Unquiet
Things

Vallense Source A nocturnal glamour-cryptid, cloaked in its own velvety wings, its vast buggy eyes like antique opera glasses. It lives in cultivated dark, manicured parks behind concert halls, the shadowed side of a fountain, topiaries at midnight. It has a taste for finer things and knows where to find them. You didn’t know it was on the guest list, but here you both are! Mossy and ambery and peppery, with a resinous sweetness that reads less like dessert than like the filling of some abstract turnover made with dry grasses and syrupy saps, ground and sweetened acorns bound together in something dark and flaking. Rich and musky-dry, slithery, a lurker. It unfolds slowly next to you on the bench, vast wings spreading, obscuring the moon, eyes enormous and unblinking. It means you no harm. It is simply drawn to the same things you are. It will have what you’re having.

Premiere Peau Doppel Dancers The shadow of something pale and cold against silk, light gathering at the edges, overcast. A duel with its back turned, a frozen moment of stillness, each gazing outward, away, the recognition of what lies between dissipating as each follows its gaze inward. Powdery and rooted and chilled, somber as cut stems left too long in cold water, as roots pulled halfway from dark soil, neither fully of the earth nor free of it. The same flower meeting itself from opposite sides of the membrane. Each one a version of the same thing: two that are one, neither fully one thing nor the other, caught in that charged space between. At the back, a molassesy brown sugar darkness, fungal and sweet, the earth already in quiet conversation with what stands above it. Something close to the work of an artist of constructed selves, of thresholds, of becoming and unbecoming: the white mask held to the blank sky, the foliage climbing the legs inch by inch, the landscape making its slow, patient claim on a body that moves through it. A ghost caught between breaths, already deep in tender negotiation with what waits beneath the soil, a surrender so private and so deliberate it feels indecent to witness. The presentiment of something not yet arrived but already, somehow, complete.

Rahasya Chai Addiction This is a fleeting review, much like its gorgeous but utterly fleeting top notes of ginger and cardamom. Delicate, ephemeral, and in one nostril and immediately out the other. Not even a slow fading spicy goodbye, but a chaste, wispy vanishing. After this near-instantaneous disappearing act, is almost straight-up, 100% the creamy/cozy white musk, sweet grasses and hay, and warm, breezy sandalwood of Coty Vanilla Fields… with the teensiest-tiniest inclusion of a bit of milky black tea (all latte, no tannins though). I love Vanilla Fields! So that’s not really a problem. But, that is a thing that exists at a much lower price point! However, if someone wanted to gift me a bottle of Chai Addiction, I would be super excited to receive it, and I would wear the heck out of it. I have a birthday coming up next month. Hint hint hint.

By/Rosie Jane Matilda opens with passionfruit that is almost too much, funky and warm and slightly sour. A little creamy. A wet dog and her pup cup. There’s something about the scent that translates to me as a fuggy pink, road-dusted, rained-on toe bean. Or maybe Gertrude Abercrombie’s snail shell on dark sand under a crescent moon, a woman’s torso emerging from the spiral of it, dreamy and shadowed and smudged, a little begrimed? The artist’s feral cats, watching from their litter box just outside the frame. “Would you still love me if I was a worm?” energy, whimsy, sweet and alive, rolling around in something a little rank.

Escentric Molecules Molecule 01 + Champaca Heady and luminous, steamy and silky, velvety and floating, kaleidoscopic and shadowed…all of these things seem quite the opposite of one another, and yet these are all of the sensations and impressions arising from just a scant few minutes with Escentric Molecules Molecule 01 + Champaca. An opulent, intoxicating spray of creamy orange blossoms encased in glowing citrine, cloaked in dusk and shade, illuminated by a breathless summer evening’s first moonbeam. It’s stunning.

If you missed it earlier this month, I reviewed a handful of fragrances from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s Lupercalia collection!

and finally….Poesie’s The Bunny Collection…

Bad Hare Day: A heavy-handed sprinkle of brown sugar crystals, golden amber molasses-lite funk, over a pillowy cloud of full-fat whipped cream, almond wisps soft and musky. A clinging cottony fluff, like a small, warm creature has just vacated the spot beside you.

Moon Rabbit: Almost-jasmine, almost-cherry, honeyed and drifting, wilting softly in the steam from a cup of green tea, grassy, restrained, a soft ellipsis of bitterness. A dewy footprint in the soil after a night of sleepwalking through the cold silver fields, frost-pale leaves.

Sunny Bunny: Somewhere on the sands underneath a striped umbrella where it is perpetually 1965, Gidget is doing the watusi at the edge of the surf, and hot dogs are a nickel, there is a beach bunny who left for spring break and is still looking to catch the perfect wave. Salt-crusted whiskers, sun-fluffed fur, a tiny dab of coconut sunscreen on its twitchy pink nose. Spring break was supposed to end and somewhere there is a fable about this.

Brown Bunny: Soft and creamy, cold and sweet, a peach that’s been syruped and jammed and ice-creamed, and is also possibly wearing a fleecy lavender bunny onesie.

400 Rabbits: A lime Peep, soft and rounded, the citrus baked into a dense, faintly powdery, sugary chew, the lime and the marshmallow fully merged into one slightly artificial, deeply satisfying thing, sitting next to the other weird novelty offerings, like the deviled egg and glazed ham Jones Cola on the Easter dinner table.

Sir Hopsalot: A glazed sweet bun served on a craquelured ceramic bunny plate, the thin crackling sheen of the pastry mirroring the aged glaze of the dish beneath it, both of them faintly dusted with musty bergamot, tea that has been sitting a little too long in a very nice cup. There is a childhood habit of ascribing inner lives to the objects in one’s house, the lamp with sassy opinions, the armchair with a dignified sadness, the sugar bowl that is simply beside itself with joy to be of service. The plate would like you to know it is pleased to make your acquaintance!

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