Apologies, all! It’s the most wonderful time of year–it’s WEENIE time of year–and your faithful reviewer has been laid up with violent food poisoning. I am sorry to say that with the ol’ tum in turmoil, the last thing I have wanted to smell over the past week was Pumpkin Spice anything.
Cinnamon Chai Cupcake(no notes provided) The coziness of lightly spiced cake batter on a chilly autumn night, a bowl of sweetened buttercream frosting, a dusting of cinnamon.
Pumpkin Brownies The Lab’s description indicates this is a pumpkin brownie swirled with caramel and topped with sour cream frosting, but to my nose, these are peanut butter brownies.Begin with a beurre noisette, and swirl high quality butter in a pan on low heat until it gets foamy and brown, and begins to release that nutty, toasty, delicious scent. Toss this in a bowl with a minimal amount of cocoa powder–really, just a dash– and add a jar of the chunkiest, saltiest, most delicious peanut butter you can find. Then do all that other stuff that makes brownies, brownies. I don’t know man, I make mine from a box.
Hallow-e’en, 1914 (Dried ivy and maple leaf with honeyed fig, black cypress, and grave dirt.) An incense of dry, dusty earth sweetened with dark, syrupy fruits, for welcoming for the dead come home.
Samhain 2017 (Damp woods, fir needle, and black patchouli with the gentlest touches of warm pumpkin, clove, nutmeg, allspice, sweet red apple and mullein) Autumn fruits stewed on the stove, spiced with all the usual seasonal suspects, and with half a mug of local apple cider stirred in to gild the lily. The mixture, perhaps left on the burner a few seconds too long as you stepped outside to turn your face up to the October sun, begins to break down into a pulpy jam, the sugars caramelizing and smoking slightly.
Haunted Seas (Seaspray and flecks of foam welling with opoponax and labdanum’s sepulchral moans.) Ooh, at first Haunted Seas smells very much like one of my long-discontinued favorites–Danube. A cool, dark, and mysterious floral-aquatic. A slow, lazy current, running through a sun-dappled glade, swirling with strange, pale blooms.As it dries on the skin, the spectral grey skies and cool, faint fog become apparent, but even so, there is a hopeful brightness at the core of this scent, the breaking of dawn after a midnight of storm-tossed seas.
La Calavera Catrina (Autumn leaves, wild roses, bourbon vanilla, dry chamomile, and a bouquet of bright chrysanthemums and Mexican marigolds.) This elegant Lady of the Graveyard’s arrival is heralded by a sour pungency, green and bitter, and the sweet rot of fallen foliage, damp and decaying. She extends her hand, and gripped lightly in the furled, gleaming bone of her fingers, is a bouquet of the reddest roses you can imagine, their scent lemony and uplifting, mingling gently with the sweetly herbaceous chamomile and the musty spice of marigold petals, crushed underfoot.
Pumpkin Chypre (A gleaming auburn chypre shot through with streaks of pumpkin) Roasted pumpkin, sprinkled with sea salt and not quite Parmesan. Maybe nutritional yeast? Foody, but in a savory main course sort of way, as opposed to the fancy dessert cart options. There’s..something here. I can’t put my finger on it. I want to say umami-esque. Umami adjacent. I don’t know if I want to smell like it, but I’m pretty sure that I like to eat it.
Dead Leaves, Hemp, Mossy Soil, Frankincense, and Oudh Confession time, friends. Your stinky friend here never properly partied it up during her youth and wouldn’t know what hemp or any other weedy business* smelled like even if she was right in the middle of it getting a contact high. Is that what you call it? I don’t even know the language for drug talk. My sister once laughed at me because I referred to “crystal meth,” she told me I sounded like an out of touch octogenarian. I was 30, by the way. I’ve led a fucked up, fascinating (well, I think so, anyway) existence, but super fun, mind-altering substances were unfortunately not a part of that. ANYWAY. This particular Dead Leaves blend smells briefly of dank earth, but it’s final form is a rich, fruity resin.
*I know hemp and marijuana are different plants! …but that’s pretty much all I know.
Dead Leaves, Violet Candy, and Sugar Crystals This initially struck me as one of the more unusual Dead Leaves combinations and I wasn’t entirely convinced it was going to be a pleasant. It begins with an earthy, murky, pile of damp leaves with the powdery woody-floral of the violets growing in a patch next to it. A waxen, sugar-crusted candy wrapper blows by in a brief but sudden breeze. All of these pieces are like jerky stop motion animation; you see them in separate frames in your mind’s eye, disparate entities that don’t even interact, let alone connect, until all of a sudden they do. Underneath the decaying plant matter is an elusive fragrance that smells like, oh, I don’t know…nougat made by dryads? Pillowy and sweet and utterly magical. Imagine there was a secret woodland fairy folk candy shop, shelves sweetly stocked with confections concocted and created with forest roots and resins. You’d have to go pretty far into the forest to find it; you might not be allowed to leave once you do. If you do make it back home again, you’ll not remember a single moment of your delicious adventure …but you’ll dream about those sylvan sweets for the rest of your life.
Pumpkin Spice Shoggoth (Bursting bubbles of self-luminous pumpkin spice!) Amorphous and radiant, and definitely drinkable as a latte, it’s possible that something either went horribly awry…or exactly as it was meant to be, when the The Elder Thing created created the Pumpkin Spice Shoggoth. Iridescent lemongrass and coconut slime, pustules of tartly fizzing lime, rolling over and crushing the gentle pumpkin spices, like so many frantic penguins–this is an oddly refreshing fragrance that is not at all terrible or indescribable.
