Unquiet
Things

There’s a special kind of joy in writing about things you love. But let’s be honest: there’s an even deeper, more visceral satisfaction in absolutely demolishing something you hate. And when it comes to perfume, the stinkers provide far juicier material than the stunners.

Welcome to the omnibus edition of “Stinkers & Duds” – a monumental collection of over 25 fragrances that have assaulted my nostrils over the years. This isn’t just a recent roundup; it’s a grand anthology of olfactory offenders!

Why dedicate so much time and nose space to perfumes I can’t stand? Maybe it’s the catharsis of venting frustrations in an industry drowning in hype. Perhaps it’s the thrill of puncturing overinflated reputations or the solidarity of shared disdain. Or it could be as simple as this: good perfume is nice, but bad perfume is a story. It sparks conversation, ignites debate, and lets us revel in the shared experience of collective disgust. There’s a perverse thrill in describing just how a scent went wrong – was it a cacophony of mismatched notes, or a single accord so vile it dominates everything else? Think about it. You don’t call your friends over to smell something pleasant. But something truly heinous? That’s an experience you’ve got to share. “Oh my god, smell this. It’s like a crime scene in a bottle.”

This isn’t about being mean for the sake of it. It’s about honesty in an industry that often feels like it’s choking on its own marketing fumes. It’s about calling out the emperor’s new clothes when they smell like a dumpster fire wrapped in gas station plastic-wrapped fake roses. In this extensive compilation, you’ll find everything from overhyped designer launches, to niche creations that should have remained a fever dream. We’ve got reformulations that butchered beloved classics, and avant-garde experiments that prove not all innovation is progress.

So settle in for a long, wild ride through a putrid hall of shame. Whether you’re here to commiserate, looking for warnings, or just enjoy a bit of schadenfreude, prepare for an olfactory odyssey of the damned. Because while a good perfume might make you smell nice, there is nothing quite so much fun as sniffing out the truly awful ones …and raising a bit of a stink.

Vietnamese Coffee | d’Annam: I really wanted to love this fragrance; I was so intrigued by the idea. But the reality of it is that it smells like sour coffee-breathed admonishments and secondhand smoke from your cranky mother when you’re wearing too much fruity-floral Ex’cla-ma’tion eau de toilette and several greasy layers of cotton candy Lip Smackers before heading off for your first day of junior high circa 1989. As it dries down, the scent morphs into something eerily reminiscent of days-old espresso shots forgotten and sloshing in the bottom of a pink Caboodles organizer.

Invite Only Amber | 23 Kayali Fragrances: Invite Only Amber smells like spotting wonky, off-brand Spirit Halloween costumes in July. As in they attempted to capture the unparalleled autumnal opulence of Hermès Ambre Narguile, and put an orange spray tan on a white gourd and said, “ok, this is good enough, let’s call it Luxe Hookah Honeycomb or Fancy Tobacco Haze or maybe something really dumb, like Invite Only Amber.” It’s like a honeyed saffron cotton candy miasma, a saccharine amber simulacrum from a seedy midsummer carnival that leaves you longing for the rich, resinous depths of October’s golden hour.

Ôponé | Diptyque: Ôponé is a fragrance so revolting you’d think someone was joking, that it couldn’t possibly be real. But it is real, and I have a sample of it. It’s a vile cocktail of the following: a freshly-opened bottle of goopy, boozy-but-not-nearly-enough booze bitter berry Robitussin Maximum Strength Cough and Chest Congestion (possibly the one with Dextromethorphan and Guaifenesin), the most repellent, unpalatable artificial fruity-sour energy drink on the shelf with the most outrageously obnoxious packaging, the one so disgusting and foul that even the people you think might be into it would never buy, and the saddest long-stemmed fake rose wrapped in dusty crinkly plastic at the gas station. Nobody wants any part of this. Throw it in the trash immediately.

Tóor Tóor | Régime des Fleurs: Tonight I am sampling Tóor Tóor by Régime des Fleurs, and usually, it’s a bit fraught with this brand; it’s always an “oh, PLEASE, don’t be good!” ordeal because they are usually too good and TOO expensive. But. I needn’t have worried this time. My immediate and initial thoughts are that it’s like a vampire with a bizarre sweet tooth stumbled into a Precious Moment gift shop and drained all the sugary charm out of a figurine, leaving behind this twee, creepy, bloodless husk at the bottom of the trash bin, slowly dissolving in a puddle of garbage juice. The predominant notes of this unfortunate incident are of anemic citrus and a wan, powdery floral, and the strange cloying rot, spoiled nectar, and sour candied sewage of something that might have been cute, once? Like the undead remains of a Sanrio character, maybe? I don’t know, but it’s not good! Seems like my wallet is safe from you this time, Régime des Fleurs.

Shangri La Edition 2022 | Hiram Green: How do I say this without being unkind? Shangri-La from Hiram Green is less lush and harmonious utopian promised land and more a Hieronymus Bosch-envisioned hellish menagerie, blighted and bedeviled, doomed and damned–all the horror and grandeur and unbridled madness of the cosmos, distilled into one raspingly chaotic scent. The initial blast of overripe, fermented peaches and citrus fruit frizzles acridly at us, trumpeted straight out of a bizarre monster’s glossy pink backside; jasmine’s balmy decay wraps us in a fuzzy, fevered winding-sheet of a golden-throned man-eating bird, to remind us that all is vanity and the pleasures of the flesh are fleeting, and the strangely spiced kisses of a porcine nun linger on your skin like a grotesque memento from a carnival of depravity. In what twisted mind is this a Shangri-La? I think Hiram Green is having one over on us.

Apocalypstick | Mad et Len: While the notes listed for Apocalypstick, violet, rose, mint, (I thought I saw macadamia listed somewhere?) sound like a pleasant enough combination, what the perfume smells like to me is a village of small children infected with a vast malevolence of pure evil. This cloying candied floral doesn’t just tiptoe on the precipice of sweetness and decay; it’s not just a playful saccharine innocence masking a sinister undercurrent of rot. It is an immediate and overwhelming assault of viciously poisoned sugarplums stuffed with razorblades served to you by sticky fingers and pale faces with sharp teeth. It lingers, sickening on the skin like a toxic premonition, like a perpetual stain, an indelible mark of repulsion.

Fraaagola Saalaaata | Hilde Soliani: Fraaagola Salaaata is fun for a split second, it smells like strawberry Jello-scented lipgloss or a tiny bottle of effervescent berry eau de toilette that was sold alongside Angel Face Barbie in the 80s. Very sweet, with no nuance or complexity (though I do think that’s sort of the point of a perfume like this.) But then it becomes this monstrous vision of a wild strawberry-kiwi-ice-breeze-whatever vape pen shoved up a half-melted red gummy bear’s butt, and even more horrifying still, a plume of vape juice smoke billows out of its squished little vape bro mouth, and oh my god I am gagging and you don’t even want to see the face I am making just now.

Good Girl Gone Bad | By Kilian: If you have ever entered a hotel room immediately after the cleaning service has come and gone, then you are familiar with the scent of Juliette Has a Gun’s Good Girl Gone Bad. It is the powerful chemical cleaning agent miasma of grotty carpet and suspect duvets that have been freshly Febrezed, the delightfully noxious fumes of Scrubbing Bubbles, and the abrasive surfactants and solvents of industrial glass cleaner. If this Good Girl has Gone Bad, I suspect it’s because she kidnapped someone, concocted for them a toxic cocktail of these ingredients, toasted to their health in that shady hotel room while tossing her own drink over her shoulder, and skipped town while the evidence lay convulsing on the floor. Maybe they deserved it. I don’t judge these things. And I would also neither drink –nor wear– this fragrance.

Salt | Ellis Brooklyn: What even is the point of this? It’s the “live laugh love” of fragrance.

L’Interdit Eau de Parfum | Givenchy:  Givenchy L’Interdit is…oof. It makes my hips ache and my knees creak. It makes me feel like a fucking fossil. This is a candied fruity floral, like crushed shards of every flavor Jolly Rancher forming the vague shape of a flower but I think anyone who smells it will agree it is no flower found in nature. Do you know who smelled it and loved it and thought it was “bomb” and “fire” and “literally everything,” though? A quartet of college girls who robbed a fast-food restaurant and stole a car to fund their spring break plans and who then got bailed out of jail by a skeezy clown of drug dealer/rapper/arms dealer named Alien who looks just like James Franco. I’m pretty sure they are all about this bikini bacchanalia neon candy Harmony Korine girls gone wild hedonist hell of a scent, and man, they can have it. I’m too old for this shit.

You Or Someone Like You | Etat Libre d’Orange: ELdO You Or Someone Like You is the screechy confrontational performance art of a person having a freaky public meltdown, a full-out adult tantrum, taking place midafternoon in a popular coffee chain or a ubiquitous lingerie store in the mall, and which is probably being recorded by spectators for millions of future views on YouTube even as the melodrama is unfolding. It’s the synthetic aroma of an indoor public space filled with too many people breathing at once and poorly circulated air, the awkward musk of distressed and embarrassed onlookers, the cool mineralic concrete of silent complicity, the acrid, antiseptic arrogance of entitlement and the tang of weaponized tears and performative victimhood of someone who felt personally attacked by Victoria’s Secret’s return policy regarding thong panties or the fact that Starbucks was out of oat milk for their ridiculous latte order. You or Someone like you is the fragrance of someone making a massively upsetting stink in front of a crowd and feeling absolutely no shame or remorse because they have a right to everything, they deserve everything, merely because they exist.

Accident À La Vanille – Almond Cake Limited Edition | Jousset Parfums  Almond Cake is so nightmarishly awful that I was inspired to write a haiku for it…

A Robitussin
and playdough and almond milk
frathouse haze: DRINK, DRINK!

Pear Inc | Juliette Has A Gun: Rotting clumps of sour milk, canned fruit that’s been forgotten in a bunker for 35 years, and the slutty Egyptian musk that a zombie stripper demon might wear while giving you a wildly uncomfortable lap dance. My god. I just want to hurl this sample straight into the sun.

Eye of Seven Hills | Alghabra Parfums: Pink grapefruit sour gummies and …whiskey…? This is what happens when you let a 4-year-old play bartender. Learn to mix a drink, kid!

Poets of Berlin | Vilhelm Parfumerie: Poets of Berlin from Vilhelm Parfumerie is a vile bioluminescent mutant blueberry thing. A blueberry subjected to a sketchy, underfunded experiment in a prototype telepod but there was also a particle of lemon-aloe-bamboo Glade air freshener in the chamber before it was hermetically sealed as well as a smashed bedazzle gem that fell off of an intern’s acrylic nail, unnoticed. Torn apart atom by atom, the small jammy fruit merged with the glinting shards of sugary bling and a blisteringly caustic glow-in-the-dark citrus-lily. I don’t think David Bowie ever wrote a song about this monster but there was a movie adaptation with Jeff Goldblum.

Si Giorgio | Armani: There exist a handful of black currant and rose scents that are very lovely and unique. Armani Si is not one of them and frankly, it feels crass and vulgar and quite common in comparison. It’s a candied floral musk that sours to an offputting fruity cocktail, something with strawberries and cheap sparkling wine and I feel like this is a themed drink served as part of your book club’s annual romance pick, and god why can’t they ever let you pick the smutty selections? There’d be way more explosive body horror and horny devils and raving madwomen in the attic. None of this secret sexy neighbor or coworker enemies-to-friends or surprise baby basic bullshit. So yeah Si is your book club’s most boring member’s spicy pick. It’s probably called Billionaire Daddy or Tempting the Boss or something.

Rue St Honore | OUAI: Rue St Honore from Ouai is giving me some real idyllic springtime wisteria-draped cottagecore Crabtree & Evelyn Gunne Sax tradwife YouTube influencer exploited by their alt-right faschy podcaster husband for their perceived domesticity, femininity and purity vibes. Is this a field of violets and daisies and gingham picnic daydream or an escapist nostalgia-trap weaponized by Neo-Nazis? Maybe I am overthinking it, but there is something about this quaint floral garden fragrance that feels wildly wrong and deeply uncomfortable and makes me desperately itchy to stage an intervention for someone.

