I am posting these a bit early, because I am taking the next two weeks off from all things perfume-writing-related!
D’Annam Mooncake smells different every time I wear it, sometimes an approximation of golden syrup, sometimes a vaguely eggy center, sometimes honey’s thick, golden musk. I can’t speak to whether it’s accurate because I might just not like mooncakes? (I also find those egg custard tarts at dim sum restaurants kinda gaggy even though everyone else seems to love them, so maybe this is a me problem.) But then I am weirdly relieved to say it settles into Victoria’s Secret body spray territory. Whipped warm vanilla beaten into syrupy clouds, not exactly caramel or butterscotch adjacent, but some secret third vanilla thing, light and sweet and glazed donut-sticky, thoroughly slutty. This is what someone in a wish dot com sexy Tinkerbell costume smells like, and I mean that with complete affection. Cheap glitter and cheaper wings, body spray applied liberally in a dorm bathroom, going out to the club with lots of enthusiasm and exactly zero plan; that version of me never existed, but I was kinda jealous of her! Trashy, charming, the kind of scent that conjures nostalgia for someone else’s youth. I’m genuinely fond of it. I almost want a full bottle, except it is also pretty gross.
Regime des Fleurs Blood Spider Orchids This is an intensely sugared cinnamon and autumn fruit compote, with a bit of brooding, jasmine-y burlesque sultriness. Big Titty Goth Girlfriend harvest spice simmer pot. Too va-va-voom to be cozy, too cozy to be moody, too moody to be come-hither. Sort of like [Mae West voice] “Come up and see me sometime,” but it’s ultimately an invitation to drink boozy hot cider in the dark while rubbing each other’s feet and watching Over the Garden Wall on endless loop and streaming yourselves for freaky guys who are into that kinda thing.
Escentric Molecules Molecule 01 + CistusFrozen smoke, ghost trails, crystallized vapor, memory of fire. Cedar’s bare branches, skeletal wood, stripped trees, winter forests. Lemon peel frozen mid-curl, preserved brightness, acid blade on ice, bone-white, moonlit. Amber trapped sap frilled and shivery-bitter, colorless, and pale. Glacial cold, silver sheen, mirror surface, morning rime coating everything. Muted, hushed, dulled edges, sound absorbed by snow. Edmund Dulac’s Snow Queen on her icy throne, layers of ice and shadow, laminated, frigid, still. Remote majesty, solemn dignity, the ceremony and sorrow of ceaseless winter.
Nos Republic Cor Serpentis is pallid astral berries translated through the cellular mimicry of a creature from beyond the stars, who’s only ever known the pale juice of celery. Gellid minerals, wibbly, rocky aspic. Acid rain-forest-ozone melting, morphing, form in flux, clouds with limbs, bark and branch lightning-struck, caustic drip. Lavinia Whateley as Virgil Finlay-starlady, but in a story wholly her own. Weirdness made manifest independent of limited human frameworks and someone else’s stunted stories. Invoking a wriggling, writhing Yog-Sothoth on her own terms, a ruin of her own making, an undoing of her own feeble design.
Birch Please Þvörusleikir energy! This lil dingus coming in from the cold into the steaming grass turf-roofed home, a little musky, woodsy, stealing a carved wooden spoon, sneaking into the Baðstofa where the family is mending by firelight with laps full of sheepskin for warmth – not exactly the best hiding spot, but here he is anyway. Cold clinging to him, outdoor sharp conifer and sweet sap meeting indoor steam, turf-and-timber warmth, the scent of gathered bodies and pelts.
Merry Gentlethems Wow wow nutmeg wow! Lots o’ nutmeg! But also a winking, waltzing salami? Anthropomorphized food, inexplicable sausages with faces, bizarre Victorian holiday postcard logic. That earthy/floral woody bouquet of that divisive spice -and-cured-meat combination, wrapped in a quilt, decorating a mantle. (I am late to the love of nutmeg, but if you think you hate it, grate it fresh and have another think!)
Pink Reindeer Club Midcentury Roald Dahl Tupperware party, James and the Giant Peach, except it’s a jar of marmalade. Cranberry ginger ale garnished with a jelly orange, glossy and bubbly, tart-ruby-bright.
Plaid Shirt Deconstructed avant-garde art-installation haute cuisine dessert brought to the masses via a food truck with a name like Essence & Element or some such. Menu item Untitled No. 3: Blonde gingerbread stripped spices, lemony and crystalline, rock sugar facets, edible crystal. Delicate green-fresh floral anise, fennel fronds just blooming, licorice-flower translucent sweetness. Precious, conceptual, demanding you meet it where it is (served from a window with a line around the block).
Arcana KnightsTemplar John Willie fetish illustration. Chained boots, exaggerated heels, high-contrast drama. Patchouli leading, dark earthy command, resinous weight. Cedar following, clean wood, crisp structure. Musk as polished leather bands, warm metal on skin, restraint as ornamentation. Patchouli’s opacity directing cedar’s transparency, composed control, intimate tension. Incense smoke chain links, insubstantial, immersive; a binding emblematic and allusive. Elegant constraint, sophisticated dominance, a study in control and compliance, rendered in resin and wood.