Chiroptophobia (Fear of Bats) A flutter of leather becomes a swarm of buffeting musks, tangled with a white flash of sandalwood and near-inaudible shrieks of eucalyptus and elemi. Dark and velvety in the bottle, Chiroptophobia immediately turns screechy and bite-y on application, nipping with tiny mentholated fangs. This phase is fleeting too, as the fragrance shifts again to a mild, oily leather and milky, soft sandalwood. The result is a fuzzy creature that you want to cuddle and feed banana chunks to just like in those bat rescue instagram accounts, but whose dark heart beats an unknowable, alien song…and you remember why you were afraid of bats to begin with.
Blood Squib Who knew that blood splatter smelled of rich cherry cordials and marzipan?
The BPAL Halloween 2017 update is always big and exciting, like a jam-packed trick-or-treat bounty bag. This year’s especially thrilling addition to the line-up is a collection based on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, with wonderfully spoopy label art by Drew Rausch. There are 14 scents total; I have reviewed a handful of my favorites for you below.
Suspicion of Foul Play Clean wood floors, a clean tub, clean, clean, clean, with no stain of any kind, no blood-spot whatsoever. I had to try this one a few times before I got where it was coming from. At first I thought it smelled like one of the scratch-n-sniff stickers that you always tried to trade away because you wanted something that smelled like ice cream or popcorn, not hot garbage. Obviously my sniffer was off that day, for the next time I tried it, it made total sense. I might have been getting a nose-burning trash heap pile of citrus peels right out of the bottle, but Suspicion of Foul Play is a actually just a very limey floral cleanser. Nearly caustic, but it reigns itself in after a moment or too. Could you clean the shit out of some blood stains with this? Well. Maybe just scent yourself with it. Or you know, don’t do any murders.
Groan of Mortal Terror (Opaque grey amber and opoponax swelling up like thick smoke, pressed under the weight of baleful tobacco.) Soft smoke and delicate resins.This is a gentle scent that makes me think of a lonely soul who might volunteer to spend a night in a haunted house because the ghosts might be the most company they have had in quite some time. Groan of Mortal Terror is absolutely lovely and wonderfully wearable. And think of all the phantoms you’ll befriend!
The Dead Hour of the Night (Mist-shrouded pine and moonflower creeping over flaccid opium poppies.) THIS SMELLS EXACTLY LIKE A WOMAN IN A FILMY PEIGNOIR RUNNING HEADLONG FROM A TOWER, WITH A SINGLE LIGHT IN ITS TOP MOST WINDOW, IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT. Seriously. This smells like running for your life across a landscape of darkness. If you’ve been searching for the perfect scent to pair with your date night ensemble worn to impress the creepy sweetheart who may or may not want to kill you and also possibly has a lunatic spouse locked in their moldering attic, this is the one.
The Mournful Influence of the Unperceived Shadow (Thick black patchouli, shadow musk, myrrh, and threads of hot saffron mired in sweet, viscous labdanum). I wore this one afternoon, and felt myself cocooned in a cloak of old-world glamour. There’s a deeply powerful leathery note present that seems simultaneously mellowed/amped up by something earthy and intimate and just slightly sour. It reminded me of the last dregs of perfume in a cloudy glass flacon on a starlet’s mirrored vanity table from another era.
The Hellish Tattoo of The Heart (Blood musk and pulsating black pepper, a throb of bitter almond, and cracked pimento.) This is a gloriously bittersweet scent for me; it conjures every time I ever crept into my mother’s bedroom and inhaled the combined odors of her perfume tray, her costume jewelry, her stacks of astrology books precariously piled at her bedside. The wafts of Rachel Perry products from her medicine cabinet, with that gorgeous label artwork that I thought was so very beautiful and sophisticated when I was younger. For you, The Hellish Tattoo of The Heart may smell of cool musks with a peppery bite, but for me it’s the scent of every secret my mother kept, and the sadness I forever carry knowing that I no longer have the chance to unlock them.
I Heard Many Things in Hell (black iris, French lavender, Roman chamomile, and frankincense) These Tell-Tale Heart scents are crazy, I tell you what. I don’t think I have ever had so many shifting and contradictory thoughts about a collection of scents. When I initially sampled the scent, I got a strong blast of something that I can only refer to as bubblegumm-y. It pains me to say that. It pains me to even type that. If there is one thing you should know about me, it is that I just cannot even with gum. People chomping and chewing on their gum grosses me out me out in such a way that I can’t even think about without retching a little bit. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to gum-shame. I don’t mean to tell you that what you enjoy is wrong. But that’s just a thing about me, okay? So, anyway, when I smelled that, I thought “what in the world…?” But, in researching the fragrance of iris, though, many gardeners do say that their irises smell very much like grape bubblegum! That validation would be all well and good, but the next time I wore I Heard Many Things in Hell, the metallic, medicinal aroma of the lavender was most prominent–but was soothed and softened by the apple-y chamomile. The iris, that strange, hateful bloom, was nowhere to be found.