Decadence | Marc Jacobs: Imagine you won a contest run by your local radio station, you know the one with the obnoxious sexist pig morning show duo, generically called something like “Big Dude Bro and the Little Vermin.” Yeah, so you–lucky you!–entered this contest where the prize was the privilege of getting to spend the night in a local spot purported to be haunted. Great, right?! Well, turns out it’s just a sketchy vape shop and the “ghost” is like, how someone saw Jesus’s face in a baked potato or something. And that actually happened next door in the crusty diner. The moment you walk in the door you are assaulted by the sickening aroma of maple syrup vape juice, a cloying waft from an empty rum raisin ice cream container crawling with many-legged insects, and the dusty fumes of your meanest ancestor’s cherry pipe tobacco. Was it a haunting or was it Marc Jacobs Decadence? You conclude that while you did not experience anything in the slightest bit supernatural, this vile combination of notes will certainly haunt you for the rest of your days.

Jasmin Rouge | Tom Ford: Tom Ford’s Jasmine Rouge is a screechy white floral hairspray worn by a Real Housewife as she’s drunkenly throwing her mimosa in your face right before she pees herself in the middle of the restaurant. Check please!

Angel Nova | Mugler: This is a very horny perfume. But a sort of sad, lonely, horniness. It’s the drunk middle-aged lady at a concert or local gig, or festival, stumble-dancing alone. (I am middle-aged now, but in my memory, every incarnation of this woman always seems older than I will ever be.) It smells like what both partners might wear when they pack for their hedonism cruise in a last-ditch effort to save their relationship and they’re on the prowl for their unicorn. It’s a bit desperate and hopeless, like that last radiant burst of manic energy that you put into a thing that’s doomed to fail, so what the hell and why not. As to the actual fragrance, it’s a sticky stain on your sheets that if you dare get close enough to sniff, it smells of overripe raspberries, lychee syrup drizzled shaved ice, and a sickly sweet cola drink spiked with peppery patchouli bitters. Instead of spending your money on Angel Nova, I think it wise you invest in an extra session with your therapist.

Fancy | Jessica Simpson: When I was young, my mother didn’t drive, so my grandmother tootled us around with her on errands and took us where ever we needed to go. Her purse was a bottomless supply of Dum Dum lollipops and if we were well-behaved, we got one as a treat. This was a massive thrill when I was 4, but some arbitrary switch flipped when I was 5 and suddenly I found them utterly vile. No thanks, grandma! Imagine shaking sticky shards of fruit punch, cherry, and butterscotch flavored candies out of your best Belk’s church purse, and… that’s basically Fancy. It is Dum Dum dust. Interpret that however you like. You might say, well, oh, Sarah, it’s not made for you. Ok, I get that. But tell me… who is it made for? And do they keep their toy lipsticks on a hot pink plastic vanity and cook with an EZ bake oven?

Intense | Cafe Montale: I first sampled Montale’s Cafe Intense years ago when I was initially getting into fragrance and perfumes. I guess I was feeling a little nostalgic for that sample a kind MUA-er sent me way back when! My recollection was that it was meant to be a coffee-forward scent, but…it is not. My partner observed that it smells like a teenage girl who typically wore a lot of candied, sugary scents and who wanted to level up with fancy florals and didn’t quite hit the mark. She tried, I guess, was his conclusion. My thoughts are more specific. This is a cloying fruity-floral that smells exactly like Rose Jam from LUSH, which I bitterly loathe because that smells just like those gaggy sweet Jolly Ranchers hard candies that all the popular kids were always eating in 6th grade. Which in turn makes me think of the MOST popular girl, we’ll call her Mary Lesa H., who broke off and ATE part of my sugar crystal science project that year. I hate science projects and I have never forgiven Mary Lesa H., and this awful perfume can go straight to hell.

Mon Guerlain | Guerlain: Everyone seems quite taken with MonGuerlain, which I’d never tried, so I thought I’d take advantage of a Sephora sale and grab a bottle of the eau de parfum. I gotta be honest. It’s pretty gross. If you need a scent for impressing your peers after pledging yourself to Jesus as a pre-teen holy roller and you were going to hang with all of them at a rager of an overnight church lock-in? This would be what you’d reach for. And listen, I’m not knocking smelling good for your lord and savior, but I think even the begotten only son of God has zero tolerance for this cloying fruity-floral bargain bin Koolaid flavor of a scent. Where’s the more interesting aspects of lavender and bergamot that people are wild for? This is just watered down CapriSun that no one even spiked. I’m flummoxed. And now I’m out $80. Dammit.

Vanilla Vibes | Juliette Has A Gun: Vanilla Vibes, you had one job. For a fragrance with vanilla right there in the name, there is a shocking lack of it in the execution. Instead, it is a humdrum aquatic, with a sour, salty marine aspect and the barest whisper of sandy musk. I hate to use the word “boring” because that’s more of a judgment than a description, but I think in this case it’s perfectly warranted. I mean if this were a person, it wouldn’t even have a face. As a matter of fact, this is that same faceless person in a 50-year-old mermaid suit at Weeki Watchee barely submerged underwater and doing a terrible job entertaining children, and they’re actually so bored themselves they are texting on their phones instead of swimming and if you look closely you can see their toes poking through one of their fins. And you know what else? They smell nothing like vanilla at all.

…and the one that started it all, Flowerbomb | Viktor&Rolf: Described as “an explosive bouquet of fresh and sweet notes”, I personally think it smells like a conflagration of petty spite, mean-spiritedness, and small minds. Like bigoted small-town pageant moms and the shitty popular girls in 80s movies. It simultaneously makes me want to cringe and cry.  Also, it’s an enormous lie. It smells nothing like any flower. As to what it does smell like, precisely, I cannot pinpoint. A shallow dish of sugar water with some sneezy, cloying powder mixed in. Like Kool-Aid, I guess. It smells like a celebutaunt-inspired Kool-Aid. Or…unless, of course, there is a blossom or bloom that smells like Bongo jeans and hair-sprayed bangs and the wretched duo of Jennifer W. and Amanda P. in the 7th and 8th grade. How’s it feel to be the inspiration for the world’s worst fragrance, you dumb, hateful bitches.

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Though I have not been sharing perfume reviews on social media this month, I haven’t stopped smelling things and writing about them! I have been especially busy over on the Midnight Stinks Patreon, with these 5 am empty world ruminations being the most current post over there.

Anyway, here are the twenty or so fragrances I tickled my snoot with this past month…!

Aura from Folie À Plusieurs unfolds like a luminous apparition undulating above an endless expanse of sun-baked desert. The opening is a radiant display of warm, peppery ginger and cool, effervescent citrus in an almost holographic way, reminiscent of the way heat ripples above scorched sand—an olfactory mirage. As the initial brilliance settles, there are the cracked and tangled limbs of aromatic woods, the sun-bleached, tenacious timber that survives in arid climes. Incense weaves through these notes, adding an ethereal smokiness, and the vetiver in the base provides a rooty- woody-earthy anchor, amplifying the overall dryness. Ambroxan lends a diffusive quality, creating an expansive halo that seems to pulse and shift with radiance. Aura is a masterful, mesmerizing study in dryness and light that captures the magic of that liminal space where earth meets atmosphere, the mundane touches the divine, and is a testament to the raw beauty of desolate landscapes and the mystical lights that sometimes grace them.

Hexenhaus 23 from Hexennacht is a portal to a fantastical bookstore, softly sagging wooden shelves brimming with magical tomes that smell of mythical desert spices, ancient toadstool-peppered woodlands, and Byzantine basilicas shrouded in clouds of incense, transporting you to the far-away places detailed within their arcane pages. Yet, to access this literary paradise, one must first traverse a basement with an air of enigmatic antiquity – hints of damp stone, the faint tang of old pipes, and the musty whisper of long-forgotten herbs create an air of thrilling mystery, history, and secrets. Hexenhaus 23 is a shape-shifting scent, each inhale a new chapter in an olfactory grimoire, the scented stories of a thousand enchanted realms.

The most wonderful Flannery Grace Good returned from Italy with a bounty of fragrance samples for me from the house of Culti. Apparently, these perfumes have not been sold in the US yet, so this is a mysterious treat! I first tried Tessuto, which I believe is Italian for tissue, or fabric–and it really does conjure a gorgeous gossamer unfolding, a drapey silken or linen scarf unfurling, the memory of its wearer cocooned within. Soft, fluffy cotton flower and delicate jasmine honey entwine with satiny woods and silky musks with subtle wisps of incense in the dry down for a scent that presents a more diffused, hazy interpretation of conventional “clean” fragrances. This is a quiet–almost casual– companion for those who find beauty in simplicity, but which occasionally catches you off guard with its understated elegance.

Kayali Invite Only Amber smells like spotting wonky, off-brand Spirit Halloween costumes in July. As in they attempted to capture the unparalleled autumnal opulence of Hermès Ambre Narguile, and put an orange spray tan on a white gourd and said, “ok, this is good enough, let’s call it Luxe Hookah Honeycomb or Fancy Tobacco Haze or maybe something really dumb, like Invite Only Amber.” It’s like a honeyed saffron cotton candy miasma, a saccharine amber simulacrum from a seedy midsummer carnival that leaves you longing for the rich, resinous depths of October’s golden hour.

Two scents from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab…

Treasure is a bright, gorgeous, golden sweetness, like citrus caramelized by a fiery sunset, beneath which something pearlescent and powdery swirls, rootless blooms born in twilight skies. Seafoam and honey, dissolving at dusk. Salt-weathered driftwood etches washed ashore speaks to liminal spaces between sea and shore, day and night, memory and dream…

…Which brings us to Dreamer of Dreams, wherein loamy lavender blooms, sweetly earthy and aromatic, an amethystine herbaceousness intertwining with the bittersweet floral tang of sour plums. These notes swirl and eddy, pulling you deeper into murky waters of consciousness. From these violet-clouded depths, a sparkling citrusy brightness pierces, as if through deep water, guiding the dreamer upward. But as dreams are wont to do, the scene shifts abruptly. The light turns sharp and piercing, transforming into a pair of eyes – emerald as new leaves, stinging and keen. They cut through the dreamy haze, a surreal beacon in the depths. And just as reality seems within grasp, the scent dissolves into phantom wisps of frankincense smoke, curling impossibly through the watery realm.

I’ve been sitting on these reviews for these two new collabs from BPAL x bloodmilk for over a month now, and in doing so, it looks like both scents have sold out! But I know in the past they have restocked various fragrances, so who knows, we may see them again…

LETHE is the languid escape endlessly downward, deep into the cool, indifferent embrace of shadows, past the mists, the driftwood, the cypress knees. A dream of the sovereign of a rain-soaked realm, their heart a stony tomb where green waters slowly pulse, instead of blood. An eerie, emerald luminescence, the quietude of forgotten things, and the mordant astringency of embittered ghosts clutching pale flowers of the dead.

In PYTHIA, jeweled walls weep with myrrh, their tears an opulent, balsamic wash of whispers. Dusky plums, swollen with strange knowledge and light caught in limbo, stain the tongue a starless sigh. Honeyed and dripping, dreams incubate as thick syrupy glimmers, opaque with the remembrance of things you never knew you’d forgotten, only to be forgotten again and again and again. A narcotic lullaby, a lavish cosmic jest, this ambrosial abundance of oblivion

Zoologist Northern Cardinal I don’t know if I love this scent but I sure appreciate the very specific scene it evokes. This is the crisp chill of a winter garden seen through the warm glow of the kitchen window on an early December evening.  Behind the window, the tea kettle whistles, and the quilts are cozy, but beyond that frost-flowered pane of glass, the world glitters with icicles dripping from the eaves; the bird bath has frozen over, its surface a mirror of pale sky. The fragrance opens with a brisk burst that reflects the scene outside. A profuse, aromatic green note tells of evergreen boughs laden with snow and the tingly bite of frozen air catching your breath and filling your lungs. The snow crunches underfoot before your scuffed brown boot plunges through a six-inch crust of the stuff – a sensation echoed in the scent’s subtle leather undertones and earthy base notes of dormant soil. A beady-eyed, red cardinal glares at you from a fencepost before taking off in a flurry of flight, a scarlet flash against a hush of white, a burst of color that finds its olfactory equivalent in a vivid bramble of winter berries, bright and bittersweet. As the fragrance settles, it reveals woody notes, log piles, and weathered barns, staunch sentinels against the winter landscape. It dries to a musty green whisper, the brushing aside of a swath of snow to find a patch of deeply dreaming grass beneath a blanket of pristine crystalline silence.

