Unquiet
Things

Porcelain Bat (warm, unsettling thrum of musky fur and leathery wings smushed against frosted orris root and vanilla plaster dust) The warmth of living fur translated through frost, musky and intimate but held at a distance, like running your hand along a taxidermied ermine in a Victorian curiosity cabinet, soft, oddly tender, and deeply unsettling in its refrigerated stillness. There’s a chalky sweetness clinging to the claws, cream gone cold and dusty, the chilled incense of snowy little footprints preserved in ice.

Interview with the Lovebat (pink strawberries floating in sparkling blood orange and French lime fizz, enveloped in a swooshy cape of black velvet plum) Cartoon-bright citrus fizzing with fruit-punch pandemonium, the unhinged glee of Marge Simpson and Linda Belcher getting day drunk on gin-gimlets sprinkled with pop rocks and Nerds and deciding they’re starting a cult or a band or maybe both, their vision board includes glitter, all the cutest pictures of Gene Wilder, and at least seven different shades of pink highlighter.

Hiss & Hearse (a dribble of Dorian and a squiggle of Snake Oil, delicately stirred with a moss-crusted muddy shovel) Sugar-cubed breakfast tea staining antique lace, a doily dropped and ground into cemetery mud, delicate embroidery work sodden with petrichor and root rot. Something powdery-sweet that should be refined and parlor-proper now caked in wet earth, the smell of a Victorian burial shroud exhumed after a heavy rain, still clinging to its faded elegance even as soil crusts the hems. Graveyard loam sweetened with the ghost of afternoon service, bone china teacups filled with dirt.

Witch Flash (tattoo ink infused with sorcerous roots and heady incense). The blackest black that light refuses to touch, proprietary darkness jealously guarded, Vantablack if it grew roots and got tangled in underground electrical wiring. Dank sour earth threaded with something chemical and adhesive, the smell of vinyl insulation wrapped around ancient woody resins, rubbery and sharp and deliberately strange. A color so black it’s basically a monopoly, a void so deliberately crafted it feels witchy by sheer force of absorbing everything around it, turning incense smoke into something industrially arcane and territorially weird.

Skeleton Flash (polished bone shards, scorched sandalwood and tattoo ink) The other end of that proprietary spectrum, what happens when you develop the negative and all that jealously-guarded darkness flips to stark white light. Bare canvas stretched over scorched wood, primer coat before the ink goes in, the erasure that comes before creation. Bleached cotton, chalk dust, correction fluid painted over mistakes, clinical and clean. The empty space, the blank page, a more fraught and unforgiving reckoning than being lost in the dark, somehow more existentially annihilating than staring down the void.

I’ve Got Out At Last (torn paper revealing scorched plaster embedded with bitter citron, yellow grapefruit, and damp white cedar) Perfect citrus segments arranged on a plate you can only see through iron bars, the breezy morning light cruel in its beauty. Grapefruit pith papery and bitter, dried allium flowers, pale purple pompoms translucent and slightly vegetal and musky-sharp, the detritus of something once fresh now aged into brittleness. That texture of things left to desiccate in captivity, the ghost of brightness viewed through obstruction, just the bitter rind of it pressed against your tongue.

Batty Lace (a leathered up, musky interpretation of Antique Lace) Bela Lugosi’s Dead run through a sticky-syruped tape deck, caramel-amber static, cotton candy spun through patchouli interference, sweet pop frequencies cutting to Motörhead grinding through blown speakers, then Sisters of Mercy cathedral-goth reverb deep and dark. Every time you think you’ve locked onto one signal, the transmission cuts out, and it shifts into something completely contradictory, soft Pink Pony Club sweetness short-circuits into something bass-heavy and shadowed and back again. [EDIT: Ha! I guess I reviewed this in 2023, too. Here is what I said, “The caramel aspect of this blend is what I notice most, a buttery-milky brown sugar caramel that wants to ooze over vanilla ice cream rather than firm up into fudgy squares. Shifting beneath the caramel are those faint, faded attic-trunk florals and creamy cobwebby linens I recall from Antique Lace and a cracked leather buckle so ghostly and elusive I’m not sure if it was actually ever there at all.”]