The Wild Audacity of My Perfect Triumph (A jubilant and deranged lime absinthe) I’ve never been able to reconcile myself to the taste of absinthe (which I of course want to adore, but I think in reality is disgusting); but I think The Wild Audacity of My Perfect Triumph is the perfect antidote for my absinthe aversion. This is a remarkable little fragrance. The notes are so simple, and so well-blended that you can’t tell where the tart, tangy lime ends and the dry, bitter absinthe begins–because it is actually none of those things at all. It is a cool, woody cologne that smells vaguely but handsomely poisonous, but in the very best way, and I imagine it would smell equally beguiling on men, women, and dismembered corpses with still-beating hearts.
What are your favorites from this years Weenie collection? Which scents are you dying to try? Give us your thoughts in the comments!
The Weenie 2017collection is currently live and available for purchase in 5ml bottles for $23 each. As this is a limited edition series, sample sizes imps are not available for Weenie 2017.
Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab are purveyors of fine esoteric goods, perfumes, and potions–and if you’ve spent any amount of time with me, or reading my blog here, then no doubt you already know all about them. But for those who may be unfamiliar with this marvelous perfumery, here’s the gist: Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has mastered the art of encapsulating allegorical ideas into singular olfactory experiences, and they specialize in eliciting emotional responses through perfume and creating unique, masterfully molded scent environments that capture legends and folklore, poetry, and the stuff of dreams and nightmares. TLDR; they make you stink real pretty in the most amazingly creative ways.
And not only do these singular scent slingers work long hours, toiling away to create compelling fragrances inspired by your favorite ghost stories/mythologies/comic books/horror movies/holidays (that would be Halloween, obviously,) for which to make your olfactive aura beautiful! The do-gooders at Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab also put in a great deal of time and personal attention in the attempt at making our world a better, more beautiful place, with many years of activism, community involvement, humanitarian work, and ongoing fundraising efforts and events under their belts.
About these efforts, my dear friend Elizabeth Barrial, owner of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, shares:
“Since the day we first opened our doors, helping support and strengthen marginalized communities has been of paramount importance to me. At Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, we have never shied away from our civic duty, and since the inception of the company, we have made it a point to do everything within our power to support organizations that provide emergency aid and disaster relief, support environmental and conservation causes, help the homeless, protect civil liberties and reproductive rights, and offer succor to the LGBTQ community and marginalized ethnic, racial, and minority religious groups. It is our way of helping to protect and provide for our communities, and we feel it is our obligation as human beings to help those who may not be empowered to help themselves.”
Jeanne d’Arc, Albert Lynch
BPAL currently offers a line up of scents inspired by Nasty Women and those who would persist; by courageous federal employees who risk their careers to ensure that the public is kept informed on issues of climate change; by those ceaselessly fighting injustice and hatred and bigotry. Scents to bolster courage as you refute ignorance and insincerity; scents to encourage kindness and compassion; scents to provide relief and recovery to those imperiled by disastrous circumstances. The proceeds from all of these scents go to such organizations as the ACLU, NCTE, Planned Parenthood, Emily’s List, NAACP, the National Parks Conservation Association and the National Park Foundation, as well as hurricane disaster relief efforts, and below you will find the descriptions and links to all of their current philanthropic, fundraising fragrances.
Alternative Facts: The truth hurts — so why tell it? Muffle the blow with Alternative Facts. If you truly want to obfuscate what you really smell like, this is the scent for you! Sugar-crusted vanilla, a firecracker-blast of cherry and sour lemon, a hint of scuttling spiders, encroaching fog, and trumpets of bombast, bluff, and bluster. Proceeds benefit the American Civil Liberties Union.
Fake News: A scent of misdirection, of 140 frantic characters typed out in spite at 3am, and paranoia-clouded churlish accusations hurled at perceived enemies: crushed pink pepper pod, bitter white tobacco, gnarled patchouli, all covered in glinting, garish slashes of gold. Wear it in vigilance as you sift through the memes, trolls, clickbait, hate-speech, and outright propaganda that continually threaten to overwhelm all the world’s kindness, wisdom, and informed expertise. Wear it in courage as you refute ignorance and insincerity at every turn — even from our nation’s highest-ranking figures — with indisputable facts from well-researched sources. Proceeds benefit the American Civil Liberties Union.
COVEFE: Is it abstract nonsense poetry? Surrealist performance art? Cryptography so subtle and devious that it would make an Enigma machine blush? This perfume makes no fucking sense: orange marshmallow cream, bitter lemon, black pepper, orange carnation, and gin.
Proceeds benefit the American Civil Liberties Union.
Nevertheless, She Persisted: A rallying call: golden oudh, frankincense, iris, and steel. Proceeds from this scent benefit EMILY’s List, an organization that supports electing pro-choice Democratic women to office.
Nasty Woman: “Such a nasty woman.” black fig and patchouli, filthy bourbon vanilla, honeyed amber oud, and loukhoum. Proceeds will be split between Planned Parenthood and EMILY’s list.
Irish Coffee Buttercream: Irish whiskey, granulated sugar, brown sugar, whipped cream, buttercream and coffee, and Spiced Rum Buttercream Coffee: Coffee and rum laced with allspice, nutmeg, clove, star anise, cardamom, and cinnamon gently whipped into buttercream. Two cheery, uplifting scents slated for a future, 2018 coffee-theme release which instead became emergency fundraiser scents in order to take an immediate stand to fight the reinstatement of the unconstitutional, immoral, and unnecessarily cruel US military ban on transgender people. Proceeds benefit the National Center for Transgender Equality and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Take a Knee: This is the scent of apple pie, as American as it gets, and a smudged grass stain. Taking a knee…this isn’t a protest of America itself, its flag, or anything that this country stands for. It isn’t disrespectful of the US military. On the contrary, it is the acknowledgement that we as a country can do better, that we must do better, and that we must renew our commitment to fight for equality and justice for all. Proceeds benefit the NAACP.
