Unquiet
Things

Celine Night Clubbing (I actually wrote this last month and forgot to include it, le whoopsie) You might be wondering how a sample of something called Nightclubbing ever even came to be in my possession, but for whatever reason, I have been weirdly intrigued by the idea of it, and serendipitously, an Instagram friend generously offered to send me a sample, so here we are! As a wallflower/homebody, the idea of nightclubbing in any form gives me the willies. And yet, I have somehow found myself on numerous occasions doing a nightclubbing-type thing. This is 100% because I am a people-pleaser and rather than rocking the boat, I just go along with the thing people want to do. When I find myself in these situations, I remind myself that, as a human, it’s good to have “experiences,” and I suppose I go into a bit of a dissociative/fugue state where I am looking at everything through rose-colored glasses, even while things are still presently happening. I call it rose-colored glasses, but I don’t know if that’s quite it. It’s more like “what are the good and lovely things about this unsavory situation that I can mine later for whenI inevitably write about it?” I smell that when I smell this perfume.

It calls to mind an album review I wrote several years ago for HÆLOS’ “Full Circle” – waxing poetic about that surreal stretch at the end of an evening when you’re in the cramped backseat of a car, forehead resting against cool glass, watching palm trees transform into celestial giants as streetlights become stars fading at the edges of your vision. Nightclubbing captures that moment when a beautiful night suddenly crosses to the other side of too late, triggering a nostalgic, aching void that’s perpetually lurking at your experience’s periphery. This is quiet aftermath after doing the thing, whatever the thing is, and it’s also the space between euphoria and melancholy where you’re sitting still, internalizing feelings you don’t yet fully comprehend but somehow recognize you will one day know all too well. It evokes that compulsion to desperately reach for connection in darkness, just to assure yourself that you are okay.

Beneath all this emotional complexity, Nightclubbing ultimately settles into a warm, sandalwood vanilla skin scent – vanilla as the throbbing heartbeat of a hand in your own when you’re no longer alone in the dark, the steady gorgeous thrum of human connection when the music has faded but its echo remains imprinted on your skin, a haunting reminder of the night’s ghostly tenderness.

…however.

That was upon my first sniff. It left me wildly feeling …feelings. Of some sort? It made me want to relisten to that album a thousand times, which I think I have done just in the past week alone. But sadly I can’t seem to recapture the experience of that first wearing of Nightclubbing. Now, every time I spritz it, it smells like a vanilla sandalwood air freshener from Bath and Body Works that one of my sisters uses all over her house, which doesn’t smell bad, but I also associate it with litter boxes that desperately need changing, so also..it kinda doesn’t smell great.

Sigh. The vagaries of fragrance!

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab x Haute Macabre Persephone’s Ascent A Persephone-inspired composition, minus the pomegranate! How incredibly marvelous, I love it already. Instead, a pale floral incense with a core of bleak woods. The release of a bitter, burning, frozen heart. A bleeding fist breaking violently through the earth, clutching a soft bouquet of pallid blooms. A blackbird’s shadow in the snow. A weeping spider biting through its tears. A spill of grief transmuted through the incubation of dreams. An exhalation of fading winter memories. A weary spirit in two halves, the beauty of how in escape you kept both.   A wrist ringed with the ghost of spring blossoms you’ll never smell. All the springs before you yet.

Diptyque Orphéon Cedar soda with juniper bitters. Water drawn from a limestone well surrounded by briar and bramble, thicket and thorn. Aerated ice chips that shatter between molars. A single cypress cone crushed between fingers. Cigarette ash that never quite made it to the tray. The condensation ring left on wood that won’t ever completely fade. Cold metal keys pressed against warm lips. The sharp intake of breath when the cosmic chords of Alice Coltrane’s harp arpeggios cascade through space, suspending time. Morning sky like a scrim of quartz; a little light, just enough to see by.

