- 13 Dec, 2025 *
I’m on a mission to find a scent for my wedding next year.
I said in the first post that I’m not a big fan of wood fragrances, so of course the first of my many samples that I tried is Commodity’s Paper-.
Commodity’s whole deal is that their perfumes explore "scent spaces". Each one is part of a trio formed of Personal, Expressive, and Bold scents. As far as I understand it, the Expressive scents are the "core’ scent and the Personal and Bold (represented as - and + respectively) are variations on the theme, intended to be quieter or louder than the…
- 13 Dec, 2025 *
I’m on a mission to find a scent for my wedding next year.
I said in the first post that I’m not a big fan of wood fragrances, so of course the first of my many samples that I tried is Commodity’s Paper-.
Commodity’s whole deal is that their perfumes explore "scent spaces". Each one is part of a trio formed of Personal, Expressive, and Bold scents. As far as I understand it, the Expressive scents are the "core’ scent and the Personal and Bold (represented as - and + respectively) are variations on the theme, intended to be quieter or louder than the original.
I don’t remember why I picked up Paper-. I’m also not sure why I picked it up over Book, which - now that I’m looking at the notes - is much more my sort of thing.
Paper- is very much just a wood scent. The notes are IsoE Super in the top, Cedarwood and Sandalwood in the heart, and Amber in the base. At this stage in my smelling-things-journey, there’s no way I could pick out those notes. This just smells like wood.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice. To me it smells like walking around a lumber yard just after someone has been ripping sheets and the air is filled with sawdust that’s just beginning to settle to the ground, but you haven’t quite got there yet and you’re smelling it from a distance. It certainly doesn’t evoke paper for me, which is a shame.
This is very much a skin scent, too. That’s perhaps to be expected with the Personal version, though I note that all three are explicitly slim scents. This one is really light, though.
My skin normally loves fragrance. It soaks it in and even scents that people claim for after a couple of hours would linger on me for days if I let them. I don’t know if it’s because this has amber in it and I’ve gone noseblind or if it’s just that it’s such a light scent, but this seemed to disappear on me after just an hour or two.
The biggest surprise for me with this, though, is that my partner liked it a lot. My entirely unscientific rating system gave this maybe a 4 or 5 out of 10 on me, whereas she gave it a confident 7. This won’t make the wedding shortlist, because I don’t want to wear it again, but knowing she likes wood opens up some avenues for exploration that I may not have gone down prior to putting this on, and I count that as a success.