Theoi Nomioi: The National Park Service refuses to be muzzled. On January 24th, South Dakota’s Badlands National Park social media team defiantly posted a series of climate change facts from the National Wildlife Federation before being shut down. The Theoi Nomioi are the gods and spirits of the wild: the countryside, the pastures, the forests. Under their auspices, untamed nature thrives, the beasts of the wild feast and multiply, the mountains reach to the heavens with their stony, snow-capped fingers, and the forests grow thick and dark with mystery. Proceeds to the benefitNational Parks Conservation Associationand theNational Park Foundation.
And last but certainly not least, The Collected Poetic Works of Antonin Scalia, the “federal court’s beat poet of indignation and right-wing rage.” We’ve had myriad political figures throughout US history that have possessed acid tongues, but few in the modern era have provided such a constant stream of colorfully vitriolic superlatives as the Sick Burn Champion, the cranky, flamboyant, inimitable Antonin Gregory Scalia.
I haven’t sampled all of these scents, and more importantly, I don’t want my opinions on them to overshadow the fact that these scents exist in the world, doing good in the first place, so you won’t find reviews here today… but feel free to ask questions in the comments if you wanted my thoughts on any of them, and I will do my best to fill you in!
Are you a creator who gives a damn? Are you aware of artisans or indie businesses speaking up, reaching out, and creating art or goods to express outrage with injustice, promote anti-hatred, or which encourage safe spaces in their communities? Please let me know about them for future Friday Fripperies!
Do you want to smell of an ice cream sundae enjoyed in the murky seaside town of Innsmouth? Or perhaps strange desert visions? Or nostalgic Spring Break make-outs with your high school boyfriend? Leave a comment over at Haute Macabre and tell us which scent you’d most like to try!
Today at Haute Macabre I’m pleased to review Solstice Scents’ Spring 2017 collection, whose refreshing vernal fragrances were a lovely change of pace during the hellscape that is July in Florida.
Are you a fan of bracing cocktails, lemony gourmands, Appalachian meadow Bambis, or watercolor florals & haunted breezes? Or perhaps the idea of the eerie olfactory equivalent of this image below piques your interest? In that case, you may want to avail yourself of some of these lovely spring scents before they are sold out!
When I was younger, summertime, to me, meant curling up on a sweaty vinyl chair on the screened-in back porch with a pitcher of powdered iced tea drink and reading stories of ghosts and monsters and possessed children. If I was lucky, the skies would darken at midday, the winds would pick up, and a fearsome storm would thunder through the area; this is a common occurrence on a summer afternoon in central Florida, and normally would not last more than ten minutes.
I avoided the sun when at all possible; I did not relish playing outside with my sisters or the neighbor’s kids, I did not care for trips to the beach, I didn’t like being hot and sticky and gross. And I didn’t really have any friends to do any of those things with, anyhow. But then again, I’d never had many friends, so I really didn’t know any better and I didn’t feel badly about it! These long, sweltering days on the back porch voraciously tearing through stacks upon stacks of cheap, lurid used bookstore finds are some of the happiest memories I have from my pre-teen years. This was how summer was supposed to be, I thought, and at the ages of 11/12/13, I was young enough to have the luxury of spending that time however I liked. And after the daily rains, which were impatiently anticipated and perfectly inevitable -that was my favorite part of the day: a few glorious moments when the humidity dropped the tiniest bit, the air cooled a few degrees, and the sun disappeared entirely, culminating in a rich scent that still tugs at my memories and the edges of my dreams many years later. The musty scent of disintegrating paperbacks, the air heavy with the sweet, musky fragrance of jasmine, the tang of ozone, just before a heavy rainfall. This was the scent of my summers.
Years later when it comes to scenting myself for summer weather, I steer clear of many of the perfumes marketed for these sizzling, stifling afternoons when the evil day star holds sway. I don’t want to smell like the synthetic coconut of greasy suntan lotion, nor do I want to smell like those generic aquatics that are supposedly “crisp and refreshing” or the ubiquitous green tea and cucumber/melon melange which smell like so many country club air fresheners. Yes, I do want something lighter, for anything richer and heavier would certainly suffocate and strangle me in our notoriously murky, muggy Southern summers…but I want a scent that also evokes some sort of nostalgia, triggers a memory, conjured a long-forgotten dream.
Below is a list of my five preferred fragrances in this vein; scents for these summer months that are at turns cooling, invigorating, revitalizing and imaginative: summer scents for those who shun the sun.
Coriandre by Jean Couturier is a light, lovely chypre launched in the mid-70’s. If you are not familiar with chypres, well, they seem to be a rather divisive grouping of scents, with perfume lovers falling squarely in either the Love Them or Hate Them camps. To me, generically, chypres smell a bit cold and astringent, distant; but Coriandre is on the warmer, more familiar end of the spectrum. It does remind me of something from the 70s; it’s got a hazy Polaroid quality to it. A warm, grassy summer day recalled through the yellowed veil of memory. It’s dry and woody and musky and I think it smells a bit like a lovely little secret that you might never be ready to share.