Aysha Hansen Ghost Lover The sleazy, dangerous-divine charm of an Anne Rice mummy. Bandages steeped in sullen honey, infused with bitter, bracing cardamom and burnished amber incense, the aromatic pique of peppercorns tucked in various orifices and cavities for an afterlife eternity. Smoky, intimate burial, earthly fortune pressed to pulse points, swaddling of intimate opulence for eventual resurrection, rapture, and ruin. The transcendent high of choosing violence, (inviting carnage / welcoming chaos / accepting inevitable devastation / choose your own adventure here) and yet… you would not kick it out of bed for eating crackers. Which is a phrase I thought of because this smells a little biscuity, too.
Aftelier Memento Mori The potpourri of a keepsakes box, dried flowers, brittle bouquets and boutonnieres, precious posies pressed between the pages of diaries and photo albums, sachets tucked among stored remnants and relics, and tokens of remembrance and reverence. Decaying roses in a dusty vanitas painting, blooms dried to powder, musky and musty, ghostly and haunting, sweet and acrid, baby-soft musk, rendered in pressed petals. The grief equal to the love, the tokens never equal to the weight they carry, entirely evidenced upon opening the box and releasing what’s tucked within.
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Thanks for giving me this poster over a decade ago, Pam!
Heretic Parfum kindly sent me their A Very Gorey Holiday collection, aromatic spritzes for your space evoking the somber pageantry and whimsical gloom of this beloved artist’s work. Here are some of my initial thoughts on this ominous quartet of room sprays, and yes, I actually did just happen to have this framed Gashlycrumb Tinies poster tucked away in the corner for years, just waiting for its moment to shine!
O Tannen Baum: A skeletal whisper of winter forests, brittle fir needles mummified with age, spiced clove dust, spectral resins eerily whistling on the wind.
The Evil Garden: Candy-sweet florals grown under bell-domed glass, sugared petals and crushed green stems, confectionary chaos cultivated in a Victorian conservatory.
The Haunted Tea Cosy: Sharp, tart citrus flesh, bitter peel and tannic black tea possessed by a poltergeist, soft stone fruit tossed dementedly at your head during afternoon service, pulpy bonks.
Fruitcake: An invisible man at the party taking up impossible space, scuffed leather jacket creaking and crackling, sharp brandy drunk sloppy, straight from the bottle, candied citrus peel and scorched nutmeg smoke clinging to his swaggering, unseen form.
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Santa Maria Novella Quercia I know I talk a lot about grey overcast skies and thunderstorms and fog and mist and loving the glooms, but even I can appreciate an objectively beautiful day. Quercia is that day…clear clear air, clean clear water, when people say fresh air or water is sweet, this is what they mean, a sharp lucidity you can taste. Something green but not heavy, not dense forest green, lighter than that, the pale spring green of new growth and tender stems crushed underfoot releasing their watery juice. A cloudless, cool spring morning that makes you genuinely think “I am glad to be alive,” the kind of day that feels like a gift you didn’t ask for but accepted anyway. Dappled light pooling through ancient oak branches, the tree itself barely present except as shadow, as the reason for this filtered sun, this meadow existing in its patient protection. Lying in the grass eye-level with buttercups and bluebells, yellow and blue blooming heads, their petals hold that papery, delicate sweetness, barely-there floral, more like the idea of flowers than their actual heavy perfume. They’re good-natured about being trampled. They know they’ll be growing on your grave one day, gentle and insistent, reclaiming everything with the same cheerful persistence. For five hundred years, the oak has stood watching smaller things bloom and fade and bloom again, and you’re just another small thing, bright and brief and beautiful. Studio Ghibli sunlight, that glowing animation warmth where death exists but doesn’t overshadow, where graves get flowers and flowers get walked over, and it’s all the same turning wheel, all the same dappled afternoon. The shadow is there – hence the coolness, the morbid turn – but that’s the way of things. Just keep enjoying the flowers while you can. (Many thanks to my dear Flan for bringing this back from her recent travels for me!)
Air & Weather Paris, 5 A.M. Gourmand, but make it runway, through a filter of sheer delectation. You could bite into it theoretically, but you wouldn’t; it’s the expansive, exultant feeling right before you laugh with unexpected joy at something beautiful. Amber laminated like a croissant, all those folded layers, but impossibly light, airy where it should be heavy and resinous. Hollow chambers of golden fluff, bird bones that shouldn’t be able to support flight but do. Plumage structured in tiers, soft but strange to the touch, not quite what you expect when you reach for them. Phoebe Buffay as amber confection as a trilling Bjorkian lullaby swan dress. Wearing something ridiculously elegant and beautiful and warmly nourishing all at once. Playful spectacle of soft golden resin folded over and over into itself, sweet baked warmth and downy impossible lightness, earnest and gorgeous and committed to the charm of taking pleasure seriously without being serious.
