2026
Lupercalia is Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s annual love letter to desire in all its forms, and I have tried a dozen from this year’s collection. Here are my notes on grave soil and honey, grapefruit tassels at full tilt, a lumberjack of indeterminate personhood with very good biceps and an armpit of blueberry porridge (this is an extremely good thing, btw), and one carb-loading bear. And more!
…And to share the love, I’m hosting an Instagram giveaway for every single scent reviewed here. Head over to my Instagram for details on how to enter. (US only, I’m sorry to my friends across the waters.)
Drowsy Voyeur (plum-soaked black patchouli, indigo musk, poppy absolute, guava pulp, black tea, and tobacco) A friend tells me this afterward. She and a date snuck into the empty apartment in the corner of the building, the one with the perpetually broken lock and revolving door of tenants. The space smelled strange, she said. Overripe stone fruit and the dark ink watercolors of night air and the void and emptiness of a place between people. The wallpaper was intricate, spiraling, mediumistic, automatic linework, a Madge Gill drawing duplicated perfectly if Madge Gill had papered a bedroom in a building like this. In the dim light, mid-coitus, it resolved into eyes, dozens of them, staring, swiveling, seething, a shadowy shifting panopticon, humid and pulsing with fleshy plum pulp. Ma’am, this is a Wendy’s, I said.
White Chocolate, Date Paste & Lime Zest I want this to be a bar cookie-like dessert, so I can nibble on it. I want it to be a gorgeously quaffable cocktail, so I can imbibe. I want this to be a fragrance, so I can — oh, wait. This one we can do. I hate to use the literal notes of a perfume when I try to describe the experience of wearing it (it seems lazy to me as a writer! I want to use the words that describe its aspects and qualities and spirit and essence, and not just that, but I want to use the most ridiculously beautiful words available to me! And tell a speculative alternate timeline diary entry, a surrealist fairytale dream about it! But as a reviewer, I get it. You just want to know if you can smell the dates and the limes. Well, yes, you can! You can smell the sugary-tobacco-y dates and the cool, slithery lime and the creamy cocoa butter white chocolate, but it smells better than any single one of those things on its own. This is rich and chewy and opulent, a serving of Lime-Kissed Sticky Date Blondies with White Chocolate Drizzle and a Date Night: dark rum, white chocolate liqueur, fresh lime, date syrup float.
By Candlelight (beeswax, wildflower honey, copal resin, vanilla bean, balsam, and frankincense) Hot beeswax and honey pooling on warm, musky skin, sticky and languid and lacquered and frothed with cream. Bodies handled like precious objects, anointed and presented and arranged, elaborate ceremonies. I can imagine this is the fragrance Anne Rice had in mind when she wrote the Beauty series.
Bakyâ Perfume Oil (polished santol wood warmed by sun, the faint sweetness of coconut husk and rice powder, crushed sampaguita blossoms, pandan leaf, and a touch of palm sugar, oud, and chocolate suman) The paradox of recognition without origin. I know this smell, except I don’t, except I do; something in the olfactory memory reaches for it and comes back empty-handed, certain it was there but wouldn’t recognize it if it was. A confectionary Saturday morning something, cottony and fruity and starchy-soft, heady-waxy florals. Turkish delight by way of circus peanuts, both and neither, made of lychee and guava, rolled in coconut powder. This smells like someone’s childhood, somewhere. Not mine. But somehow I feel the loss of it regardless.
Sal y Pimienta (salty skin musk dusted with pink pepper) A white sheet ghost of your most aspirational self. The day you did everything right, you woke up early, exercised, kept every appointment, every promise, did right by everything, and took care of yourself, too. Clean sweat and goodwill and hard-earned dopamine pride, imprinted onto freshly laundered cotton and stored in a hermetically sealed chamber for the day you wake up feeling like a big loser pile of shit. Throw the good ghost sheet over your head and take a deep breath.