Annick Goutal’s Mandragore reminds me of a scene in the 1980’s vampire film The Lost Boys, when the main characters’ grandpa says “….well that’s about as close to town as I like to get.” My perfume shelf is filled mostly with deep, dark, resinous fragrances, and Mandragore, with its bright lemony/peppery opening that quickly fades to a soft, minty bergamot, is as close to a “summer scent” as I like to get. It’s a lovely, (softly) zingy scent that calls to mind some sort of mildly alcoholic herbal shandy one might drink to refresh one’s self at the close of a balmy June afternoon. Unfortunately, much like the buzz from this weak cocktail, the scent lasts but a moment and is gone.
Safran Troublant by L’Artisan is a wonderfully restorative, heart-warming/opening scent. It should be part of a comforting bedtime ritual at the end of a long, hot day where one has done a lot of yard work or gardening. There’s a comforting sweetness to it, though not at all sugary or cloying. A creamy sandalwood pudding, a lukewarm bath lightly infused with milk and rose petals and a deep, enveloping hug. You’ll sleep quite well and be visited by the loveliest midsummer dreams.
Danube, by Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab is a beloved scent that is, for me, more about memory than the actual fragrance itself. It is a deep blue aquatic scent – but not salty, ozone-y, beachy aquatic, nor is it murky, swampy aquatic. Like a cold swimming pool on a hot day (maybe if you were adding grapefruit to your pool instead of chlorine) with every blue flower imaginable floating on top of it. Imagine being 6 years old and holding your breath and submerging yourself in a swimming pool, then slo-o-o-wly sinking to the bottom. The water is chilled, you feel like the only person in the world and everything is totally silent. Imagine peering up and seeing the sun streaming down into the water, between all of the blue petals. It’s calm and soothing and serene and is an absolutely a must for hot, sticky weather and for people who haven’t got a swimming pool. Unfortunately, I do believe that Danube is discontuned. For other other unique summer scents from BPAL, sniff out Fae (sweet, floral, peachy), and Zephyr (light musk, soft lemon and florals), and Aeval (dried herbs & sweet pea & tonka and it smells like all of my favorite occult bookshops at once -herbs and oils and stones and crystals and and the crisp pages of unopened books filled with unlearned knowledge.)
When I was 18, I was dating the boy who used to live next door to me, but who had since graduated high school and moved to Indiana to attend Notre Dame. We spent a week together on summer break, during which time he had flown down South to stay with me and my family. It was early in this visit that he proposed to me on the beach one night, and I accepted…though something told me that this was a doomed venture. I knew it was not going to last, and yet I agreed anyway; I suppose I just liked the idea that something interesting loomed in the distant future for me. One late afternoon a few days later, we took a drive; the sun hung low on the horizon, the windows were down, and on the wind that ruffled our hair was the musky, sweet scent of orange blossoms, as we had just driven past a massive orange grove. Jo Malone’s Orange Blossom smells like that summer afternoon, sweet blooms and dying suns and the melancholy of tears yet to be shed for reasons you’re not quite sure of.
A bonus scent, which I have mentioned before, so it didn’t seem quite fair to list it above: Comme des Garcons Incense Series: Kyoto. To be honest, Kyoto is my go-to fragrance no matter what the season; it’s austere and meditative and calls to mind a dark prayer in a cool, shadowy forest temple. But there is something exceptionally wonderful about it in the summer months. On a day of wretched, heated summertime oppression, do this: draw the curtains, dim the lights, strip naked, and liberally spritz yourself with Kyoto. Lay on your bed, mid-afternoon in the dark. Nap for a time. Dream of cooler places. And for what it’s worth, I just purchased my 5th bottle of this particular scent (and you know I have quite a lot of perfumes to choose from) so Kyoto is obviously getting a lot of mileage.
What scents do you dream of in summer time? What cools you down & soothes your brow when the temperatures soar?
Wow, has it really been since the end of January that I’ve compile a list of stinks o’ the week? Lordy. Well, better later than never, right? Though I guess in this case is more like “scents of the month/s” But we won’t dwell on my faults and laziness, okay? Previous weeks: one // two
First up, Kiehl’s Original Musk: I do think this is the perfect musk; it hasn’t got that lofty sneeze-inducing quality that I associate with Egyptian musk, but it does have a feral edge of skankiness, and an underlying bittersweet powderiness that keeps a scent that is mostly warm and clean from becoming bland and blah. Kiehl’s musk is exactly what I imagine 1974 to smell like. Astrology enthusiasts, embroidered caftans, and an endless parade of Tupperware parties through your rust & mustard & olive wallpapered kitchen. {perfume sample pictured alongside the utterly exquisite “black mirror” snake pendant from Flannery Grace}
Mandragore by Annick Goutal. Mandragore reminds me of a scene in the 1980’s vampire film The Lost Boys, when the main characters’ grandpa says “….well that’s about as close to town as I like to get.” My perfume shelf is filled mostly with deep, dark, resinous autumnal fragrances, and Mandragore, with its bright, effervescent lemony/peppery opening that quickly fades to a gently minty bergamot, is as close to a “summer scent” as I like to get.