Arcana Wildcraft Black Death There’s a particular kind of gothic imagery that Black Death calls to mind: baroque church architecture in shadow, where stone angels tucked into dusty alcoves have awakened hungry, wings once outspread in reverence now twist inward in sacrilege, enfolding flesh in the dark. A century’s worth of prayer-stained marble suddenly weeping blood; an inverse of holiness; the stony flame of the frozen heart. Black Death is cold where it should be warm. Clove should read as warming spice but here it’s numbing, that sharp eugenol prickling before the needle’s sting, tingles cold and strange. The smoky haze of offerings burnt to forbidden names. Sweetness emerging from the dry smoke and numbing spice, out of place, a lure you know better than to follow but follow anyway. Temptation heavy and inescapable, smooth and terrible in its certainty, the sweetness of something you were always going to do. Desolation and eerie stillness, the chilled moment of being found by what you’ve forever been circling. This is what it smells like to stop praying for the shadows to spare you and call them closer instead. Fear and desire meeting in the same alcove, two faces of one shadow. The darkness was coming regardless – might as well open the door to it yourself.
Hellenist À l’Ombre d’Artémis The wild goddess of the hunt peeling citrus in a mossy starlit clearing, an unlit Baies candle wafting blackcurrant and dewy rose from her pocket. In another pocket (cargo pants, lots of pockets): crushed mint, pale green sparks, cold mineral facets. Retinal ghosts when you close your eyes after staring at something bright. The quality of light more than light itself. Green stems snapped, leaf sap on fingertips. Petals pressed between glass slides. Forest floor dampness clinging to knees. Atmospheric, solitary. Citrus as quartz as starshine, crystalline and remote. Grains of light-fall suspended. Psychic gossamer, sour afterimage. Florals at dawn, night’s lingering chill. The moon in your mouth, its clear eye sees all.
Epichron Nightchild When I first sampled Nightchild months ago, I thought it smelled like an epic ballad by a Finnish heavy metal band, all Nightwish operatic drama and intensity, soaring vocals over crushing walls of reverb and distortion, cathedral-sized forests rendered in smoke and electric guitars, everything amplified and enormous. After purchasing a full bottle, I realize it’s something equally intense, but different: not operatic shrieking but guttural chanting, throat-singing incantation, Heilung summoning spirits in a clearing. Green-earth-smoke, tangled and inseparable. Coniferous sap weeping, clinging in translucent filaments. Forest floor moss, rooty, dark, and creeping, peeled away in damp handfuls, exposing Xenolithic scars. Loamy sweetness and soil, minerals apothecary-bitter. Cedar knife-edge, incense cutting sharp, clean and cold. Herbs twisted and wrung, citrus peel, crushed pine needles, and black pepper ground fresh. Less actual smoke than the drama suggests, more breathing near where smoke was, its ghost hanging in frigid air. A ritual performed for an audience of one. Maybe you’re dreaming—the clearing, the figures circling, the intranslatable incantations carved on gold, the owl cries, the wolf howls, the gods laugh like thunder, that kind of thing. Dry ice fog rolling low across the stage floor, backlit for maximum atmosphere and vibes. Hazy incense shrouding stark forest, ancient spells you mouth without understanding, throat-singing layered with crystalline chant, the ceremony private and enormous simultaneously. You’re watching from inside the dream, close enough to smell the vapor, far enough to know it’s performance. The ancient forest rendered, amplified, made devotional, and only for you.
Brown Sugar Babe Wildcard (BR540 dupe) Wild Card smells posh, polished nonchalance, elegance carrying a slight edge. The dryness of unlit cigarettes, tobacco-adjacent without being tobacco. Something golden and floral threaded through, warmed with spice, woods that feel cosmopolitan rather than earthy. Smart, savvy, confident, plugged-in – an It-girl who knows everyone, goes everywhere, looks expensive doing it. No interior life to speak of, but she doesn’t need one. A pack of Gitanes tucked in a Parisian model’s handbag alongside a perfect lipstick, a vintage Hermès wallet soft with age, a dog-eared French paperback, loose euro coins, and keys to an impossibly chic old apartment. (I don’t know if it smells anything like BR540; I had a little sample ages ago, but it didn’t leave much of an impression. Probably a little too sweet, though. No matter how much or how little Wildcard resembles that scent, it is by far a better purchase.) Over on Patreon this month, I share a favorite layering combination involving this scent!
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High Uintas, Utah USA by Sally Underwood, via milkywaychasers on Instagram
From the Midnight Archives: Slumberhouse Norne – a cult favorite that’s nearly impossible to find these days. In this post for paid members, I share alternatives that might scratch the same itch, and why I think some of them actually do it better.
I talk about winter’s chilly dreams of sun-dappled forest paths, tart winter berries and Yuletide cemetery strolls, arboreal crystalline orb visions, witchy speakeasies in midnight woods, even a holodeck simulation shortcut.