Yellow Lemon Tree Dixit & Zak I am on a mission to find something similar to the lemon-ginger-glamazon-15-minute-long guitar solo of TRNP Lemon Blossom (by the time I finished my sample, it was discontinued!). Today, I am trying Yellow Lemon Tree from Dixit & Zak. This is …not it. This is a minute droplet of off-brand lemon extract dribbled into a bottle of embalming fluid with a soupçon of acetone and sold as niche perfumery with a price tag of nearly $300. NEXT PLEASE.

Dark Season from Neil Morris is a scent that calls for a bit of a storytime, and you can read more of that over on my Patreon. But to sum up, It is a scent of smoky woods/rich, dusty amber that smells of the dramatic tenebrism of all those old, spooky gothic novels and musty 19th-century weird fiction, of ancient landscapes and loam, the soot of pine logs, ghostly smoke and sifting snow in a strangely lit field, a somber ochre, an umbral amber, frost-rimmed branches scraping a scrim of leaden sky, footprints vanishing in freshly fallen snow, the creak of the wind whistling around standing stones, something terrible let loose in the dark, something that eventually fades until it’s nothing more than an unquiet feeling or a cold shiver on a warm day.

I received a sample of Chasing Autumn when I ordered Dark Season from Neil Morris, and I might love it so much more than Dark Season that it is actually making me feel disloyal. It brings to life the autumn I’ve always yearned for, living in Florida’s endless summer. It’s a scent that captures not just a season but a frame of mind and a state of being I’m perpetually seeking. Millais’ painting “Autumn Leaves” comes to mind – a twilight scene where young girls gather fallen foliage, their faces touched with a melancholic reverence for the changing season. The painting draws our eyes to a vivid pile of rustling leaves, with only a wisp of smoke hinting at a distant bonfire.

This fragrance, however, boldly brings that bonfire to the forefront. The fir and birch tar notes roar to life, evoking the crackling warmth of autumn nights I’ve only imagined. It’s as if Morris has taken that implied warmth from Millais’ canvas and made it the heart of this olfactory experience. The leather and coffee accords add depth, reminiscent of cozy evenings of the sort I feel in Emily Brontë’s poetry.

Emily Brontë’s “Fall, Leaves, Fall” echoes as I wear this scent. Her words are not just poetry but an invocation – a chant to usher in the coming winter. The line “Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree” feels like a spell being cast, and this fragrance embodies that mystical transition. Where Brontë’s poem is a call to the approaching cold, Chasing Autumn captures the very essence of that summoning.

ALSO this scent conjures the underlying atmosphere of Over The Garden Wall, stripped of its childish elements (I love those elements! But!) It evokes that sense of being lost in an autumnal otherworld, where mystery and melancholy reign supreme. The fragrance captures the essence of wandering through the Unknown, with its subtle menace and ominous presence lurking just beneath the surface of fallen leaves and shadowy forests.

Chasing Autumn is an homage to those flickering fires of autumn, allowing me to immerse myself in a fall feeling that exists more in my mind than in my subtropical reality. It’s a sensory journey to the autumn I chase year after year, never quite reaching but always dreaming of – a season both beautiful and slightly foreboding.

With Witch’s Spell thought I was getting the kind of craggy, forested woodland Vvitch you might find in a Roger Eggers film; this is instead more along the lines of a gloriously kitschy-campy hyper-saturated swinging ’60s meets ruffled Victorian boudoir of Anna Biller’s The Love Witch. Initially, it’s this heady, slithery, intoxicating coil of orange blossom, reminiscent of the almost narcotic allure of Elaine herself. It borders on desperately sweet, but with an edge that hints at something more complex beneath the surface (it made me think of tuberose with its indolic, waxy sweetness.) Cashmere and fir needle bring a cognitive dissonance, mirroring the film’s blend of soft femininity and underlying danger and patchouli and jasmine further amp up the fragrance’s vixienish va-va-voom qualities. The dry-down is powdery and somehow vulnerable, like the illusion of self-dissolving when you realize all you really want is just to be loved, but you keep accidentally killing your paramours with all of your love potion love-bombing. Note: Witch’s Spell is not listed on the site, but according to Neil Morris, the amount of offerings available would make the site unnavigable if they were all listed, so apparently you just order any “vault” perfume or sample, and in the comment section at checkout, simply tell him which unlisted fragrance you want, and he will substitute.

Vietnamese Coffee from d’Annam I really wanted to love this fragrance; I was so intrigued by the idea. But the reality of it is that it smells like sour coffee-breathed admonishments and secondhand smoke from your cranky mother when you’re wearing too much fruity-floral Ex’cla-ma’tion eau de toilette and several greasy layers of cotton candy Lip Smackers before heading off for your first day of junior high circa 1989. It dries down to days-old espresso shots sloshing at the bottom of a pink Caboodles organizer.

Green Star from Cocoa Pink. This is a weird one. I was intrigued by the notes of cypress and fennel list, and along with all the rest of the notes, it coalesces in a perfume that both repulses and obsesses me, like how your tongue continues to probe the bloody hole of a broken tooth and even as you gag at the coppery tang of blood and feel the unsettling discomfort, you can’t stop. That’s not a great analogy. This doesn’t smell anything like blood or broken-toothed phobias, but it does have the vague aspect of something that makes me dry heave whenever I encounter it. I desperately hate all forms of mint, particularly wintergreen with its camphorous confectionary qualities. Green Star, weirdly, and perhaps because of that licoricey fennel, does have this mentholated, candied sweetness. And yet it’s enrobed in this rich, slithery musk, and this gorgeous golden veil of gingery-amber resins and becomes something almost mystical, both sacred and profane. It’s a paradox that leaves me teetering on the edge of revulsion and reverence, and I’m compelled to both sing its praises while also resisting the urge to puke.

In Régime des Fleurs Nitesurf Neroli, many fathoms below the sky and sea, a candied grotto pulses with crystalline sweetness. Whipped orange blossom honey stalactites drip into luminous pools; sirens writhe in neon foam, their voices piercing shards of light. Hypersaturated quartz blooms dissolve in the damp and darkness, a bright ginger and glacé citron pollen strobing in the mist. Fossilized shells from conch and clam and sea snail scatter, their ancient forms crusted with sugared jewels, catching and refracting the shimmering glow. Every surface glistens with a rusk of candied brilliance, and time dissolves in saline musk in this underwater disco frenzy of sugar-coated excess, looping endlessly, eternally electric. This is the sweetness mermaids whisper, each to each, beneath the waves.

Lastly, I was influenced by one of the Japanese lifestyle YouTubers that I watch. It’s a couple; the channel is called Hige and Me, or Hige to Watashi, and they’re the kind of artsy, somewhat minimalist, very too-cool-for-school kind of individuals that I secretly want to be, except I am pretty much the exact opposite of them in every way. Anyway, they live in Tokyo, and she just went on a trip to Korea, and in a recent haul video she did, she shared some perfume she got from the brand Nonfiction. I was suckered in because, if I am being honest, I liked the way the bottles looked. I have only tried about half of them so far, and they’re all pretty subtle, but it’s the one I am wearing now that I really love. Santal Cream is very similar to Le Labo Santal 33 but less picklish, or so I hear. I have never actually tried Santal 33, so my experience is that this one is a very fuzzy, figgy woody scent. Gentle Night is a sour soapy aquatic with the underlying unpleasant effluvium of a mildewed laundry pile. Forget Me Not is a spicy, effervescent herbaceous scent, very green, almost crocodilian in its greenness. A crocodile slithering through a wild patch of mint. But it’s For Rest that has my whole heart. It opens with an incense-y citrus note,  a sort of shadowy yuzu–not smoky per se, but sort of dim lit and flickering. Hinoki can sometimes strike me as a little harsh, but combined with the nutmeg and peppery musk, I think it lends a bright, spiced sweetness here. This is really beautiful. It’s a scent that’s too earthy and grounding to be called mystical or mysterious, but it’s too interesting for me to think of as cozy or even mundane. Perhaps it’s a perfume that straddles both worlds in the sense that it’s somehow deeply familiar and surprisingly evocative, a scent that lulls you into a comfortable reverie even as it leaves you with a lingering sense of wonder.

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Today on the Midnight Stinks Patreon, I have concocted a trio of fantasy perfume collections that speak to the darker corners of art and fashion and, well, frankly, just things I am permanently obsessed with: the surreal eroticism of Jean Rollin’s films, the haunting beauty of vanitas paintings, and the avant-garde allure of macabre runway couture.

Envision scents that capture the essence of Rollin’s “Living Dead Girl” and “Fascination,” where notes of blood accord and decaying flowers mingle with absinthe and velvet. Picture fragrances inspired by the fleeting beauty and morbid symbolism of vanitas still lifes, where the scent of wilting blooms and tarnished metal serve as aromatic memento mori. I’ve also bottled the essence of fashion’s darkest visions, from Alexander McQueen’s haunting “Widows of Culloden” to Gareth Pugh’s Asgarda-inspired collection. These olfactory creations embody the transformation of trash into treasure and the juxtaposition of delicate beauty with dangerous edge.

While these perfumes exist only in our imagination for now (and probably forever unless some extraordinary perfumer/s wants to collaborate!) I invite you to lose yourself in these scented reveries. What dark corners of art and culture would you translate into fragrance? Join me on Patreon to explore the full collection and share your own fantasy fragrance concepts: Des collections de parfums imaginaires pour les âmes sombres *

*in French for extreme fanciness

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Sometime in 2022, I wrote a very long and very personal and very “ma’am, this is a Wendy’s” essay review of this scent, but I am not sure that I shared it here. The gist of Soul of My Soul from Etat Libre d’Orange is that it’s soft and cozy sandalwood-y musks; the cocoon of your feet touching your person’s feet under a fleece blanket when you’re comfort-watching LotR for the bazillionth time. It’s a spot on your person’s chest sculpted perfectly to cradle your head at night. It’s their funny murmuring snore when you shift your body in bed, and your butts touch for a moment. It’s the secret language of two hearts who get it, and who got the chance to get it. It’s the miracle and magic safety and connection and all the green flags saying go-go-go, that it’s okay to be your weirdest, most authentic, very truest self with someone, and no matter how weird or hard things get–and they will get harder and weirder, make no mistake–you will always remain a soft, safe place for each other.