Absinth by Nassomatto. Bittersweet mosses, green woodsmoke, and sinister woods. It’s a bit of a nose-jarring scent at first sniff, as if the punk-poet green fairy quit bohemian Paris to live amongst the ancient dryads and they didn’t get on well but eventually formed an uneasy friendship. It’s a softly surreal, slightly subversive scent, and I totally imagine Meatface here wearing it.
Avignon from COMME des GARÇONS Incense series. In short, it smells like the melancholy elegance of a poet who writes with terribly expensive pencils. Pencil shavings & poet’s tears. All of CdG’s Incense fragrances smell like poetry to me, so here is Avignon captured alongside some of my favorites.
Pink Sugar by Aquolina. If you’ve not tried it, it’s exactly what you think it is. Which is to say an ultra sweet, teeth-aching miasma of fizzy spun sugar. Marshmallow and a tiny twist of lemon with a barely-detectable licorice spike. It is wretched. It is divine. I inexplicably adore it. I buy the “hair perfume” version so I can spritz with manic pixie dust mad abandon. The dry down is sweetly vanillic and woody, like maybe the bark of the mythic candy floss tree in the dime store candy forest. I know heaps of folks who hate this stuff. Oh well. More for me!
Me, Myself, and I by Ego Facto. I’ve had this bottle for over a year but haven’t really worn it much until recently, and I’m here to tell you, it is strangely addictive. I was initially intrigued by the notes {Hemlock flower, exotic basil, Tuberose absolute, lavender flowers, Java Vetyver roots, Gaiac wood} and I’ve read that hemlock is an unpleasant scent, but anytime it’s listed in a fragrance, I can’t help but to want to give it a go. Me, Myself and I is sort of raw and green and smoky all at once. There is something just this shy of mentholated to it, and though it’s slightly bitter and almost musty at first, hours later it’s a really lovely, flowery-fresh, woody scent. What I love about it most, though, and this is going to sound weird (and maybe gross to some of you), is that it smells vaguely like the handbag or the scarf of a long-time smoker. There was a girl I went to high school with, the sister of my boyfriend at the time, who was beautiful and popular and had her shit super together, and she was, at that time, a somewhat heavy smoker. Every time she’d swing her waist-length, impossibly shiny black hair around, I’d catch a whiff of cigarette smoke, perhaps tinged with her expensive shampoo, (it was probably Origins; a store had just opened in the mall at that time) and I’ll be honest, I thought it was an unbelievably gorgeous, sophisticated scent. (Note: I’m not even a smoker, I have never smoked anything in my life. I’m just a weirdo, I guess.)
Guardian from Solstice Scents. Described as a forest chypre blend and a botanical talismanic perfume, it smells of dense earthy shadows and amber sunlight through a forest canopy, and feels like finally coming home.
Death & Decay from LUSH. I wrote about this back in 2015, for Death & The Maiden, and my thoughts have not changed much. A mass of white lillies, a wreath, perhaps – sweet and clean and full, waxen, and with a dignified clove-like spice, you can almost envision their alabaster form and curve. A calming, quiet, meditative, floral, almost too fresh to call classic, but it certainly evokes a kind of nostalgia. This fragrance calls to mind little girls dressed all in white, playing hide and seek around an open casket because they don’t know yet to be sad at funerals.
Antique Lace from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab (discontinued). Many years ago, a friend spilled my beloved bottle of Antique Lace. Which made me awfully sad, I can assure you. I was even more devastated shortly thereafter to discover they had discontinued this soft, sweet, whisper of a scent. Imagine my surprise to learn, seven or eight years later, that they are offering it again! It may have sold out already, but you can bet your fluffy pantaloons I hastily procured a replacement bottle for myself.
Inviting us to celebrate the warmth of passion in the dead of winter, the smut peddlers at BPAL again deliver stimulating, scintillating scents for the lovelorn and lustful, the depraved and the intemerate. Whether you see these lurid delights as a dare, or as merely as a to-do list, and no matter how singular your tastes may be, there is all manner of delightful debauchery here to appeal to aficionados of arousing, amusing aromatic experiences.
Speaking of smut, let’s begin with Smut 2017! (three swarthy, smutty musks sweetened with sugar and woozy with dark booze notes) My first thought is that this as not as aggressively smutty as Smuts of yore (my boss made me go home when I wore it to the office in 2008). Like, maybe Smut went to rehab and detoxed a little. While the older versions of this scent I have are heavier on the booze and musk, this version seems lighter and sweeter and …fruity? While this smells nothing, of say, blackberries, I’m reminded of the syrupy, glazed bits of the fruit mixture crusted to the edges of a cobbler dish after the dessert is removed from the oven. I think many people are going to find Smut 2017 a touch more wearable than it might have been in the past.
Luperci (patchouli, Gurjam balsam, and essence of Sampson Root, beeswax, virile juniper, oakmoss, ambrette seed over honey and East African musk); inspired by rites of the Luperci (“brothers of the wolf”) this opens with raw, powerfully earthy patchouli, piercing and damp. The grassy soil which cradled the She-Wolf, suckling the Sacred Twins, shaded by the leaves of a fig tree and made rich by its rotting leaves and fruit, and the blood of the sacrifices spilled there. Luperci remains green and wooded and though it does not sweeten with time, it softens and becomes muskier, murkier.