Dead Leaves and Skin Musk Soap bubbles catching October’s dying light, the way autumn evenings used to stretch infinite even as they ended early, time moving differently when someone else kept track of it for you. Steam rising from water drawn by someone’s hands you’ll never see again in this lifetime, that drowsy warmth after hours spent kicking through leaf piles, the exhaustion of childhood translated through clean suds and amber dusk. Bath time as the day collapses into early darkness, warm and safe and somehow unbearably tender in retrospect.

Interminable Grotesques (narcissus blooms lolling on broken stems, their buttery perfume swelling into a debased crescendo of honeyed heliotrope, toxic lily of the valley, almond blossom, and opium poppy) Honeyed and narcotic, the kind of dizzying pareidolia where you keep almost seeing something recognizable before it dissolves back into confused blooms. Marzipan shaped into wedding cake flowers, perfect and poisonous, the immediate wrongness of food mimicking flora mimicking food. Almond ghost-flickering through a blanket of heavy white petals, there for a second, then gone, sweetness piled on sweetness until it becomes a hypnotic spiraling, beautiful in that specific way that makes you slightly sick.

Dia de los Muertos (dry, crackling leaves, the incense smoke of altars honoring Death and the Dead, funeral bouquets, the candies, chocolates, foods and tobacco of the ofrenda, amaranth, sweet cactus blossom and desert cereus) A dream, a classroom, you hear your name, but it’s coming from both inside the lesson and outside the door. “The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead/ Did squeak and gibber…were it not that I have bad dreams,” intones a distant voice, fading. Death wrapped in vinyl, a smear in a shower curtain, a red, red hand pressed against the film. A trail of something slick and sticky, honeyed tobacco, a fruity resin, and sweet, grassy, dried blooms in its wake. A shape beckons through the barrier, a dread, phantom thing in wrapped plastic, calling from beyond the corner, and you’re walking toward it —you can’t stop walking toward it.

Cherry Cola Hearse (fizzy pop and a syrupy slick of motor oil splashed across disintegrating tan leather seat) Waxy cherry candy stretched into ropes, dense chocolate-adjacent chew that’s not quite chocolate, the slick pomade perfection of Kennickie’s hair catching light in the rearview mirror (“A hickey from Kenickie is like a Hallmark card, when you only care enough to send the very best!”) Fake-fruit plasticky Twizzler sweetness, Tootsie Roll richness, everything polished with product and oily swagger, neon light shine and candy-slick confidence.

Hearse of Pancakes (black coffee, syrup-drenched buckwheat cakes, and a crusty cruller for the road) One of my brothers-in-law is a bit of a coffee enthusiast (also a bit of a snob, but that’s not important to the story) and he drags us to every cafe and coffeeshop he can find whenever the family is all together. This smells exactly like what he orders, or some version of it: cafe mocha and a pastry, bitter-chocolate darkness meeting sugar-glazed fried dough. He’s Icelandic, so he usually goes for the cream cake option, but this is my rose-tinted glasses recollection of those afternoons I’ve spent at small tables while he evaluates the beans, the roast, the crema, and I just smell this exact combination over and over until it becomes the scent of family obligation turned oddly tender and sweet.

The Woman Behind it (silvered lavender and white iris shuddering like lamplight on stained plaster, ambergris frothing through vanilla husk, and the phantom outline of a rose-touched woman’s silhouette) Sneaking into Deborah Turbeville’s Unseen Versailles, elegant ghost stories and hazy hallucinations of antique decadence. A sliver of lavender soap worn translucent, the waxy trace of vintage lipstick on forgotten drinking glasses, pale powdery woods exhaling through dust-shrouded chambers. Those fleeting witnesses—hairpins, papers, cosmetics left in neglected storage rooms—so delicate an open window might blow them all away. The specific scent of beauty rituals frozen mid-performance, isolation and romanticism suspended in abandoned gilt, the haunting intimacy and immersion of faded grandeur where pristine splendor once might have kept you behind velvet ropes.