I picked up a bottle of Baruti Oh My Deer from Perfumology in Philadelphia earlier in the month when I was visiting my Best Good Friend. Oh My Deer struck me immediately because one, I’d never smelled anything from these guys, and two, this really does not smell like anything in my collection. This is one of those fragrances that immediately conjures an image in my mind; one of my late father’s Heavy Metal magazines from the 1980s featuring a metallic beauty on the cover, all gleaming chrome and curves, stark lines, and a strange, throbbing sense of mystery. Hajime Sorayama’s art for Heavy Metal magazine perfectly captured his signature style of future-noir and sci-fi eroticism for the machine age, and it certainly captured my attention when I first saw it at the tender age of 11. I don’t typically dissect fragrances through the lens of sexiness and sex appeal because, frankly, it feels inelegant and reductive. Perfumes can be so much more. But in this instance, it feels strangely fitting. Oh My Deer is a scent of bitter, aldehydic metallic musks, perversely both mineralic and animalic, and the olfactive dissonance of peppers that are warming and resinous but also act as a cooling, electric current. It’s a scent that also feels gritty and grungy, somehow, which brings it all back to a very personal place for me. Gritty and grungy is exactly how I felt when I first flipped through that back catalog of Heavy Metal magazines; they terrified and exhilarated me in equal measure, and those dark, techno-apocalyptic narratives may have been the catalyst for the first bit of… stirrings… in my weird little bod. Hey, we’ve all got our origin stories. Oh My Deer triggers a fascinating internal dialogue, pulling me back to those thrillingly strange magazines. It’s not what most would consider sexy, and for me personally, it isn’t either. But it’s undeniably weird, a quality I find endlessly intriguing. More importantly, it’s a scent I genuinely enjoy wearing.

A trio of scents from Heretic that I tried during that same Philadelphia trip…

Dirty Violet: dank dungeon jasmine, a collection of skeletal cypress knees, and a patchouli oil-slicked leather executioner’s mask
Dragon’s Blood: earthy, in a fantasy vegetable detritus compost-y sort of way, and also a bit smoky, like you made incense from that compost? (This was a limited edition and not available now.)
Cactus Abduction: has a sort of retro cucumber melon/cotton blossom vibe, but with an added zhuzh of effervescence, like the dream of the 90s is alive but make it sparkle!

Frederic Malle En Passant I’m a little ashamed to say that as long as I’ve been enthusing about fragrance, this is the first time I have ever smelled this one (I believe it is meant to be some kind of contemporary classic?) With notes of lilac, cucumber, cedar, and white musk, I am still trying to put into words what a beautiful creation this is. All I can say is that it’s like the gauzy childhood memory of a gentle, misty spring day, cool tendrils of fog lifting as the sun shifts through the clouds and warms the skin…but that’s not quite right. As a child, I wouldn’t have had the language for the ghostly sense of nostalgic melancholia En Passant evokes. It’s more like looking at the source of this memory through a hazy window pane as an adult, the present as it unfolds moment to moment, and becomes memory as fast as the moment unfurls. And knowing how fleeting it all is. And the sadness for the passage of time, and the joy for the child who doesn’t feel that yet. It’s that. It’s all of that.

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Nyx, Night Goddess Imagine all the forbidden nocturnal mystery evoked by rich, smoky, brooding resins such as opoponax, oud, and frankincense, but soften it with sweetness and snuggles, make it a kinder, gentler darkness. Brown sugar candle glow, amber lantern light, the honeyed hum of a streetlamp– a companionable luminescence for the midnight soul, and a comforting balm for night owls, moonlighters, and after-dark enthusiasts.

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While the gothic aesthetic holds a certain undeniable allure, the label itself has never quite felt like a fit for me. The truth is, my love for all things gothy – the macabre aesthetics, the haunting melodies, the lyrical explorations of mortality – exists on a curious spectrum. While I find myself enthralled by the atmosphere,  I wouldn’t exactly say I identify as full-fledged goth.  I’ve written about this a lot!

Think of me more as a whimsical wayfarer, a will-o-the-wisp who flits along the fringes of your favorite hauntings, a connoisseur of the curious and the unsettling, a gentle weirdo with an affinity for shadows and darkness. Dark art, and darker music, and the darkest humor. And, of course…dark smells! Which I have somewhat already written about before: perfume of the dead // summer scents for those who shun the sun // scents for the dark

But! This is a topic I could write at least  dozen novels about and I do have quite a few goth/gothic-leaning perfumes in my collection. So here I am to share some more!

Zoologist Bat is undeniably the strangest, most wonderfully unique perfume you will ever smell. Opening with a nearly overwhelming note of damp, primordial earth, both vegetal and mineral in execution, this immediately conjures inky caverns and pitch-black, damp limestone caves. The scent then morphs into something I can only describe as “night air and velvet darkness”; I cannot say how she has done this, I only know that it is the very essence of the vast, temperate midnight sky, the glowing moon high overhead. At this point, it becomes something quite different and–quite possibly–even more beautiful. Soft fruits, delicate musks, and resins lay at the heart of this enigmatic scent and combine to create a fragrance that lightly circles around the wearer to surprise them with a mysterious sweetness at the most surprising times. According to Dr. Covey, who has spent a great deal of time researching and studying bats, with this quality, the scent has succeeded pretty well in doing what she envisioned. This review is for the original 2015 perfume, but it has since been reformulated. You can still purchase the version I’m waxing poetic about, though; it’s sold over at Olympic Orchids as Night Flyer.

Tom Ford Oud Wood is a ghostly, glacial coniferous rosewood sandalwood melange of chilly, bitter, peppery woods. It is a tiny, sinister statue of a scent in an empty room where the temperature drops suddenly, with no explanation. The perfumed version of a little gremlin that appears in a haunting tale; one that skitters in the corners of your vision when the eye is focused elsewhere and inches eerily to your pillow when you’re at the knife’s edge of wakefulness and dream.

Mad et Len Noir Encens POV: you are a brooding pencil, prone to bouts of melancholia, that only scribbles at midnight and has only ever been used to draft architectural sketches of gargoyle-adorned gothic cathedrals and crumbling medieval monasteries and Baudelairian poetry and you listen to a lot of Bauhaus and Joy Division. This is discontinued, but it looks like you can buy samples here. Or you can buy a full bottle from me for $250 because I have an extra one!

bloodmilk x Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Owl Moon A symbiosis of the moon and the magnificent night owl. A dark, rooty, sweet patchouli swirled with honey. A scent steeped in mythology and magic, Owl Moon opens with the blackest, earthiest patchouli (before learning of the notes, I actually thought it was vetiver!) and calls to mind cool, moist soil at the base of a pine tree through which all of the busy little night creatures slither and crawl, the pale, ghostly light of the moon glinting off their scales and wings. A yellow-eyed owl, perched overhead, meditates briefly before silently embarking on his nightly hunt; the sour, screechy scent of his nest, littered with rodent bones and pellets, serves as a warning nearby. This is the fragrance of potent night magics, rich and ripe with darkness and feral mysticism. The sharpness of the patchouli streaked with high-pitched honey combines to form an aura that is both graceful and grotesque, sacred and profane. It dries down to a spellbinding, narcotic musk within an hour or so, and I predict many a darkling will fall rapturously in love with this bewitching nocturnal perfume. This one is sold out for at the moment, but they have been known to restock.

Lvnea x Chelsea Wolfe Pêche Obscène is glorious– but what I mean is glorious in the way that something monstrous and magnificent stalks the dead zone of night, by stealth and in the dark. This is peach, irradiated and ashen and grown over with moss and broken bird’s nests and salted against curses, curls of ferric iron to both ward away and contain within. A peach more lore and legend than it ever had life, a peach whose shadow looms uneasily far beyond its ruined flesh. Juices corrupt with the grave dirt of vetiver and patchouli and oozing with osmanthus’ strange leathery/jammy incense, Peche Obscene is an undead lich of a peach, and it is absolutely, terrifyingly, bewitching in the way that all delicious forbidden things are.

Solstice Scents Estate Carnation is a deeply gothic glamour amber, a musky murky chypre-adjacent fragrance that smells simultaneously like the figure in the white nightdress running from the manor house with the lone candle lit in the window at midnight and the surprise succubus that this figure is secretly possessed by–it’s all the iconic tropes of Avon Satanic Romance novel, and it’s perfect. This one may have been a seasonal or limited edition scent.

Arcana Holy Terror a blend of frankincense, deep myrrh, and beeswax candles, it smells of gentle resins, lofty sandalwood, and less of the fearsome spirits known to haunt certain long-deserted abbeys than it is curling up and reading about them in a horrid novel by the warm glow of candlelight.

Diptyque Tempo conjures an atmosphere of dolorous elegance, patchouli’s murky woods and dusky loam, with a wraithlike metallic chill and an herbal shiver of something green and strange simmering underneath. It carries a disquieting heaviness, the shape of a feeling impossible to give voice to; like having to climb into bed with someone and tell them they’re dead. It also reminds me of this passage from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within… and whatever walked there, walked alone.” This is a patchouli that has walked the long shadows of Hill House, has become lost in the thick, unspoken secrets of its notorious halls, and suffered its mad face in the growing darkness. This is a twisted, haunted patchouli that has seen some shit, but all the edges of that unnerving terror have been blurred by the creeping of moss, the settling of dust, and the softness of time and memory, of unreality and dream.

Chapel Factory Heresy is the sharp green metallic floral of violet leaf, mingled with cool aromatic cedar, lofty sandalwood, and the smoked leather notes of vetiver; elements which alchemize into the austere elegance and kindred glooms of a dry, peppery violet incense. If you like the dark ambiance and nocturnal aesthetic of dungeon synth coupled with spectral visionary Simon Marsden’s black and white photographs of haunted ruins and moonlit abbeys, this is a transportive scent that will spirit you away to those eerie, ominous realms.

Beaufort London Terror & Magnificence This is the very gothest thing: tarry, leathery shadows, wet, stony paths leading into the teeming dark, and moonless midnights presiding over all. Like being enfolded by bat wings, encased in obsidian, enveloped in a stark abyss. A silent secret from the mouth of one just dead. This departed speaker whom no one hears is you.

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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Zoologist Rabbit: Imagine a little picnic with your beloved stuffed bunny, the threadbare and shabby old thing with the missing eye and the unraveling stitches and the patch on its little belly where the stuffing has begun to leak through, the one you’ve loved so much and for so long that there is no doubt in your mind that it is the very realest rabbit. And picture the most realistic mud pie you ever made, so true to life in fact that when you took a crumbling bite of it, it actually tasted a bit like a lightly spiced tea loaf, gently sweetened, with a soft, tender crumb– maybe a seasonal apple or zucchini bread, but minus the actual fruit or vegetation. As a matter of fact, there’s little to no greenery in this scent at all, even the clover and the hay is more honeyed sweetness than grassy or botanical, and I do think that verdancy, that sense of green growing things, is what’s missing for me. This fragrance is less Peter Rabbit and more Velveteen Rabbit, right down to the well-worn cozy, cuddly fuzzy, snuggly skin musk of it– and as a matter of here’s a fleeting there-and-gone curious note that seems to be aiming for milky and creamy, but briefly veers a touch sour and unwell almost like a hint of baby spit-up. Like your beloved stuffed bunny that served as a faithful childhood repository for various ailments and was never quite fully sanitized. Despite its peculiarities and what it’s missing, it truly feels like a love letter to something sweet and cherished, and so far back in time you can never reach it again–and I think that’s ultimately what makes it so evocative – it’s the memory, how you felt in that garden and that friendship with your soft, sweet companion, filtered through the lens of childhood wonder and a love so fierce it transcends reality.

Two more collaborations from bloodmilk x Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab…

Midnight Snowfall is a winter’s witching hour personified; Night Queen, shock of moon-pale hair glittering, cloaked in the dark unknown of ancient terrors looming beyond firelight, a creature born of the hush that descends upon the world as the last sliver of sun sighs into the dusk. Lunar dreamworlds, surreal shadow realms, secret starlit cities beyond time–limned in a single frozen glance, a soft, bitter stolen kiss, a phosphorescent lamentation of stars fading at dawn. The resinous nectar of champaca’s intoxicating warmth chilled by a shiver of pale, pearlescent moon flowers, swaddled, sticky, and senseless in a velvety oblivion of moonless night.

An olfactory altar to the transformative agonies of sloughing off your broken chrysalis, The Shedding Time is a fragrance that calls for a moment, alone and in the dark. The clove is feral and sharp, a twisty slithering coiling around your awareness, deep in the shadows; each successive sniff draws it closer to the surface. Clinging to the bitter autumn honey of the serpentine spice is the shriveled exuviae of phantom flowers–a scorched and skeletal bouquet of tuberose and honeysuckle, mingles with the dissolving tendrils of earthy incense smoke. A rosy glowing emerges, the faintest sunrise blush on the freshly exposed skin, that much more alive. The body unshrouded, the psyche reborn, a perfume to witness the beauty of becoming through the crucible of transformation. Kick aside your broken carapace and step out into the sun.