Womb Furie(an itch that needs to be scratched: Snake Oil and three types of honey) I don’t know if this happens with everyone–or anyone, even–but usually anything with prominent honey notes ends up smelling like pee on me. As you can imagine, I am very saddened by this because honey is divine and delicious. However! Though this initially exhibits the sharpness I associate with most honeyed scents, there are none of those pungent, ammonia-like associations, so I suppose I can breathe easier. Snake Oil by itself, is, I believe, a rather divisive scent; there are those who love it, and there are those who are wrong. But the general complaint I hear is that it is a incredibly potent, sometimes headache inducing scent. In Womb Furie the harsh edges of Snake Oil’s exotic Indonesian oils and intense vanilla are tempered by the delicate, powdery honey and strikes a pleasingly satisfying balance; it conjures feelings not so much of itches that needs scratching but rather the warm afterglow of desires sweetly satiated.
The good folks at BPAL like to remind us “We’re not always all about death, sex, and debauchery. We like chocolate, too!”
White Chocolate, Marshmallow, Honey, and Goat’s Milk Straight from the bottle this smells of cocoa butter and marshmallow, and something else I can’t quite put my finger on–a cookie-like quality. Something with a cloying graham cracker crumb. It conjures a treasured confection from childhood, a sacred, special treat which I have just now remembered: Mallowmars!
Dark Chocolate, Whiskey, and Cardamom-Infused CaramelWhoa. This is some business, here. Rich dark chocolate, the intensely bitter sort with the amped up percentage of cacao that you don’t even have to hide from your significant other because they can’t even handle it. The whiskey is so smooth you can barely detect it, and layered with the goopy sweetness of the gently spiced caramel, this makes for an incredibly decadent bonbon of a scent.
Milk Chocolate, Cacao Cream, Ceylon Cinnamon, and Coffee AbsoluteWhile I have insisted for years that I am not a lover of foodie or gourmand scents, this may be the one that changes my mind. I’m going to give you a visual, okay? Imagine an amorous encounter with your sexy barista crush, (the one who works really long hours because they hand-grind a lot of beans), while rolling around in $240 worth of creamy, milk chocolate pudding.
Lupercalia Single Note: Riding CropThis is an exquisite “worn in” leather scent, but I don’t mean to imply that it smells somehow beat up and rugged like cowboy boots, or a horse’s saddle that has seen many denim clad bottoms across it. No, this is the scent of madam’s favorite corset– smooth and black, and perfectly fitted to her elegant curves. A handsome, tight-laced thing whose strict shine has dulled over the years but in whose reflection can still be seen countless memories of hours spent meting out untold pleasures…and in the exquisite instruction of delicious pain.
Pleasures of the Imagination I(black amber, leather, and myrrh) Clean, powdered skin, and shiny black leather and oddly enough, the delicately antiseptic smell of an expensive lingerie department. Imagine wearing your Agent Provocateur scanties underneath a leather moto jacket with just the right amount of silvery zipper accents.
Pleasures of the Imagination V (black leather, red sandalwood, orris root, tobacco absolute, oakmoss, and sweet patchouli) This is an inconstant leather, at first, lined with the softest cotton, and then, filled with strange, sweet earth. A marvelously mutable scent, I soon detect a watery greenness and sharp, metallic freshness. At the end we are left with not the pin-up girls in Art Frahm’s campy illustrations, but rather the surprise stalk of celery that is lurking, ever present, as a poor woman’s skirts fly up and her underwear, inexplicably, fall down.
Ah, my favorites. The scents I look forward to all year round because they combine my love for the beautiful and the absurd and elevate to sublime art: the Shunga scents. Novel Ideas for Secret Amusements is “a limited edition Salon series celebrating the joy, humor, playfulness, and thrill of sexual intercourse through scent interpretations of Japanese erotic art”
Kitten with Shamisen Daydreams of a Phallus Palanquin (rice milk, white musk, and pear) It is not pear I smell at first, but strawberries. Or perhaps some other twinkling, pink, “youthful” smelling fruit. The longer the scent wears, the more I feel I am aging backwards, and I am surrounded by small, plastic dolls whose, fruity, synthetic, multi-colored hair I sniff obsessively and no doubt rudely, as I am serving an imaginary tea and that’s not the behavior of a polite hostess. In our small teacups with the curly-cue handles I still dream about as an adult, we are drinking a shimmering champagne spiked with dollops of lightly sweetened cream. I apologize for the hair sniffing.
Delightful Visitor Among the Haystacks (chrysanthemum incense and red carnation) I was keenly interested in this scent in particular… I found unexpected beauty in the brevity of the notes listed; it pierced my heart with a fleeting sort of sadness. And too, this fragrance is strange and sad, musty and full of ponderous longing. Years of incense woven into threads of a poet’s pillow and perfuming their final inhalations as they pen their last words in this world: Rusu naredo // tou hito mo kana // notorikigo? — Kizo, 1851 When I am gone // will someone care for // the chrysanthemum when I leave?
Consoling Pussy of Horse Face Mountain(tuberose incense, blue wisteria, and oakmoss) A cool, creamy, intimate floral that conjures a flood of memories for me, none of which have anything to do with each other, or with anything in particular. The fragrance of my mother’s carved wooden boxes that held sticks of nag champa and faded tarot cards; the chlorinated, rubbery scent of a pool supply store that we used to frequent when I was very young. I don’t think this is a scent that I will reach for very often, but not because I don’t care for it. Rather, it is the perfume of a life that I have already lived and know quite profoundly.