This is what paid membership gets you: deep dives into how fragrances connect and evolve, how one scent leads to others, how sometimes the thing that showed you what you wanted isn’t the thing you end up keeping. With a paid membership, you get access to the full Midnight Stinks Archives: years of reviews, musings, and fragrance philosophy spanning rare indies, niche darlings, and mainstream favorites you’ve been sleeping on. Or that I’ve been sleeping on! Monthly marinades where I pull overlooked bottles from my cabinet and find unexpected connections. Perfume reviews that read more like atmospheric prose than product descriptions, because I’m more interested in what a scent evokes than what it’s “supposed” to smell like.
Join me for smoke and silk, resin and ruins, moss and myrrh, vanilla and velvet…olfactory reveries, aromatic meditations, perfumed darkness that feels like coming home (if your home is an abandoned chateau full of glamorous vampires or a lighthouse keeper’s cottage colonized by spores and mutating under the moon, or the cabin in the woods where you definitely will speak aloud the words from the flesh-bound book).
I have had the same all-time, no. one favorite fragrance for 20 years. The one to which all other perfumes must measure up. Six weeks ago, my world was shooketh when I found a new favorite, and I have been processing the echoes of those discombobulations ever since. It smells a bit like this image by Luis Royo, but if you want more details (and I wrote a lot!) head on over to Midnight Stinks today, it’s a free read!
Stora Skuggan Silphium A little burlap sack of herbs, a little spell-bag, green, dry, peppery, sharp, that you tucked in the back of your freezer for safe-keeping. You forgot it entirely and found it freeze-dried and iced over hidden by a bag of peas years later and just in the corner beyond it, you see something strange. A shimmering-glimmering fissure, a glowing rift. What appears to be a portal in the very back of your frigidaire. Sea salt air wafts cleanly from it, cerulean waves dazzling in the far distance (is it ocean or alien horizon? unclear) and most peculiar, sandy pathy lined densely with something very much the shape of pine trees, fragrant boughs heavy with gleaming drifts of snow.
Aysha Hansen Golden Thread is freaking magic. On paper, I should not have cared for it at all. I hate the scent of bananas. I find ylang-ylang’s deeply earthy, floral/weird, rubbery musk to be wildly obnoxious. AND YET! This opens with the floral musk of that ylang-ylang to be sure, but from there it becomes this deep, rich warmth, the warmth of not say, mahogany or wood or amber or those kinds of things, but rather of sweet, sun-warmed skin. My nose has been constantly pressed to my pulse while wearing this, I may have actually rubbed a little dent in my wrist! A honeyed creaminess, an impossibly soft radiance, like the subtle glow radiating from someone sleeping in late summer sun, drowsy salt-kissed and vanilla dream-touched.
Imaginary Authors The Abandoned Mansion Haunted tiki bar, spectral mai tai floating in the periphery while some scratchy exotica album plays from a speaker you can’t locate, Martin Denny maybe, or Les Baxter’s jungle fantasies, that whole mid-century escapist thing that was already nostalgic for something that never existed, already haunted by its own appropriations, its own colonial fantasies dressed up as lounge entertainment, which is absolutely not what this fragrance is about but it’s where my nose took me, this tiki bar detour having nothing to do with the brand’s actual abandoned mansion concept. The fruit here does exactly what I want fruit to do in fragrance, ashen and dusty and somber, bruised and semi-preserved like fruit that’s been drinking alongside the patrons, drifting in its own languid dissolution, melting into the upholstery, losing definition under hazy torch light. Beach cottages abandoned after hurricane season, with everything softly deteriorating in the damp air, fruit bowls forgotten on kitchen counters, paperbacks yellowing and swelling and smelling like vanilla and wood pulp slowly decomposing, all of it fading together. This is October in places where October doesn’t mean sweaters, where fall is more conceptual than meteorological, where the season changes because the calendar says so, but the air is still thick and warm. Something resinous and golden underneath, woody-amber earthiness, tropical-earth, the smell of wood that’s never known frost, rooms that stay humid year-round. The smokiness like the ghost of a bar where fruits lounged and got tipsy, daddy-o, got a little loose. The kind of abandoned specific to semi-tropical places, where things don’t freeze and die back cleanly but just slowly molder and transform, go spectral in the heat.
Heretic Parfume Häxan is, rather than the poison gardens and shadow work that many reviewers experience, is, for me, pure romantasy magic. Not exactly “Häxan”, but rather “en rosglitterkonfekthäxa” (a rosy-glitter-confection-witch). Read my full review over on Patreon.
Slut For October, a candle collaboration between Bill Crisafi and Heretic Parfum Certified autumn freak. Unabashedly obsessed with October. Perpetually chasing autumns that can never be recaptured, eternally planning how to make the fall feeling last forever, wrapping myself in the lingering shroud of the season that never ends. Six years old dressed as Stevie Nicks, shawl shivering in the deep beech shadows and maple chill of an Ohio evening, me at twelve for the first time watching Laurie Strode in her cozy turtleneck and cardigan stroll down the Haddonfield streets with her girlfriends after school as Michael Myers stalks invisible behind the picket fences, me at twenty one deep in the Florida woods in a bitter autumn drizzle while my boyfriend and his shady brother/business partner burn files, ash in the air and on my tongue, the syrupy warmth of apple cider filling the thermos, giving my hands something to hold as everything slips further and further away from me. This candle burns with all of that. Earthy smoke and leathery ash of burning leaves, the sun low on the horizon and amber light slanting through bare branches, a crisp crunch of phantom apple that also tastes a bit like tears that you didn’t even realize you were crying. All the autumns littering your path, all the Octobers still unfolding ahead, each future fall already tinged with nostalgia before it arrives.