I’ve got a sampler set from Marissa Zappas, and I don’t know if it is just me, but are all of these scents really subtle and subdued? Today I am wearing Maggie the Cat is Alive, I’m Alive! and, firstly, I should confess that I’m not coming at this scent from a place of attachment to its inspiration. With the exception of an overwrought snippet or two, I have never seen Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. From what I gather, it’s a whirlwind of melodrama and histrionics and conflicted, tormented souls. And considering that, this fragrance is quite an exercise in restraint.

It is the olfactory equivalent of hushed whispers, fading echoes, and pale shadows further muted by weak sunlight. The champagne is a warmed, still echo in its glass, the effervescence long gone. A delicate tension simmers between the dripping sweetness of peach and ambrette’s intimate, powdery musk, all set against an understated backdrop of cool, elusive floral notes and the gentle, woody humidity of oakmoss. Maggie the Cat isn’t at all the piercing shrieking experience that I expected but offers an introspective, understated moment instead

The Cartographer Wasp from Paintbox Soapworks. While appreciating a fragrance on its own merits is always delightful, there’s a certain thrill, a code cracked, a secret unlocked when you can discern its inspiration. And this perfume absolutely sings its source: an olfactory homage to the award-winning short story “The Cartographer Wasps & the Anarchist Bees” by E. Lily Yu.

It initially unfolds with an autumnal chalice of warm, sweetened harvest grains – perhaps barley or oatmeal – generously drizzled with the forbidden warmth of stolen honey, strange tawny nectar, haunted with the dusky whisper of hidden hives in a lightning-scarred elm. This comforting porridge soon melts away, revealing a heart of soft, velvety, caramelized apricot resin and the airy musk of pear blossoms. As it lingers, the fragrance transforms into a rich yet weightless, creamy amber-vanilla essence. It becomes an intimate companion, close to the skin, and evokes the gentle murmur of bees nestled in the dark hush of winter, dreaming of sun-drenched fields.

Norwegian Wood from Folie À Plusieurs This is not actually the scent I ordered …I double-checked my receipt a dozen times in the past few days just because I always assume I am the one who is mistaken or wrong… but you know what? I’m okay with receiving what I got, and regardless of what I ordered, I like this a lot. Norwegian Wood is inspired by the Haruki Murakami novel of the same name, but I read that so long ago that I don’t recall a thing about it, so that’s not going to factor into my thoughts. So. While I do love the scent of a heavily wooded hinterland or an ominous evergreen Mirkwood Forest midnight–basically, a syrupy resinous coniferous balsamic dirge of a scent (think Norne from Slumberhouse or Dasein Winter Nights) this is…not that. Or, well, it’s sort of that, but remove all those associations with darkness and shadows and the macabre. Rather than the Huntsman chasing a terrified Snow White into the gloomy woods, this is instead the contentment of Snow White in a sun-dappled forest glade, surrounded by woodland creatures, a soft trembling faun on her lap, and a little bluebird perched on her finger. It’s the scent of weathered branches and leaves fluttering in the breeze, sticky sap and damp creeping moss, the faint sweetness of wildflowers crushed under your feet, the rosy golden musk of a sunbeam on your skin; it’s all of that, but it’s not overly sentimental or twee. Its the sheer, gauzy summer halo of a winter haunted forest emerging from a deep sleeping curse.

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab The Storm While I am much usually much more expansive in my reviews, I am confident in saying that all you need to know is this scent is BPAL’s Antique Lace, those faded phantom attic-trunk florals, and the milky-musky-powderiness of cobwebby linens, caught up in the misty salt-air mystery and bitter cliffside botanicals of smugglers and shipwrecks on the windswept Cornish coast of Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn. 

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab The Acrobats is the flushed exuberance of juicy-peachy apricot, its delicate brightness made unsettling with amber’s dimly glowing resins and the bitter tang of tannins. I don’t know if I am unduly influenced by the heart-rending painting upon which it was based, but it really does smell like a sweet memory tinged with unbearable sorrow.

I have two fragrances kindly sent to me by Noah from Amphora’s debut collection. Amphora’s offerings are “gay-hearted fragrances”, perfumes that are joyous, inclusive, and queer, and the first one I’ve got here, Sublimate, really feels like the utmost epitome of these sentiments. With notes of frozen apple, dried rose petals, candied violets, marshmallow, cashmere, and white musk, this scent is a disco ball piñata of Pixy Stix dissolving in a vat of liquid nitrogen, exploding into a supernova of candied campy Barbarellas. It is a technicolor cacophony of hyper-fruity absurdity, a celebratory sweetness that leaves your soul awash in glitter and makes you question the very fabric of reality, and truly, I think it is the penultimate recipe for euphoria. Primal Yell has elements of hot iron, cherry, and bitter almond in addition to patchouli, vetiver, and some other notes, and this is definitely the moodier and broodier of the duo. I definitely get that red fruit, but it’s swaddled in black velvet and furs, and encased in an ancient iron coffin. As a matter of fact, this is very much a blood popsicle shared between two very old, very chic, and jaded, too-cool-for-school vampire lovers. These fragrances, despite being wildly different from one another, share an underlying thread of a creator who is clearly having lots of fun– and who is joyfully inviting us along for the ride.

This Ember by Anka Kus As intrigued as I was by the idea of a fragrance inspired by the lore of the phoenix, this is less a solitary mythical firebird and more a gaggle of mean girls cackling at a sick burn. It’s the sort of ambery raspberry-smoky rose that I’m already disinclined to like, because I don’t love fruity florals, but there is something about this one that’s particularly smug and acridly unlikeable. It’s got the structure of a scent that aspires to an aura of power and allure, but it falls flat, it’s just a loud, saccharine veneer in the shape of a void where a personality is meant to be. And sure, you can tell me I need therapy for my high school trauma, but I swear I don’t even think about that stuff until a particularly awful perfume comes across my radar. This is one of those perfumes.

I got myself the Kayali fragrance sampler for my birthday as sort of a joke, which I feel a bit hypocritical for saying, as I am also someone who -most of the time- believes that if you are not doing something in earnest, then why are you even bothering to do it at all? I don’t feel good about the idea of enjoying things ironically, I’d rather approach things with genuine curiosity. So anyway, the whole reason I got the set was for a sample of Yum Pistachio Gelato, and the story for this is that whenever this scent was first released (sometime last year in 2023?) I recall that perfumetok was a bit in a dither about it for some reason…and not being all that plugged into perfume community drama, I wasn’t sure why, but I thought it had something to do with how influencers were talking or not talking about it, or maybe some people were butthurt about not receiving PR boxes? I don’t know, but I was curious as to whether the scent itself was in any way worth getting your nose out of joint about. It is not. This is a commonplace-smelling vanilla skin musk with the addition of what I think of as a sort of rancid shea butter sour baby puke element, something soft and creamy that’s gone all clotted and curdled. It’s not the worst thing I ever smelled, but if you didn’t receive a PR box about it, you no doubt lived through the ordeal of it and went on to smell better things.

I don’t think I know how to talk about Fantosmia from Jorum Studio, , so instead, I am just going to run their list of notes through my internal translator and speak them to you in my language. This is the scent of a leather armor repurposed into a stewing pot into which you stir the sticky sap of a wounded tree, the sour scrapings of the inner rind of a pumpkin, the last few crumbles of Transylvanian honey bread blessed by the holy sisters and studded with spirit-soaked dried plums, and a scant handful of musty seeds and peppery herbs. Stir over stones that haven’t seen sunlight in one hundred years and trap the cookfire’s ghostly smoke in a glass vial for after-dinner divinatory purposes. This scent is a cryptic recipe written in a forgotten tongue; I can almost decipher the symbols, but ultimately it remains a mystery, a riddle that I can’t solve. I can admire it, yet I can’t quite call my own.

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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I recently shared the following on Reddit in (probably unhelpfully) answering someone’s question about a process for writing perfume reviews, and it occurred to me that it’s something I should share here as well. In case you ever wondered about my perfume review process or lack thereof!

Wrapping up with “Be true to yourself” is cheesy as hell, and I KNOW IT, but it’s the only way I can write about anything, and it’s the best advice I can give.

“I’ve been writing perfume reviews for almost twenty years, and when I saw your question, I had to admit to myself that maybe I don’t actually have a process. I’m kind of all over the place with it. It’s chaos.

Also, I realize that my reviews are probably pretty frustrating because I don’t really write them to be helpful to other people. Perfume reviews, for me, are more of a creative writing exercise than an attempt to paint a factual, by-the-numbers picture of my experience with a fragrance.  True, I do share them on review sites and various subreddits like this one, and if they resonate with someone, great!

I don’t write on a schedule, though I do try to write about fragrance every day. I might not always share it immediately or at all, but I am always sniffing things, thinking about them, and making little notes and connections for myself.

But –and I am being totally honest here– my perfume reviews are very much an example of “boy, she sure likes to hear herself talk, doesn’t she?” Ruminating on and rambling about perfumes as I do provides a more complete experience beyond the smelling of the thing, you know? I have to write about things to understand them, and as unaccommodatingly wacky as my resulting thoughts might sometimes be, it’s the process of writing them down that brings me to that understanding.

That said, as abstract or circuitous or as unhelpful as my perfume reviews frequently are, I suppose I do have some things I try to work into my reviews. Perfume notes? Not really. Thoughts on the perfumer or the house? Rarely. I might talk about how the notes translate for me (like tobacco usually manifests as stewed raisins, for example), and I might talk about whether or not I smell the perfumer’s inspiration in their creation, but as both a reader and writer of reviews who doesn’t care about the nuts and bolts of the scent, I write about it the way I would want to read it.

Which is to say…I want to know what the perfume made you feel. Don’t tell me it smells nice. What does that even mean? Is “nice” a yellow daisy on a crisp spring day? Is “nice” a sudden rainstorm on a humid summer night? Is it a lurid orange bucketful of teeth-rottingly sweet candy and a cheap, sweaty vacuum-pressed Frankenstein mask circa October 31, 1980, the only Halloween you can ever recall snow on the ground? Do those things summon a memory, unearth a dream, did they trip a nostalgia or a deja-vu wire in your brain? Do they smell like a story, forgotten lore, or some unwritten fable from the future that trips off the tongue as the notes unfold on your skin? That’s where I write from, and I guess I write for people who think along those lines.

I also keep a running list of book and film quotes, song lyrics, poetry, heck, even things I have heard Nigella Lawson say! She waxes poetic about food; I recall her referencing cauliflower’s “Victorian pallor” and “fat coral curls” of shrimp, “aubergine confetti,” and “flakes of terracotta,” and sometimes these descriptions of flavors and hues translate beautifully to scent!  I think these are all wonderfully evocative things to include in a perfume review. I’d honestly rather read that a fragrance reminds me of Mary Oliver’s words, “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine,” than learn that a reviewer thinks x perfume smells like y perfume.

Will the way I talk and think and write about perfumes change? Sure! It’s constantly evolving as I collect life experiences and catalog more scents, and I can even track my flickering interests and fluctuating passions in my perfume reviews throughout the years. (One year there was a lot of Star Trek and Lawaxana Troi mentions, ha!) And I bet your perfume writing will change as well. Whatever your process ends up being, just keep it fluid, and have fun with it and above all, be true to yourself.”

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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Complicated Shadows from 4160 Tuesdays is a perfume for the insomniac hours, late-night strolls wandering through the deserted streets of your hometown, familiar landmarks strangely distorted by the play of moonlight and shadow. The warm, velvety sandalwood whispers in contrast to the chilling “shade” note, evoking the breathless hush of liminal, in-between spaces. The iris and narcissus here are shrouded in mystery, their earthy floral murmurations laced with a tang of acrid irony, simmering existential angst below the surface of introspective ponderings. Veiled in a bitter vanilla mist, it’s the uncanny reverie, nocturnal glooms, and haunting landscapes of the dreamless, lost in the dark.