Finally, The Devil’s Lovers: the Erotic Art of Félicien Rops, a collection which showcases the work of the renowned Belgian illustrator, engraver, and printmaker, and which is a celebration of death, sex, and political and social rebellion, all reflected through a distinctly Mephistophelean lens.
Le Vice Suprême(leather and a splash of gin, whiskey-swirled tobacco, rose petals, and bourbon vanilla) What a nose-tickler this is! While I don’t smell gin, per se, I smell something a bit effervescent and dry and not quite boozy, but somewhat woozy. It’s the olfactory version of a gleeful gulp going awry, laughing and gagging until your eyes swim, and the prickly little cough that remains for the rest of the evening. At this point, you’ve also got the hiccups. Light, fizzy, giggle water.
Les Incubes et des Succubes(blackberry pulp, Bordeaux wine, grape leaves, and wild patchouli) This, my friends, is the Kool-Aid fueled orgy that you have been dreaming of. Sugar-macerated berries and wildly overripe grapes squelching amongst heaving, naked bodies as an oversized anthropomorphic plastic pitcher MCs the depraved festivities. I won’t end this sentence with his iconic phrase. It’s just too easy.
À Un Dîner D’athées(white lavender and ambrette seed, grey patchouli, rum absolute, and vetiver) A somber, sobering scent, with an initial blast of lavender which oscillates between cool and medicinal and sharp, salty licorice. The vetiver and rum add a dry, bitter, molasses-tinged edge to what, at its heart, remains a brittle, humorless scent. It is a fragrance that borders on unpleasant, but leaves me intensely curious as to its inspiration. “À Un Dîner D’athées”, or, At a Dinner of Atheists, is an illustration by Félicien Rops to accompany a story of the same title in Les Diaboliques (The She-Devils), a collection of short stories written by Barbey d’Aurevilly. According to my two seconds of research just now, the acts committed by the characters in these stories are induced not only by their extreme passion but also by their boredom–and it’s strange to say, but this fragrance does conjure images of ennui and tedium, but also of rage and revenge and other manias not given proper outlet, but allowed to fester, silent and hidden. I can’t quite think of who I would recommend this scent for, but whoever this person is, they are both fascinating and dangerous.
My week in fragrances, week two. (Which is more like a week and a half’s worth and I am now on week three if you’re being really picky about it, but I’m not, so you shouldn’t be, either!) I am almost to the end of January and so far I have not purchased any new fragrances, not even tiny samples! Let’s see if I can keep this up for another month.
Morocco (formerly “Old Morocco” from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab). This is one of the first BPAL samples that I ever received, and one of their first scents that I fell in love with, but it took me a while to commit to a full size bottle. When I did, it was no longer “Old Morocco”, but instead, just plain “Morocco”. This is a scent of tender comforts, of being swaddled in plush saffron robes after a long, dusty day of travels, and sipping a honeyed, milky draught of something unfamiliar and yet strangely comforting before slipping into bed. Your pillow is filled with carnations and sandalwood shavings, lending a gentle spice and dry warmth to round out the sweetness. You dream for days.
Courtesan by Worth. I purchased this many years ago, and sometimes I seriously question what I was thinking. It’s a frou-frou, one-two punch of pineapple pixy stix and a feathery poof of some sort of vanilla jasmine laundry powder that manages to be creamy, cloying, and yet very sheer. It’s like being smothered in a veil of phantom custard.
Niki de Saint Phalle, a light, grassy chypre interwoven with dry, autumn floral accents. It conjures imagery of late summer afternoon daydreaming on a mossy hill and brushing dried blooms and other herbaceous detritus off your sun-warmed skirts when you’ve finally roused yourself to head home.
An informal reporting on the scents I’ve been wearing lately, in a concerted effort to appreciate and use what I already have, as opposed to continually adding another fragrance to the collection (and another, and another). Previous to now, this collection has grown, unchecked, and has reached a point where I will never wear all of it, even if I had ten lifetimes to scent.
As strange as it sounds, I think Arsenic smells like fresh marjoram, which, in turn, reminds me very much of Christmases when I was a little girl. I think that’s because when I first smelled fresh marjoram (which to my nose smells a little sweet, slightly piney, maybe a touch of citrus, and vaguely musty?) I realized it smelled exactly like the worn, cardboard box of Avon Christmas ornaments, gewgaws, and tchotchkes that we’d haul down from the attic, dust off, and disperse throughout our home every year for the holidays.
Mississippi Medicine opens with an astringent, peppery cypress, and gives way to a pine-crackling, smoky fire, sweet birch, muddy grass and scorched leaves… and dries down to a sweetly herbaceous, woody, resinous scent that would smell devastating on either a man or a woman (I mention this because it is marketed toward men.) All told, this is the scent of waking with strange incense in your hair and the vague dream of descending into the dark, dancing and divining with ancestors, and having been part of rituals older than you can imagine. A scent of potent magics – both sacrificial and healing
Chanel Sycomore. Foliage and tall trees and rich, gritty dirt; soft smoke and damp greenery, and all the best smells of a forest ramble–but the hiker is garbed in expensive elegance, Prada boots, an Hermès scarf, Burberry coat, that sort of thing. This scent of a woodland spirit turned posh socialite; a dryad who quit the forest, now living on the Upper East Side.
Courtesan by Worth
Niki de Saint Phalle