Honey Dust, Patchouli, and Orris Absolute Barry Keoghan, post-Saltburn grave-humping scene, Emerald Fennell’s most deranged gift to cinema. A cheeky sprinkle of improv sweetness, speckled and spattered across freshly turned earth, loamy and dark, coffee grounds worked into the burial mound. Somewhere, twenty miles away, a pale iris sits in a funeral bouquet on a windowsill.
Rose Quartz Phallus (rose cognac, sugared pink grapefruit, iced strawberries, and creamy sandalwood warmed by skin musk, vanilla bourbon, and glowing pink amber) conjures delightful visions of a grapefruit Haribo candy burlesque performance, pearled sugar pasties, bright pinky-coral musky-soapy citrus wig. A jiggling, jellied, bouncy, exuberant, tassel-twirling, sass-and-wink-and-shimmy extravaganza.
Isis and Osiris (blue lotus incense and kyphi resin dancing in a dusk-shadowed temple, black loam of the Nile and green papyrus crushed beneath bare feet, myrrh and cassia steeped in date honey, a glimmer of lapis and gold leaf pressed into linen, and a surge of floodwater returning to parched earth) I am not sure how I am supposed to write a review that even compares to this poetic list of notes, so I can only say is that it smells like when someone who knows better murmurs, “the soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis.” Incense like a drifting tide of stone and honey, heavy and dripping with craggy grief and stoic matter-of-factivism.
Blueberry Chai Truffle (jammy blueberries folded into creamy chocolate and dusted with cardamom, cinnamon, black tea, and warm milk). There is a lumberjack in the backwoods mountains somewhere. I don’t know if they are a man, a woman, genderfluid, nonbinary, cryptid, or what. Doesn’t matter. They look good in a flannel and a beanie, and they have a kind heart and exquisite biceps, and sometimes in winter, with their big, strong hands, they feed you spoonfuls of blueberry porridge they kept tucked up under their armpit to keep it warm for you. Syrupy bláberjagrautur, warm grainy oats, a gorgeous bit of musk.
Mangetsu (white musk, green mandarin, moonflower, oolong tea, crushed grass, ume blossom, and green amber) Eco-poet-author Robert Macfarlane writes about daylighting, the process of bringing buried rivers back to the surface, re-exposing them to sun and air and the communities who had been living unknowingly above them. And when it comes back, everything around it comes back too. Mangetsu smells like that recovered green space. The sharp green bite of new grass pushing through loosened soil. Unripe citrus, a cool, punchy idea with as of yet no focus. A powdery floral haze, waxy, something blooming in cool air for the first time in a long time, all that new growth over warming earth, something skin-close and alive underneath it all.
The Scholar’s Indiscretion (Japanese wineberries, ti leaf, osmanthus, and a dribble of plum wine) Fruity-zingy-almost-fizzy-definitely-giddy, this is a chaos of golden retriever puppies, a whole pile of them, all of them tumbling over each other, absolutely delighted with everything, no agenda beyond maximum joy and maximum destruction…translated into a very-berry-forward scent.
Nanggigigil Ako Sayo (ube candyfloss and rice paper-wrapped red bean custard candy) The ube and red bean listed in the notes are there in spirit if not in letter; what actually shows up for me is baked and grainy, the sweetness of pop tart crust and cake donut and olive oil cake, and maybe even bran muffins, baked up relentlessly wholesome, radiating warmth and carbohydrates, stacked high…and a cozy determination to snorf it all down. Lazy, nap-loving Rilakkuma in his motivated era, powerloading for Fat Bear Week!
The Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab 2026 Lupercalia collection is currently live and available for purchase. As this is a limited edition series, sample sizes imps are not available.
Need more Lupercalia scents? Have a peep at my Lupers reviews from 2025, 2024 and 2023 and 2022 and 2021 and 2020. Looks like I skipped a few years but we’ve also got 2017 and 2016 reviews as well!
…PSSSST! Did you know I have collected all of my BPAL reviews into one spot? I’m about two years behind with adding new stuff to the document, but as it stands, there are over 60 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)
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