I don’t like comparing perfumes to each other, especially comparisons of something a niche or indie creator has made to something from one of the big houses…and I hear artists of all ilks, all the time, bemoaning how they hate being compared to other artists. So apologies in advance to my beloved artists amongst us here, but I know that sometimes comparisons to something you are already familiar with can be helpful in evaluating something new.

That said, my first impression of Complicated Shadows was one of cool, dusky elegance… and there’s a definite kinship with Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue, that melancholic masterpiece shrouded in powdery twilight. However, Complicated Shadows sheds the heavy cloak of powder, revealing a more approachable, contemporary feel. L’Heure Bleue, as much as I want to love it, has never been my cup of tea. But Complicated Shadows? I could drink it by the bucketful. In the dark. In the middle of a deserted road. At the stroke of midnight.

I know better than this, but I purchased a bottle of Fantomas from Nasomatto without having sampled it first, and I’m surprised to say…I actually rather enjoy it? It reminds me of ELdO’s Ghost In The Shell, that bit of speculative lactonic peach, but I then realized what I was smelling in Fantomas was more along the lines of those Japanese milky honeydew melon hard candies. There’s also a bit of sterile, plastic-y musk and digitally-rendered powdery porcelain heliotrope, and the more I sniff my wrist, the more I am convinced that this creamy floral/vinyl musk is what the uncanny valley of a really expensive sex doll smells like. I’ve not smelled any sex dolls, either of the budget or the big-spender variety, but I have got a big imagination, and I’m pretty sure I know what I know. Anyway, I like it!

Parfums de Marly’s Pegasus Exclusif, and maybe I am extrapolating a bit from the brand’s copy, promises a ride on the back of a flying stallion, a journey into a realm of “masculine virility” and “exhilarating power.” But I think we need to temper our expectations; the description would have us believe this is the fragrant equivalent of a noble winged steed, all myth and muscle, soaring through the heavens, presumably being the fantastical equine embodiment of toxic masculinity. I’m not saying that I actually wanted any of that, but instead, what we are presented with is a pastel carousel pony, all heliotrope powdered sugar, and cracked porcelain. Now, there are some things I am not up to speed on here, which is to say that Pegasus Exclusif implies the existence of a Pegasus not-so-Exclusif, and if that is the case, I haven’t smelled that yet, and maybe that one is a dusty plastic marzipan macaron as well… so I am not sure how this one differs. And unlike other reviewers, I don’t get anything complex or dark or rich out of this perfume; the promised depth and complexity and woods and spices never materialize, leaving a one-dimensional sweetness and a sense of artificial whimsy that smells more like a My Little Pony collection than the epic journey of a majestic beast.

Citron Boboli from Le Jardin Retrouvé was a lovely, unexpected surprise. It’s such a light, refreshing, palliative scent; there’s hardly anything to it at all, and then the longer you sit with it, the more mellow marvels it conjures. On the hottest day of the summer, when the sun bakes the earth, and the air hangs humid, heavy, and shimmering, find a mason jar, glass smooth and etchings worn, passed down from your mother’s mother, to cradle a spell for a sweltering day. Beneath the skeletal shade of a midday tree, into this vessel layer lemon balm and blossom, a sprig of geranium, and a frilled citronella leaf–a soothing strata, herbal, citrusy, and green, a counterpoint to the relentless heat. Stream in a shiver of rainwater that has caught the reflection of the moon, and, finally, drop in as many cloves and peppercorns as loves you have lost, and smell their spiced warmth transmute into a strange, fizzing chill. Anoint your pulse, your throat, and your heart with the verdant brew, peer into its swirling emerald shadows, and let echo the words that cool the air and summon the soft, secret summer rain. This is what Citron Boboli is for me. And as a Floridian, I think this fragrance will be my go-to scorching summertime incantation of relief.

I got a sample of Flamingo from Blackcliff because thought this was for sure going to be my manic pixie pink pepper of demented glee that I have long been searching for. It’s a mangrove swamp’s heart of kaleidoscopic funhouse mirrors, twisted cypress knees splashed in the lurid, tart effervescent guava-grapefruit hues of technicolor twilight. Prickly pink pepper like a shard of shattered glass, like a frenzied clutch of little claws skitters and dissolves, and  a melancholic violet peeks through, its bruised purple mascara streaking through the murky water. Damp earthy tendrils of vetiver, musky ambrette, and loamy tobacco loom faintly but unsettlingly close to the surface. Flamingo is a warped sour bittersweetness unseen creatures chirping and croaking in the twilight–and I like it– but it’s more of a pink pepper whisper than the deranged fever dream intensity of pink pepper delirium I was hoping for.

Stéphane Humbert Lucas Soleil de Jeddah is a last-gasp sour and tang of sun-shriveled citrus, fusty desiccated green herbs and mummified mosses, ashy, arid leather, and the most spectral iris wilting in a disappearing patch of shade whose earthy roots are already giving up the ghost, crumbling away in the sandy dirt. The radiant aurora of an eclipse made pale, parched apparition via a dusty, occluded lens.

SYZYGY from bloodmilk x BPAL Syzygy is the undying dream of a dusky poppy in full bloom, not vibrant and fleeting, but perfectly preserved within a gilded tesserae of amber, its vivid essence suspended in slow, honeyed time. Crumble these petrified petals into a steaming glass of milk, the creamy warmth coaxing out their hidden secrets. The first breath of Syzygy is this: a haunting sweetness, both familiar and strange. It’s the memory of summer captured in a single, perfectly candied posy, not swaying in a sun-scattered field but tucked between the shadows amongst sun-baked stones. The rich, resinous beauty of the blossom endures, a timeless lure to the dark hum of ghostly bees forever adrift, doomed to perpetual yearning. This will be available later today (4/30) on the bloodmilk website.

Zoologist Moth is the cool glooms and musty melancholy of antique lace and silks tucked away with camphoraceus mothballs; there’s a smoky rose musk aspect, the spectral embers of a rose that lit itself on fire for love, or vengeance, or maybe both, and a bittersweet powdery element, like dried honey mixed with grave dust from a tomb. But the longer this wears, the more familiar it begins to smell, and I realize I am actually just wearing the musky vanilla and dusty florals of Hypnotic Poison, or alternately, the Bewitching Yasmine from Penhaligon, or Fleur Cachée from Anatol Lebreton, which to my nose, all smell like kindred spirits. And do I really need another perfume in that vein? And then I remember that I actually only own one bottle of those three scents, and that one doesn’t have the thing going for it that Moth does: ultimately, Moth smells like a twilight shadowplay of austere embraces, a haunting chorus of forgotten languages, and basically what you wear to convince the ghosts that you are in fact a ghost.

Koala from Zoologist is an aromatic-green-soapy incense-balsamic black tea-geranium sandalwood cologne with eucalyptus and pine. It’s dapper somehow, but the ironic dapper of a 25-year-old in 2013 with a handlebar mustache and a pork pie hat. It’s the refreshing, relaxing scent of a spa, but these dapper, ironic hipsters run the entire spa. And I don’t even know if I want to call it irony or absurdity or even farcical, but after a while, it doubles back on itself, and it’s almost painfully earnest, it’s got a genuine “love is real, and I was pounded in the butt by my sentient spa experience” Chuck Tingle title vibe. I don’t know what that means. I’m all over the place for what is probably a very approachable and wearable perfume. That’s kind of wild, that I have no problem describing the weirdies, but the normies are the ones that give me pause. Anyway, I think this is both a sincere and sardonic eucalyptus scent. That’s my final word on it.

Ôponé from Diptyque (I think this one is hard to find, but you can find overpriced bottles on resale sites) is a fragrance so revolting you’d think someone was joking that it couldn’t possibly be real. But it is real, and I have a sample of it. It’s a vile cocktail of the following: a freshly-opened bottle of goopy, boozy-but-not-nearly-enough booze bitter berry Robitussin Maximum Strength Cough and Chest Congestion (possibly the one with Dextromethorphan and Guaifenesin), the most repellent, unpalatable artificial fruity-sour energy drink on the shelf with the most outrageously obnoxious packaging, the one so disgusting and foul that even the people you think might be into it would never buy, and the saddest long-stemmed fake rose wrapped in dusty crinkly plastic at the gas station. Nobody wants any part of this. Throw it in the trash immediately.

Bonus material! I can’t believe I have never shared this, but the closest I have ever come to hearing/seeing the perfume reviews I want to see in the world is this SNL sketch with Benedict Cumberbatch. They are not talking about perfume, but I think you will get what I mean…

If you enjoy these fragrant musings, or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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Over on TikTok this month, I shared a not-quite-a-review for a bland freebie from Sephora that actually gave me a lot to think about; I share a “get to know me in 10 perfumes“; and I give a peek into how I store my myriad perfume samples. And below are a handful of the things I smelled this month!

19.1 Neroli Ad Astra by Pierre Guillaume Paris is a galactic striptease performed by a dazzling spectacle of radiant holographic beings. ​​The opening is a burst of effervescent pear, the fruity flamboyant fizz of a champagne fountain in zero gravity. Showstopping neroli swoops in, opulent, heady with a teasing coolness, like a sheen of ice crystals on silvery spacesuit pasties reflecting the glitter and glare of a distant sun. There’s a green velvet gloved graze of herbaceous, rose-tinged geranium, a coy peep at jasmine’s rich floral sweetness, and the low cosmic hum of a soft, deep musk, anchoring the fragrance even as it reaches for the stars, a celestial burlesque performance amongst the glimmering expanse of forever.

RE: Tóor Tóor by Régime des Fleurs, usually, it’s a bit fraught with this brand; it’s an “oh, PLEASE, don’t be good!” ordeal because they are usually too good and TOO expensive. But. I needn’t have worried this time. I’m still in the early stages of trying it out, but my immediate and initial thoughts are that it’s like a vampire with a bizarre sweet tooth stumbled into a Precious Moment gift shop and drained all the sugary charm out of a figurine, leaving behind this twee, creepy, bloodless husk at the bottom of the trash bin, slowly dissolving in a puddle of garbage juice. The predominant notes of this unfortunate incident are of this anemic citrus and a wan, powdery floral, and the strange cloying rot, spoiled nectar, and sour candied sewage of something that might have been cute, once? Like the undead remains of a Sanrio character, maybe? I don’t know but it’s not good! Seems like my wallet is safe from you this time, Régime des Fleurs.

Annacamento from Toskovat is a fragrance that I have a difficult time picking the notes apart, but the overall creation is one that resonates with every fiber of my being. How could it not, with the melancholic poetry of its description referencing a kid seeing the sea for the first time…or maybe an adult seeing it for the last, and the observation that “If you look back at that beauty, you’ve most likely already lost it.” This sentiment reminds me of another similar one that I loved, evoking the fleeting purity of a moment, wherein Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, the narrator opines, “Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it.” The ingredients list citrusy elements in the form of fruits and herbs and a handful of bakery case items, alongside various woods and marine botanicals- and its overall impression is of a faint, sad sweetness that’s also somehow… not exactly fresh and not quite clean but some secret third thing that’s somehow adjacent. It’s a bittersweet dream you once had of sitting by the ocean and eating a small, cold dish of ice cream as the skies darkened to grey with the promise of rain on the horizon. As the tide rolls in, you realize that the dampness on your cheeks is not the brine of salty seaspray but streaks of drying tears, though you had no idea you were weeping or why that might have been.