Poesie Perfume Cryptid scents
Nessie: Tea steeped with blossoms and honey, a thick floral sweetness of highland flowers’ pollen suspended in viscous light. A kind of gold that pools slow, catches afternoon sun slanting through old glass, turns a chipped ceramic mug into a chalice. Wool blankets hung near yesterday’s fires, smoke absorbed into the weave, the ghost of peat clinging to fabric. Rain-grey mornings of soft, tannic ritual matters, steam as prayer, rising toward low clouds.
Mothman: Spiced warmth with its aggressive, bitter edges sanded down, autumn’s recognizable onslaught muzzled by dried leaves’ somber poetry, and tobacco’s civilizing influence. Red musk behaving itself for once, button-popped bodice replaced by a cashmere turtleneck, nutmeg simmering quietly, minding its own business instead of all up in yours. Unruly spices acting right, like their Gran is watching from heaven, turning potential chaos into orderly aromatic gorgeousness. Tea brewed strong enough to stain porcelain, threading through like the dirty bass line in a song you can’t stop humming, even though maybe it’s quite naughty, and who knows, maybe Gran IS listening.
Jersey Devil: Pine resin, cool and sharp, needles sun-baked but chilly, their green gone eerily concentrated and alien. Coastal salt drifts through forest density, ocean air wandering inland, turning shadows crystalline, evergreen ghosting translucent at the edges. Arboreal incense, blood-dark and frost-blessed, threading through branches that claw and clutch. Tea as shadow, as sanctuary, as a centering, grounding the strange marriage of forest meeting shoreline, land suspended between what roots deep and what erodes away, between darkness that grows and salt that preserves.
BPAL X Haute Macabre Bats & Bonfires The sweetness of apples gone toasty-tender, pastry-wrapped and sugar-sprinkled, a pale citrine glow of a ghostly fire, smoke that’s more shape than scent, minimalist and whimsical. This makes me think of Charley Harper’s “Bat, Bullfrog, and Bonfire” – that 1968 lithograph I wrote about in my book, The Art of Darkness: A Treasury of the Morbid, Melancholic and Macabre, where nocturnal creatures loiter in midnight glooms rendered in vivid, playful geometry. Harper had this way of distilling nature down to its essential forms, large expanses of color and jaunty shapes that somehow captured the spirit of a thing without getting bogged down in realistic detail. Bats & Bonfires does something similar – it’s not trying to recreate the acrid reality of woodsmoke or the sticky mess of actual toffee, but rather the impression of autumn nights, the gentle wit of bonfire gatherings where bats swoop overhead and apples roast on sticks. Sweet without being cloying, warm without being heavy, the kind of scent that makes eerie nocturnal scenes feel like frolicsome meditation. Harper believed humor made environmental awareness easier to swallow, and maybe this fragrance believes the same about autumn – making the season’s darker edge playful, giddy, a party for the eerie hours and midnight glooms, a celebration in flickering flames and swooping shadows rather than a dirge for dying light.
Pierre Guillaume Volupté Noire Dates soaking in over-brewed black tea, astringent and mouth-coating, that dry tannic bite married to sticky, crystallized sweetness. Dark musky honey, earthy and animalic, refined in the way something becomes after a thousand years of being wild – it evolved, got that shit out of its system. Heavy like a weighted blanket, enveloping, calming rather than crushing or claustrophobic. This is the witch in the woods who turned out to be just a person whose heart was too good, whose reputation for darkness came from living apart, looking strange, choosing solitude. You went seeking magic or answers or maybe just got lost, and she poured you tea in a chipped Limoges cup, offered a shoulder to cry on, pulled out the good French biscuits kept for guests who never come. She wrapped you in a cashmere throw gone soft from years of use, pressed soft woolen slippers into your hands, gestured to the chair by the fire that’s clearly the most cushy, cozy comfortable one. Abundance in unexpected places, richness where you thought there’d only be shadows. It makes you feel powerful and protected simultaneously, wrapped in care that looks forbidding from the outside, but inside is all velvet cushions and warm stones and things worn soft by love. The sweetness and bitterness work together, sticky dates and bitter tea conspiring toward comfort, quiet luxury in weathered textiles and secret stores of good honey, the kind you’d want to find if the world got too sharp, too bright, too much. A dark, warm space that welcomes without questions, that knows what you need before you ask, will hide the bodies in the best places.
..and finally see this separate post for seventeen fragrance reviews from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s 2025 Weenie collection!
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?
