaginary leaf, and the next I'm crumpled on the floor, sobbing in the foetal position.
House of Mammoth is a brand I genuinely love and want to see more people discovering. There's something wonderful about experiencing the scent journey Ben has laid out, but also being able to bring your own imagination into it. To interpret how the perfume smells, what it represents and what the story means to YOU