Copal Azur from Aedes de Venustas  is a prophecy rustling on the wind, woven from copal and frankincense fumes that billow from temples guarding secrets older than gods. Meditate on these vapors of incense and antiquity, and you’ll find it’s a salty, bittersweet paradox, a wisp of sacrificial smoke laced with the unexpected sweetness of caramelized ambers. A sacred offering – a glistening, balsamic lacquered glaze burnishing a forgotten feast, a tang of something primal, both savory and sweet. A taste of eternity, a sticky fever dream forgotten ritual, clinging to your ribs long after the final swallow. The jungle itself seems to hold its breath as explorers, trespassers who believe they understand the weight of the past, navigate its sun-dappled heart toward the source of the scent. The air hangs heavy with it, a fat, golden sigh that twists through the foliage–which, wary of the intrusion, whispers not of secrets but of warnings from the dusty pages of history, hinting at unknown chapters these interlopers were never meant to be a part of. A golden condor soars overhead, its wings brushing against this intoxicating residue; it, too, is aloft on a dream of following the path of the setting sun.

Benjoin Boheme from Diptyque unfurls like a clinging veil of memory, a scarred ridge of sepia dreamscape where an ache of memories and ancestral yearning shimmers at the edges of perception. The heady, honeyed sweetness of balsam, benzoin, and amber mingles with the dry herbal whisper of rockrose, but it’s a displaced, disconnected twinge of borrowed nostalgia –it’s not yours, it doesn’t belong to you, this dusty incense of melancholic longing, and yet it’s tethered close, entangled with damp, earthy tendrils of patchouli and a woodsy musk,  Beneath it all, a static unease hums like the feel of cobwebs brushing against the skin, like your reflection as it fades into the darkness behind you, like glimpsing the subject of a gauzy, blurred antique photograph and looking closer only to discover your own eyes gazing back at you from across time.

Dirty Rice from Born to Stand Out conjures a gorgeously lensed photo of aspirational bathtime, a clawfoot tub of opaque opalescent milky bathwater (but not in a Saltburn way; this is more like a meticulously curated, aesthetically pleasing Pinterest board of self-care fantasy photo milky bathwater kind of way) with hundreds of fresh, soft petals floating on the surface. It’s the woody-floral sandalwood bath salts perfuming the water, the sweet, creamy almond musk of soaped skin, and the intimate warmth of steamed air. It smells of subtle indulgence and casual luxury.

From Poesie’s Weekend in Paris discovery set…

Au Vieux Paris opens with a gentle wisp of coffee, not the spine-straightening jolt of a morning brew, but the lingering aroma after a long afternoon spent in conversation. It’s the ghost of a perfect cup. As the fragrance settles, a delightful treat emerges – the unmistakable tang and sweetness of a homemade preserve, something like red currant and rosehip jam, filling a barely-there pastry where the real star is the summer-bright, ruby red jelly. In a twist of olfactive alchemy, it is no longer the quaint cafe scent of a sip or a bite to savor but the elegant poetry of a classically beautiful perfume wafting from a sophisticated shop window. It’s a wearable memory that captures the essence of an ambrosial Parisian afternoon in a single, unforgettable drop.

Champs Elysées is a scent for those who see the world through rose-colored, cat-shaped spectacles. In alternate reality Paris, there is a tearoom where you’re urged to give a soft, secret handshake to a sentient cloud of cherry blossoms. Puffs of petals clinging to your fingers, you’re whisked through a tiny rose-trellised door to a pastel Hello Kitty wonderland, where you’re immediately greeted with a towering plate of buttercream sandwiched macarons in every shade of rose quartz and baby pink. A mismatched porcelain tea service is spread before you, mischievously clattering cups of pink lemonade and strawberry milk tea. You realize with a sip that you don’t need a single cube of sugar.

La Vie en Rose — Cicely Mary Barker, as far as I can tell, never illustrated a peony version of her flower fairies, but that’s what I envision with this fragrance, especially since pear and rose notes together in a fragrance always brings to mind the dewy floating floral of peony blossoms in a way that’s both bright and delicate, rosy and soft, with the ephemeral fizz of a spring breeze. If that flower fairy existed, and if she were taking along a signature scent for her weekend in Paris, she would smell of La Vie En Rose.

Marché aux Fleurs is the embodiment of when people say “stop glamorizing the grind and start glamorizing whatever this is” and what it is is Frog and Toad dressed in their dapper corduroy best, perusing a riotous profusion of blooms in a Parisian flower market, little webbed feet slipping through slick cobblestone puddles on a drizzly spring afternoon.

Montmartre, a clandestine gem in this collection, embodies a twilight tryst beneath the city’s soft glow. A whisper of stolen moments, the soft musky warmth of a forbidden embrace, the bitter mystery of absinthe kisses, and the provocative perfume of hidden gardens revealing itself in the illicit magic of secret thrills.

Rue Saint-Honoré – Imagine a Parisian fashion week gone deliciously astray. Step through the portal of an elegant oaken wardrobe onto a runway where the cashmere is woven from brittle threads of vanilla honeycomb, the leather-look boots are actually carved from warm, toasty hazelnuts, and the tiny details on the lavishly embellished clutches are intricate burnt sugar swirls. Would you believe this decadent spectacle fits cozily into an aromatic sandalwood box? “Bite-size haute couture gourmand-adjacent opulence” is a mouthful of a summation for this fashion statement in the whiff of extravagant indulgence.

And finally, I have a little sampler from Dark Tales Perfumery. I ordered a few of the usual suspects I know I will like, woody, incense, or green stuff, and so far I have only tried one: Medieval has notes of lavender, some other florals, black musk, sandalwood, and myrrh. I think the lavender and musk give it a slightly leathery quality, but overall, it paints a shadowbox woodland picture in shades of gray, etched with something desperately melancholic, like this excerpt from Barry Eric Odell Pain’s poem, Ainigmata: 

What could they tell us? We see them ever—
The trees and the sky and the stretch of the land;
But they give us a word of their secret never;
They tell no story we understand.
Yet haply the ghost-like birch out yonder
Knows much in a placid and silent way;
The rain might tell what the grey clouds ponder,
The winds repeat what the violets say.

If you like this kind of somewhat gloomy, dolorous poetry–which I obviously do–this poem goes on and on, you should look it up.  But alternatively, if John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows had a scent, it would 1000% be this.

If you enjoy these fragrant musings, or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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Roja Midsummer Dream is the olfactory equivalent of the urge to disappear into a haunted glade and become local folklore or of how your body isn’t a temple, it’s the moss-encrusted altar where primitive rituals once unfolded. But we are a soft, suburban people, and I think this sense of longing is tempered with the fog of nostalgia for something we’ve never possessed –and quite frankly, might not be equipped to handle. So sure, be the cryptids or feral forest witch you wish to see in the world or become one with your inner family of raccoons, but also remember that you don’t actually like the cold very much, and getting your hands dirty isn’t your idea of a good time, and a dark moonless night where the only sound is that of your own frantic breath, and the invisible scurrying of nocturnal creatures would be better spent dreaming indoors under a downy granny quilt. Roja Midsummer Dream is the best of all these worlds– a gentle elven chypre, an ancient amber that hums like skin warmed by forgotten fires, the faint rust of autumnal spice, and the phantom sting of bitter grapefruit in the golden memory of sun-dappled woods. It’s like a gentle ghost story of arboreal elegance told under the soft glow of glittering fairy lights, except, unfortunately, the ambient lighting costs four hundred bucks, and the only ghosts you might encounter are the missing funds in your bank account. All this existential exploration, this whispered communion with the primal self, sounds delightful, but I’m afraid I prefer my delights slightly less expensive. These enchantments are best enjoyed in my dreams, where perhaps money grows on moss-covered trees.

…as opposed to Shangri-La from Hiram Green, and how do I say this without being unkind? This fragrance is less lush and harmonious utopian promised land and more a Hieronymus Bosch-envisioned hellish menagerie/paradise, blighted and bedeviled, doomed and damned, all the horror and grandeur and unbridled madness of the cosmos, distilled into one raspingly chaotic scent. The initial blast of overripe, fermented peaches and citrus fruit frizzles acridly at us, trumpeted straight out of a bizarre monster’s glossy pink backside; jasmine’s balmy decay wraps us in a fuzzy, fevered winding sheet of a golden-throned man-eating bird, to remind us that all is vanity and the pleasures of the flesh are fleeting, and the strangely spiced kisses of a porcine nun linger on your skin like a grotesque memento from a carnival of depravity. In what twisted mind is this a Shangri-La?  think Hiram Green is having one over on us.

Upon smelling Flos Mortiis from Rogue Perfumery, I have a sense that for casual perfume wearers, this is going to lean either one of two ways. “Old lady” or “headshop.” While I don’t consider my enthusiasm for fragrance casual by any sense of the word, I certainly don’t want to imply that I am better or smarter than any casual perfume-wearers–there are definitely aspects of both a sort of vintage costume jewelry cough drop mothball glamour and that ubiquitous champaca incense element of a bohemian bazaar. But it’s all wrapped up in the shadows of an Edgar Allan poem, the honeyed sweetness of romantic sentiment laced with the crumbling bitter mausoleum creaking coffin lid tang of decay, rounded out with the tart crimson kiss of red currant fruiting sickeningly in the dirt of a freshly turned grave. So maybe this is old lady juice, but it’s definitely the grand dame in the ancient portrait above the mantel upon which perches a resin-feathered raven, whose tarnished visage follows you in every corner of the drafty parlor, whose bones creak under the floorboards you are standing on, whose phantom hand rests lightly upon your shoulder even now.

Génération Godard from Toskovat is the scent of sticky soda spills on old seat cushions, the mouth-mangling sour and sugar of chewy citrus candies, and a greasy popcorn machine’s dying wheeze. A troupe of wounded, reckless weirdos working shifts in the grimy glamour of a historic cinema, their secrets and strange kinship the illicit musk and leathery glue that holds the decaying dream of this crumbling landmark together; the moody rose perfume steeped into the velvet lining of a moth-eaten fur coat pilfered from the musty lost and found closet a final sigh before the building is condemned.

Sarah Baker Charade I am an absolute fiend for the lush, fevered va-va-voom of tuberose, and it’s always a good time to see how that is interpreted through the lenses of different perfumers. Sarah Baker’s Charade bursts onto the stage with a ditzy dame of a tuberose, not the classic, opulent diva you might have been expecting. This one’s all mischievous effervescence;  imagine the voices of Queenie Goldstein or Betty Boop, breathy, giggling champagne and honey whisper. But plot twist! While our dizzy tuberose distracted you with her artful, ambrosial chicanery, a vegetal ferniness emerges, and a Lothlorien elf steps out of the shadows, a sylvan arrow aimed at your heart. The luxuriance of the tuberose intertwines with the verdant notes, vining our two stars together, creating a captivating tension. Ylang-ylang adds a softly decaying languor, while styrax and benzoin weave a faint trail of smoky, balsamic sweetness. The leather accord seems like it would be out of place, but it’s the earthy, oily leather fanny-packed director holding this unlikely theatrical production together.

Eris Perfumes Mx I hate to give an explanation for my reviews because part of me feels like I should never have to explain myself…but there’s a needier, people-pleasier part of me that also never wants to be misunderstood. I also don’t typically bother going into notes or what the perfumer’s vision is, because that’s all great and stuff, but once it gets in our hands, humans who are going to draw from our own dreams and memories and experiences, I feel like we’re going to interpret it our own way anyway. But I do think it’s really important to note that this is a scent that celebrates the notion of freeing oneself from gender binaries, and I think that it’s fabulous in both concept and execution! But after I’d written this review about a very strong, slithery association that the fragrance brought up for me, I realized that what I’d said might be taken the wrong way, and in rereading it, I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking so.  So please know right off the bat that this review was prompted by how the fragrance reminded me of a character in Lois Duncan’s 1981 YA Thriller Stranger With My Face (wherein a teenager realizes that her jealous twin sister has been astral projecting into her body at night and making her do terrible things!) ALL THAT SAID, Mx is a  slithering, unsettling echo of an intrusive thought, a fixation, a compulsion that thrums beneath your skin and stirs unease and intrigue in equal measure. Hypnotizing tendrils of saffron, a musky murmur of something primal, something unnerving. Velvety sandalwood, a plushness of warmth, of comfort, but something’s not quite right. A nip of ginger, a prick of pepper, sharp, sudden, jolting you awake, reminding you that you’re not yourself. The mirror wavers reflect the eyes of a stranger you don’t recognize, a smile playing on lips that aren’t yours. The scent is secretive, intimate, and sheer, a whisper that clings to you, the memory of actions you can’t explain, of choices you didn’t make. Are they yours, these yearnings, or have you become a fascination, a vessel for the uninvited, a maddening allure let loose from the dark? Specifically this edition with this cover art.