Porcelain Bat (warm, unsettling thrum of musky fur and leathery wings smushed against frosted orris root and vanilla plaster dust) The warmth of living fur translated through frost, musky and intimate but held at a distance, like running your hand along a taxidermied ermine in a Victorian curiosity cabinet, soft, oddly tender, and deeply unsettling in its refrigerated stillness. There’s a chalky sweetness clinging to the claws, cream gone cold and dusty, the chilled incense of snowy little footprints preserved in ice.
Interview with the Lovebat (pink strawberries floating in sparkling blood orange and French lime fizz, enveloped in a swooshy cape of black velvet plum) Cartoon-bright citrus fizzing with fruit-punch pandemonium, the unhinged glee of Marge Simpson and Linda Belcher getting day drunk on gin-gimlets sprinkled with pop rocks and Nerds and deciding they’re starting a cult or a band or maybe both, their vision board includes glitter, all the cutest pictures of Gene Wilder, and at least seven different shades of pink highlighter.
Hiss & Hearse (a dribble of Dorian and a squiggle of Snake Oil, delicately stirred with a moss-crusted muddy shovel) Sugar-cubed breakfast tea staining antique lace, a doily dropped and ground into cemetery mud, delicate embroidery work sodden with petrichor and root rot. Something powdery-sweet that should be refined and parlor-proper now caked in wet earth, the smell of a Victorian burial shroud exhumed after a heavy rain, still clinging to its faded elegance even as soil crusts the hems. Graveyard loam sweetened with the ghost of afternoon service, bone china teacups filled with dirt.
Witch Flash (tattoo ink infused with sorcerous roots and heady incense). The blackest black that light refuses to touch, proprietary darkness jealously guarded, Vantablack if it grew roots and got tangled in underground electrical wiring. Dank sour earth threaded with something chemical and adhesive, the smell of vinyl insulation wrapped around ancient woody resins, rubbery and sharp and deliberately strange. A color so black it’s basically a monopoly, a void so deliberately crafted it feels witchy by sheer force of absorbing everything around it, turning incense smoke into something industrially arcane and territorially weird.
Skeleton Flash (polished bone shards, scorched sandalwood and tattoo ink) The other end of that proprietary spectrum, what happens when you develop the negative and all that jealously-guarded darkness flips to stark white light. Bare canvas stretched over scorched wood, primer coat before the ink goes in, the erasure that comes before creation. Bleached cotton, chalk dust, correction fluid painted over mistakes, clinical and clean. The empty space, the blank page, a more fraught and unforgiving reckoning than being lost in the dark, somehow more existentially annihilating than staring down the void.
I’ve Got Out At Last (torn paper revealing scorched plaster embedded with bitter citron, yellow grapefruit, and damp white cedar) Perfect citrus segments arranged on a plate you can only see through iron bars, the breezy morning light cruel in its beauty. Grapefruit pith papery and bitter, dried allium flowers, pale purple pompoms translucent and slightly vegetal and musky-sharp, the detritus of something once fresh now aged into brittleness. That texture of things left to desiccate in captivity, the ghost of brightness viewed through obstruction, just the bitter rind of it pressed against your tongue.
Batty Lace (a leathered up, musky interpretation of Antique Lace) Bela Lugosi’s Dead run through a sticky-syruped tape deck, caramel-amber static, cotton candy spun through patchouli interference, sweet pop frequencies cutting to Motörhead grinding through blown speakers, then Sisters of Mercy cathedral-goth reverb deep and dark. Every time you think you’ve locked onto one signal, the transmission cuts out, and it shifts into something completely contradictory, soft Pink Pony Club sweetness short-circuits into something bass-heavy and shadowed and back again. [EDIT: Ha! I guess I reviewed this in 2023, too. Here is what I said, “The caramel aspect of this blend is what I notice most, a buttery-milky brown sugar caramel that wants to ooze over vanilla ice cream rather than firm up into fudgy squares. Shifting beneath the caramel are those faint, faded attic-trunk florals and creamy cobwebby linens I recall from Antique Lace and a cracked leather buckle so ghostly and elusive I’m not sure if it was actually ever there at all.”]
Dead Leaves and Skin Musk Soap bubbles catching October’s dying light, the way autumn evenings used to stretch infinite even as they ended early, time moving differently when someone else kept track of it for you. Steam rising from water drawn by someone’s hands you’ll never see again in this lifetime, that drowsy warmth after hours spent kicking through leaf piles, the exhaustion of childhood translated through clean suds and amber dusk. Bath time as the day collapses into early darkness, warm and safe and somehow unbearably tender in retrospect.
Interminable Grotesques (narcissus blooms lolling on broken stems, their buttery perfume swelling into a debased crescendo of honeyed heliotrope, toxic lily of the valley, almond blossom, and opium poppy) Honeyed and narcotic, the kind of dizzying pareidolia where you keep almost seeing something recognizable before it dissolves back into confused blooms. Marzipan shaped into wedding cake flowers, perfect and poisonous, the immediate wrongness of food mimicking flora mimicking food. Almond ghost-flickering through a blanket of heavy white petals, there for a second, then gone, sweetness piled on sweetness until it becomes a hypnotic spiraling, beautiful in that specific way that makes you slightly sick.
