The Smell of Weather Turning perfume

This is my sometimes-favourite of all the perfumes - on my more playful days I prefer Superworldunknown, but The Smell of Weather Turning was the first of the Gorilla perfumes range to really catch my attention. It also caught my imagination, taking me on a journey as it matured on my skin: the essential oils that make up the scent evaporate and react with the skin's chemistry at different paces in any perfume, and in a fragrance as complex as this one it causes some dramatic changes.
First, let me share with you the story that this perfume tells me:
It's summer. It's been unbearly humid for days, to the point where the air seems to have a tangible weight to it. To escape the heat, I'd gone to the woods, and of course at that point the weather finally broke, pouring down a few weeks' worth of rain in just minutes. And now the rain has stopped. The air is finally fresh and clear, and it's a delight to breathe something so clean tasting. The earth smells fresh and alive and full of potential, and all the plants seem as relieved as I am for the change. The sun has come back out now, warming and drying both me and the ground, bringing out the scent of all the wonderful wild plants as I walk - nettles, somehow beautiful with their coat of raindrops and their green, pungent scent; chamomile, gentle but deep, its daisy-like flowers drying in the sunshine; and wafting from the town at the edge of the woods, the smell of freshly cut grass drying in the sun, no doubt cut just before the storm hit. I feel warm and alive and content.
The initial hit is unquestionably mint - the fragrance is loaded with peppermint and water mint, and if you happen to inhale whilst spritzing you will actually taste it. That's where I get the fresh, clean air feeling from, and I suspect that there's some trace of mint's natural cooling effect contributing to it, though it's very subtle.
The mint top notes gradually fade out, leaving behind just the slightest hint that they were once there. In their place, deeper, smokier herbal notes rise up to mingle with sweeter hints - the depth seems to come from chamomile, nettle and oakwood, whilst beeswax and hay provide a subtle sweetness that is strange and familiar all at once. The herbal base notes are what suggests earthiness to me, and somehow seems to evoke the smell of rain-wet hair drying in the sun to me as well. The cut-grass smell comes from the hay, of course, and the beeswax just pulls it together somehow.
The fragrance came about after Mark and Simon Constantine, the father and son team behind Gorilla perfumes (who are also on the main Lush team as well) had a chat with one of the shop workers, who happens to be a white witch. The conversation turned to how weather turning might smell. This got Mark's imagination going, and ultimately he decided that he'd like to make it into a perfume using materials that would have been around in Britain thousands of years ago - hence the nettles, chamomile and grass. Simon pulled it together and warmed it up with hay and oak, and added some more of the fresh green notes. Apparently the tough part was choosing the top notes - Simon didn't want to use a modern citrus note, as is quite common in fresh and herbal fragrances. Then Mark had the idea of putting in mint. I think it worked perfectly. 
All of the Gorilla perfumes react with each person's skin chemistry differently, as the scent is composed of essential oils. Many 'commercial' perfumes are carefully formulated to smell pretty much exactly the same on everyone. Now, I can see the point in it - people want to be able to sniff a test strip or even someone else who's wearing it and know it will make them smell the same way.
But where's the fun in that? Where's the individuality? Isn't a perfume meant to be like a signature, something distinctive for people to remember you by? And people really do associate scents with memories - the olfactory bundle, which processes smells in the brain, is virtually on top of the hippocampus, which processes short term memories into long term ones, and the two are well connected.
That's why scents can evoke memories so strongly - the scent of roses takes me back to my Nanna's garden when I was a little girl, collecting petals to make 'rose perfume' by mixing them into bottles of water, for example. It's also part of why this perfume may tell you a very different story to the one it tells me - you might have completely different memories connected to the various individual scents that make up the whole, and so your experience could be totally different. It's also down to how it reacts with your personal chemistry, of course.
Overall, I find this an unusual, complex and oddly comforting scent. Though the woody, herbal notes would traditionally be considered masculine, it smells amazing on women too - I find that the lighter notes tend to come through a little stronger on ladies, whilst the deeper notes take more of a back seat and add a real air of mystery.
If you get a chance, I'd advise you to give it a go. It's strange, it's mysterious, and it's absolutely beautiful.
Lots of Lush
Coralie