RE: Lorenzo Pazzaglia’s Van Py Rhum, my first instinct is just to tell you that it’s giving slutty bloofer lady and show you Lucy Westenra resplendent in her frilled Eiko Ishioka burial gown because that’s it right there; that’s all you need to know. But there’s a part of me that always makes things harder than they have to be and wants me to do a proper review. So. This is a diabolically sweet, cold-blooded, porcelain-moon vanilla with a buttery sour tang from the damp and rot of the crypt, that, when warmed with the venomous kisses of patchouli’s nocturnal loam, agarwood’s smoky growl and rich, oaken-casked rum, takes on the predatory edge and spectral allure of something that appears after the sun dips below the horizon, something once beloved and familiar, whose undead arms are now ravenously hungry for your embrace.

The Key of Solitude from bloodmilk x Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Soil and shadow, a subterranean ember, smoldering, The Key of Solitude is a scent that plays tricks on you, promises much, and delivers more. It’s the damp earth beneath bare feet, a bat-winged tickle of rain in the air at the edge of midnight; a primordial altar deep underground, shallow breaths sooty with ancient incense smoke and the stony language of deep time, a haunting chorus of fossil imprints and biological hieroglyphs; lights out at the last library on Earth, honeyed wooden shelves gleaming in amber candlelight, its welcoming glow extinguished, one flickering flame at a time. A keyhole cartography mapping everything, everywhere, all at once: a darkness that delights in revealing a kaleidoscope of shifting realities, where time folds in on itself, each blink twisting the vista anew. But you’ve always known how to navigate the paths of your heart’s own darkness, haven’t you? After all, both the lock and the key were shaped by you.

Beauté du Diable from Liquides Imaginaires is a heady cocktail created by a couple of eccentric bons vivants, something to celebrate an evening of decadent parlor games and general hedonism: an herbal froth of verdant absinthe, a heavy-handed crystalline pour of breathtakingly expensive gin, and a peppery crush of carnation petals– drunk copiously in smoky wood paneled secret rooms while a sweet, narcotic resin burns throughout the night, stinging the eyes and inducing a strange, mystical trance. In the morning, these self-indulgent socialites and muses of the devil send dearest Papa a telegram, demanding that he “Please sell $10,000 worth in stock. We intend to live a mad and extravagant life!”

Eidisis from Aesop is a melancholic, cedary soft sandalwood scent with a sweet, earthy hobbity funk. A hobbit who maybe stayed at home instead and never had an adventure, never became a barrel riding, troll tricking, goblin killing, elven cultural aficionado. A hobbit who never once left The Shire but who smoked his peppery pipeweed by his cozy hearth with his loamy feet propped on a hand-carved stool, who dreamed of giant eagles and great black bears and died comfortably in his bed with an adventure-shaped hole in his heart and a peculiar sadness he could never name.

Spirit Lamp (discontinued) by DS& Durga is a fragrance that evokes a forgotten corner of a botanical garden next to the highway, where a spirit of untamed wilderness thrives unchecked and unexpectedly in a slick puddle of illicitly dumped motor oil. The initial impression is a thick, oily green of some swampy primordial reed, the smell of an extinct past that’s closer than we often care to think, its roots tangled in the earth, its leaves exuding an unctuous herbal musk. This greenness isn’t fresh and invigorating; it’s greasy, thick, almost suffocating. As the scent unfolds, a metallic tang emerges, the scent of rust or singed copper, an aggressively hotwired Dodge Charger counterpoint to the glossy, verdant heart. It’s a scent that evokes anachronistic images of forgotten rituals and arcane practices, real prehistoric Fast & Furious living your life one-quarter mile at a time shit, a potent concoction brewed in the junkyard-slash-abandoned car lot cauldron of nature’s darkest recesses.

Allow me to preface the following with the observation that while I have objectively appreciated many aspects of Sarah McCartney’s 4160 Tuesdays fragrances, they are all perfumes that, for some reason or another, are just not for me. I am desperate to find one from among her creations that really works because I do think she’s super talented, and I love the artistry and ideas that go into her fragrances. Also, I really want one of her bottles on my shelf. Anyhow, I thought this would be it, but good lord. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Oakmossery promises a nostalgic chypre with all the requisite inclusions of oakmoss, peach, bergamot, rose, jasmine, labdanum, patchouli, etc., but rather than an elegant mid-century glamour, you are spoon-fed a vile puree of curdled disappointment. Rather than the gentle juice of a summer peach, it’s a shelf-stable, artificially sweetened, tiny jar of big, mushy baby food feelings. Somehow, it’s also a bit milky, but in the sense of cream that has soured and gone clumpy with a tinge of greenish mold. Swirl them together into a pudding, garnish with a jellied dollop of vaguely floral hand sanitizer, and you have some a grotesque lumpy custard of olfactorily textured nightmares. I could not scrub this off my wrist fast enough, but the joke’s on me! I still smell it on my sweater!

Diptyque Tempo conjures an atmosphere of dolorous elegance,  patchouli’s murky woods and dusky loam, with a wraithlike metallic chill and an herbal shiver of something green and strange simmering underneath. It carries a disquieting heaviness, the shape of a feeling impossible to give voice to; like having to climb into bed with someone and tell them they’re dead. It also reminds me of this passage from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within… and whatever walked there, walked alone.” This is a patchouli that has walked the long shadows of Hill House, has become lost in the thick, unspoken secrets of its notorious halls, and suffered its mad face in the growing darkness. This is a twisted, haunted patchouli that has seen some shit, but all the edges of that unnerving terror have been blurred by the creeping of moss, the settling of dust, and the softness of time and memory, of unreality and dream.  

34 Bohemian Cafes from Thin Wild Mercury’s New York collection. You know, Orpheus went down to Hades to retrieve Eurydice, but he was a dumbass and couldn’t follow instructions; he looked back at her when he was expressly told not to, and then just like that, she was whisked away again. Poor Orpheus, I guess, but I feel like no one ever thinks about Eurydice. I mean, did she even want to come back? I think we imagine this terrible journey to unspeakable hell dimensions, but maybe … contemplate it…she was happy to be uncoupled from that guy and just be on her own? Maybe she got to hang out in a dim-lit, infernal coffee shop, double-fisting the most bitter espresso and a chipped glass of crisply caustic gin, wearing a deliciously pruney leather jacket, a blackened and dusty rose in her lapel and being the sole audience for a mysterious entity singing jazzy French lounge horror ballads, just the unholy instrument of her smoky voice and the demonic feminine in heavy reverb. I don’t know why how Eurydice and La Femme Pendu got to be in the same Satanic VIP room in this perfume review, but here we are and I love this for them, for me, and for this dark, gorgeous fragrance.

I have been spending a few months with Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s Human Animals collection. I have finally put some thoughts together on these transformative fragrances exploring the blurred line between human and beast and the crossings of form and fate, drawing inspiration from folklore and cautionary tales of dark pacts, the consequences of forbidden desires, and yearning for power beyond our grasp or understanding.

Bringer of Evil: A heady mix of musky queen of night poppy and honeyed mimosa entwines with the zest and evanescent freshness of grapefruit, a dark wispy tremor of benzoin’s caramelized sweetness flutters against orris’ secret, rooty coolness in a shadow cast by a single, ill-fated butterfly.

Elimanzer: A bowl of oaty, grainy muesli-esque porridge, steaming and wholesome, holds the sweetness of the cream and the deep fragrant incense of jammy prunes, concealing the insidious and incendiary bite of acrid brimstone, a shivery reminder of pacts made and prices paid.

Elizabeth’s Imps: Thick, rich, molasses dreams, a soft smear of butter infused with cinnamon’s spiced fire, and the powdered musty sap and syrup of amber’s subterranean glow; a promise whispered, a bargain struck, and the cold comfort of calling darkness your own.

Lady of Saintonge: A woodsy phantom limb of creamy white sandalwood aches beneath a veil of slithery black silk, its fading perfume an opulent counter to the metallic tang of blood and the ironclad resolve of self-preservation’s small, sharp curved blade. The scent of forever caught between two worlds, a beast in disguise and a ghost not yet dead.

The Corn Spirit: Beneath the golden cloak of rye stalks, sweet, sun-warmed hay, and chamomile’s milky innocence, a feral musk stirs, and the raw, rich peaty soil hints at the darkness of this unspoken truth, the haunting knowledge that the bounty of the fields comes at a cost.

The Hound and the Milk-White Doe: The luxurious warmth of sandalwood and the sweet summer whispers of jasmine paint a specter of ambiguous innocence, while coconut milk and rosewater offer a fleeting glimpse of soft youth and beauty, but a shadow lurks beneath. Labdanum’s leathery balsamic resin and cardamom’s uneasy floral spice weave a tale of forbidden desires and dark bargains, leaving a scent that evokes a seductive, albeit perilous transformation.

Witch-Birds: A beguiling liveliness of ripe plum and velvety violet shrouds a shadowy heart of dark magic and bitter vengeance, resinous opoponax and mysterious opium evoking the midnight feathers of forbidden knowledge

And finally, a peek at the Miss Behave Favorites collection from Poesie in Celebration of Women’s History Month

Anne of Cleves: A shimmer of green tea’s subtle bitter complexity and dewy earthiness, steeped in bright, clear, sunlight and citrus-infused rainwater, and sweetened with a golden kindness of vibrant, minty wildflower honey. A lush green sprig of lemon verbena floats gently atop, its graceful reflection mirrored in emerald.

Cleopatra: A languorous cascade of peachy musk, draped in balmy moonlit jasmine, imbues the air with an indolent opulence. The ephemeral sweetness of the lotus, a sunset’s fugitive heartbeat, surrenders its delicate petals to the warm, velvety embrace of sandalwood. An ancient tale whispered on arids wind of a queen fed on champagne and pearls, bedecked and perfumed for ecstatic rites invoking forgotten pleasures and enduring power.

Emmeline Pankhurst: An icy rain falls on slick black cobblestones, a gust of wind rattles the windowpanes; Inside, a cup of strong black tea is nestled on a soft linen napkin on the sill, plumes of fragrantly astringent steam veiling the chilled, rain-streaked glass. Just outside, a solitary violet blooms boldly in the crevice of a standing puddle, unyielding in the storm, a parable of profound resolve.

Frida Kahlo: Is a profusion of intensity in delicate balance; tangy passion fruit curd, the tangier, unparalleled tart effervescence of a freshly sliced wedge of lime, the cool, melony crispness of prickly pear, the creamy richness of coconut pulp, and a sugarcane straw to sip it through while you ruminate on how Frida Kahlo purportedly said to “Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are a bourbon biscuit,” and ponder on how to channel that same energy into your own creative practice.

Josephine Baker: I was a little bit afraid to try this one; the scent of a ripe banana is enough to drive me from a room. But this is more the sweet verdant sap and grassiness of the banana leaf gently enveloping a subtle custardy creaminess, like a small, perfect spoonful of creme brulee tucked around a sun-kissed wisp of glowing amber. This one is a thoroughly delightful and beguiling subversion of my expectations.

Zitkala-Sa: This is not the apple I thought I was getting, but it’s ever so much dreamier. This is a breezy apple orchard in spring, an ethereal cloud of awakening blossoms perfuming the air, its delicate canopy throwing lacy shadows over fragrant honey-vanilla sea of clovers. Supporting it all, rosewood and cedar root deep into the earth, their secrets grounding and strong.

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