Dia de los Muertos(dry, crackling leaves, the incense smoke of altars honoring Death and the Dead, funeral bouquets, the candies, chocolates, foods and tobacco of the ofrenda, amaranth, sweet cactus blossom and desert cereus) A dream, a classroom, you hear your name, but it’s coming from both inside the lesson and outside the door. “The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead/ Did squeak and gibber…were it not that I have bad dreams,” intones a distant voice, fading. Death wrapped in vinyl, a smear in a shower curtain, a red, red hand pressed against the film. A trail of something slick and sticky, honeyed tobacco, a fruity resin, and sweet, grassy, dried blooms in its wake. A shape beckons through the barrier, a dread, phantom thing in wrapped plastic, calling from beyond the corner, and you’re walking toward it —you can’t stop walking toward it.
Cherry Cola Hearse (fizzy pop and a syrupy slick of motor oil splashed across disintegrating tan leather seat) Waxy cherry candy stretched into ropes, dense chocolate-adjacent chew that’s not quite chocolate, the slick pomade perfection of Kennickie’s hair catching light in the rearview mirror (“A hickey from Kenickie is like a Hallmark card, when you only care enough to send the very best!”) Fake-fruit plasticky Twizzler sweetness, Tootsie Roll richness, everything polished with product and oily swagger, neon light shine and candy-slick confidence.
Hearse of Pancakes (black coffee, syrup-drenched buckwheat cakes, and a crusty cruller for the road) One of my brothers-in-law is a bit of a coffee enthusiast (also a bit of a snob, but that’s not important to the story) and he drags us to every cafe and coffeeshop he can find whenever the family is all together. This smells exactly like what he orders, or some version of it: cafe mocha and a pastry, bitter-chocolate darkness meeting sugar-glazed fried dough. He’s Icelandic, so he usually goes for the cream cake option, but this is my rose-tinted glasses recollection of those afternoons I’ve spent at small tables while he evaluates the beans, the roast, the crema, and I just smell this exact combination over and over until it becomes the scent of family obligation turned oddly tender and sweet.
The Woman Behind it (silvered lavender and white iris shuddering like lamplight on stained plaster, ambergris frothing through vanilla husk, and the phantom outline of a rose-touched woman’s silhouette) Sneaking into Deborah Turbeville’s Unseen Versailles, elegant ghost stories and hazy hallucinations of antique decadence. A sliver of lavender soap worn translucent, the waxy trace of vintage lipstick on forgotten drinking glasses, pale powdery woods exhaling through dust-shrouded chambers. Those fleeting witnesses—hairpins, papers, cosmetics left in neglected storage rooms—so delicate an open window might blow them all away. The specific scent of beauty rituals frozen mid-performance, isolation and romanticism suspended in abandoned gilt, the haunting intimacy and immersion of faded grandeur where pristine splendor once might have kept you behind velvet ropes.
Dead Leaves and a Woolly Jumper. The main character from some isekai anime I’m making, totally making up just for this perfume review, but if someone writes the screenplay, they’d better give me credit! “I Died Choking on Strawberry Milk Pocky and Got Reincarnated as the Autumn Demon Queen.” Dead leaves crushed underfoot, meeting kawaii streetwear: the crunchy vegetation of seasonal decay paired with fuzzy pink cable-knit and cartoon-animal faces. She’s supposed to preside over fall and mortality but shows up to every council meeting in a patchwork sweater with bunnies on it, strawberry milk powder dusting her sleeves, strawberry marshmallow mochi in her pockets, strawberry white choco latte in her baby pink Stanley cup, pastel in a world of russet and rot, autumn trying its best to be taken seriously while its demon queen insists on being adorable. (I’ll be honest, this sweater inspired this entire review.)
Lime Green Hearse(lime rind, citron, petitgrain, white musk, a swish of bay rum and a bit of black pepper)What if the green fairy wasn’t absinthe at all but lime flavoring? That chemical brightness that tastes nothing like actual limes but everything like the Platonic ideal of citrus translated through laboratory genius. An electric emerald conjuring that appears in jelly beans, gummy bears, snow cones, Jello molds, Freezee pops, a green that only exists in artificial form, nature could never! La fée verte viridian visions granted not through wormwood but through whatever makes lime lifesavers taste like that, like chartreuse and shamrock make you feel, impossibly, deliriously green.
Hot Pink Hearse(flashy pink guava, strawberry jam, sugared pink grapefruit, blackberry, bergamot, and pink champagne adorned with a gleaming chrome Landau bar) OMG. This is the absolute, exquisite embodiment of the best Kool-Aid recipe ever, courtesy that one scene in Slumber Party Massacre: one package of Kool-Aid (ultra-pink, berried chaos, fruit-punch-adjacent) and seven heaping cups of sugar dissolved into a scant tablespoon of water. I swear you can even smell the fizzy granules wafting up to tickle your nostrils. Complete and utter perfection.