Dead Leaves and a Woolly Jumper. The main character from some isekai anime I’m making, totally making up just for this perfume review, but if someone writes the screenplay, they’d better give me credit! “I Died Choking on Strawberry Milk Pocky and Got Reincarnated as the Autumn Demon Queen.” Dead leaves crushed underfoot, meeting kawaii streetwear: the crunchy vegetation of seasonal decay paired with fuzzy pink cable-knit and cartoon-animal faces. She’s supposed to preside over fall and mortality but shows up to every council meeting in a patchwork sweater with bunnies on it, strawberry milk powder dusting her sleeves, strawberry marshmallow mochi in her pockets, strawberry white choco latte in her baby pink Stanley cup, pastel in a world of russet and rot, autumn trying its best to be taken seriously while its demon queen insists on being adorable. (I’ll be honest, this sweater inspired this entire review.)

Lime Green Hearse (lime rind, citron, petitgrain, white musk, a swish of bay rum and a bit of black pepper)  What if the green fairy wasn’t absinthe at all but lime flavoring? That chemical brightness that tastes nothing like actual limes but everything like the Platonic ideal of citrus translated through laboratory genius. An electric emerald conjuring that appears in jelly beans, gummy bears, snow cones, Jello molds, Freezee pops, a green that only exists in artificial form, nature could never! La fée verte viridian visions granted not through wormwood but through whatever makes lime lifesavers taste like that, like chartreuse and shamrock make you feel, impossibly, deliriously green.

Hot Pink Hearse (flashy pink guava, strawberry jam, sugared pink grapefruit, blackberry, bergamot, and pink champagne adorned with a gleaming chrome Landau bar) OMG. This is the absolute, exquisite embodiment of the best Kool-Aid recipe ever, courtesy that one scene in Slumber Party Massacre: one package of Kool-Aid (ultra-pink, berried chaos, fruit-punch-adjacent) and seven heaping cups of sugar dissolved into a scant tablespoon of water. I swear you can even smell the fizzy granules wafting up to tickle your nostrils. Complete and utter perfection.

Committing Every Artistic Sin (turmeric-dusted acrid marigold, linseed oil, bitter orange peel, crumbling plaster, clotted vanilla, and a whiff of sweet mildew) The smell of creative obsession after you’ve been working for days without noticing, that moment you finally surface and realize you’re hungry and aching and haven’t showered in who knows how long. Something sour and unwashed, cheesy and human, the physical cost of disappearing into your work. From across the room it’s intriguing, that particular musk of someone deep in the zone, but up close it’s almost repellent—the reality of bodies neglected in service of making something. Where do we go when we’re like that? What liminal space swallows us whole, spits us out days later blinking and disoriented? You leave your body there, or it leaves you, time moves differently or doesn’t move at all. You emerge with paint under your fingernails, ink stains blooming across your palms, the ghost of ideas still clinging to your hair. The work gets done but you can’t remember eating, sleeping, the basic maintenance of being alive. You’ve been somewhere else entirely, some fevered creative underworld where the only thing that matters is finishing, completing, manifesting whatever’s been clawing at your insides demanding to exist. This is what that place smells like—not the glossy fantasy of the tortured artist, but the actual funk of artistic sin. Stale breath and forgotten meals, skin gone sour from stress hormones and tunnel vision, clothes worn too many days in a row because changing them would mean acknowledging the outside world still exists. The sourness of someone who’s been burning themselves as fuel, converting flesh and sleep and sanity into something tangible, something real. You bring back the work, yes, but also this smell, this evidence of the sacrifice, proof you went somewhere most people won’t follow because it costs too much to stay there. The dry down smells like the finished work itself, an earthy elegance polished by multiple drafts and a diligent editor, refined into something presentable… but underneath runs an insistent current, the indelible signature of the creator’s weird funk.

The Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab 2025 Halloween collection is currently live and available for purchase. As this is a limited edition series, sample sizes imps are not available.

Need more ‘Weenies? Have a peep at my ‘Weenie reviews from the autumns of yesteryear 2024 // 2023 // 2022 // 2021 // 2020 // 2019 // 2018 // 2017 // 2016 

And PSSSST! Did you know I have collected all of my BPAL reviews into one spot? Here you will find 88 pages of my thoughts and rambles on various limited-edition scents from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab over the years: BPAL REVIEWS BY S. ELIZABETH (PDF download)

Are you new to one of our very favorite indie perfumers, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab? See my three-part primer here, here, and here.