Serviette Frisson D’Hiver A shriek, a howl, a prolonged tee hee hee hee; a pause, a champagne hiccup, and everything shatters. A tinkling cackle pealing and slivering like weaponized bells, crystal blades that split and splinter the night. A lake that holds more stars than the sky ever dreamed of possessing – celestial sparklers, myriad, multiplying before your feet, even as your eyes glance upward noting their absence in the sky. What lake reflects what cannot be seen? What ghost swallows its own echo before sound can escape? Scent as the most terrifying Sailor Moon villain who never existed: pale as bone, bright as a blade, each breath a shard of story where you are nothing more than a footnote. Pitliess – all razor citrus and winter’s exposed nerve. Each droplet a fragment flung from some terrible, glittering precipice. Mercy drowned long before you arrived. More stars than sky, more reflection than reality. You’re not getting out of this alive.

Seance Perfumes Love And Eternal Darkness Imagine Nosferatu as a gentle collector of flower meanings, his spindly clawed fingers tracing the delicate lines of rare Victorian botanical guides. Each pressed bloom becomes a document of human transience – a memento of lives that bloom and fade, capturing moments more complex and fleeting than mere survival, than markers of age. In this herbal sanctuary, he studies the intricate ways humans forge connection: a language of touch, memory, and fugitive emotion that exists far beyond the physical realm of blood. His collection traces the trembling edges of human vulnerability – how a single flower can hold entire histories of love, loss, and longing, each petal a whispered secret of a life about to vanish. A predatory creature probing sensitivity and frailty, an immortal examining ephemera. Here, a bouquet takes shape: pale lilacs unfurl their powdery breath, soft as pillowy sleep, nestled against sprigs of lavender heavy with twilight, white jasmine trailing memories like pale ribbons of moonlight, and a single sprig of forget-me-not – a promise so delicate it might dissolve at a whisper. Each flower carries the same hushed message: I will visit you in dreams.

Aftelier Bergamoss Sweet grass crushed beneath wriggling toes burrowing into honeyed earth, the loamy green must of spring’s waking breath, Neko Case singing “maybe sparrow” plaintive at dawn in a golden grain of light-fall, wildflower valleys thrumming slow-footed with moss, burnished dew pearling, sun-soaked syrup suspended on unfurling ferns.

Chanel No. 19 reminds me of finding the perfect vintage vanity set at an estate sale—immaculate crystal bottles and silver-backed brushes arranged just so—but when you lean closer, you notice someone has etched a razor-sharp critic’s observation into the mirror’s edge. It’s not vandalism exactly, but a deliberate counterpoint to all that polish.

The fragrance carries itself with immaculate poise but sidesteps the accommodating softness we often expect from classic perfumery. Intensely sharp and dry and green, with an earthy, rootsy powderiness that feels pulled from some garden’s underground mysteries. There’s an acrid verdancy about it that reminds me of stumbling across a line from a Margaret Atwood poem or a Patti Smith lyric etched into pristine bathroom tile – the juxtaposition feels ridiculous considering we’re talking about a Chanel perfume, but that’s genuinely how it makes me feel. Alongside this runs what I can only describe as a leathery, grassy woodiness that makes me think of expensive boots walking purposefully through wild gardens.

That sour metallic tang and bitter effervescence feels unmistakably vintage to me, though I couldn’t tell you exactly why. But what keeps drawing me back isn’t just this quality—it’s how the scent seems to subvert its own refined elegance with what I can only call a punky funk. Like costume jewelry that’s outlived its original owner—slightly tarnished, impossibly elegant, carrying what feels like decades of stories. The fragrance exists in what I experience as a kind of gloomy luminosity, like sunlight filtering through grimy stained glass onto marble floors—both austere and achingly tender at once. It shifts on skin throughout the day, revealing facets that appear and recede like carefully guarded confidences. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of moss-covered stone steps leading to a garden where everything useful grows—medicinal herbs, not decorative flowers. Other times, it morphs into something mineral and cool, like running your fingers along marble that’s been sitting in shadow. Its most fascinating moments come when warmth breaks through all that greenness—not a golden warmth, but something more like the heat signature of intellectual fervor, the temperature of thoughts running too quick and deep to share casually.

A few extras: Over at Patreon, I share Six Perfumes For A Weekend Jaunt and A Peek At My Sister’s Perfume Shelf and over on Instagram I was featured in Eau La La by Genevieve’s most excellent Shelfie Sunday!

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