Committing Every Artistic Sin(turmeric-dusted acrid marigold, linseed oil, bitter orange peel, crumbling plaster, clotted vanilla, and a whiff of sweet mildew) The smell of creative obsession after you’ve been working for days without noticing, that moment you finally surface and realize you’re hungry and aching and haven’t showered in who knows how long. Something sour and unwashed, cheesy and human, the physical cost of disappearing into your work. From across the room it’s intriguing, that particular musk of someone deep in the zone, but up close it’s almost repellent—the reality of bodies neglected in service of making something. Where do we go when we’re like that? What liminal space swallows us whole, spits us out days later blinking and disoriented? You leave your body there, or it leaves you, time moves differently or doesn’t move at all. You emerge with paint under your fingernails, ink stains blooming across your palms, the ghost of ideas still clinging to your hair. The work gets done but you can’t remember eating, sleeping, the basic maintenance of being alive. You’ve been somewhere else entirely, some fevered creative underworld where the only thing that matters is finishing, completing, manifesting whatever’s been clawing at your insides demanding to exist. This is what that place smells like—not the glossy fantasy of the tortured artist, but the actual funk of artistic sin. Stale breath and forgotten meals, skin gone sour from stress hormones and tunnel vision, clothes worn too many days in a row because changing them would mean acknowledging the outside world still exists. The sourness of someone who’s been burning themselves as fuel, converting flesh and sleep and sanity into something tangible, something real. You bring back the work, yes, but also this smell, this evidence of the sacrifice, proof you went somewhere most people won’t follow because it costs too much to stay there. The dry down smells like the finished work itself, an earthy elegance polished by multiple drafts and a diligent editor, refined into something presentable… but underneath runs an insistent current, the indelible signature of the creator’s weird funk.
Need more ‘Weenies? Have a peep at my ‘Weenie reviews from the autumns of yesteryear 2024 // 2023 // 2022 // 2021 // 2020 // 2019 // 2018 // 2017 // 2016
And PSSSST! Did you know I have collected all of my BPAL reviews into one spot? Here you will find 88 pages of my thoughts and rambles on various limited-edition scents from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab over the years: BPAL REVIEWS BY S. ELIZABETH (PDF download)
Are you new to one of our very favorite indie perfumers, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab? See my three-part primer here, here, and here.
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?
Haunted tiki bar, spectral mai tai floating in the periphery while some scratchy exotica album plays from a speaker you can’t locate, Martin Denny maybe, or Les Baxter’s jungle fantasies, that mid-century escapist thing that was already nostalgic for something that never existed, already haunted by its own appropriations, its own colonial fantasies dressed up as lounge entertainment, which is absolutely not what this fragrance is about but it’s where my nose took me, this tiki bar detour having nothing to do with the brand’s actual abandoned mansion concept.
The fruit here does exactly what I want fruit to do in fragrance, which is be weird about it, ashen and dusty and somber, bruised and semi-preserved like fruit that’s been drinking alongside the patrons, drifting in its own languid dissolution, melting into the upholstery, losing definition under hazy torch light, not trying to be fresh or bright or engaging, just strange and a little sad and smoky.
There’s a mustiness here, old wood and older paper, that particular smell of closed-up places where the air has gone stale and sweet at the same time, resort towns in the off-season where the bars are shuttered and the bamboo decorations gather dust and you can still smell a thousand phantom drinks soaked into the floorboards, lime and orgeat and something vaguely tropical gone sour in the humidity. Beach cottages abandoned after hurricane season, with everything softly deteriorating in the damp air, fruit bowls forgotten on kitchen counters, paperbacks yellowing and swelling and smelling like vanilla and wood pulp slowly decomposing, all of it fading together. This is October in places where October doesn’t mean sweaters, where fall is more conceptual than meteorological, where the season changes because the calendar says so, but the air is still thick and warm.
Something resinous and golden underneath, woody-amber earthiness, not cold-earth but tropical-earth, the smell of wood that’s never known frost, rooms that stay humid year-round, dust that never quite settles because there’s always moisture in the air. The smokiness like the ghost of a bar where fruits lounged and got tipsy, daddy-o, got a little loose, a little wild. The kind of abandoned that’s specific to semi-tropical places, where things don’t freeze and die back, but just slowly molder and transform, go spectral in the heat.
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Black Moon Mineral-sharp sourness, cedar and graphite alchemized in lunar essence (I initially wrote cedar and pencil shavings steeped in moon juice, hehehe.) Underground chambers are revealed, mineral veins exposed; xenolithic flora, Earth’s scar tissue, sprouts shadow-fed roots and subterranean blooms, ghostly and calcified fronds.
Luna Negra Jammy incense, midnight berry-stained narcosis, the plush blanket of shadows, falling into the darkness of dream. A sumptuous plummy-amethystine obsidian ode to the pantheon of night.
Schwarzer Mond Brooding resins, dark lurking patchouli, pitch-black pine blood, abyssal anise; a warped and wicked tripping of the tongue summoning that which dwells in shadow, feeds on secrets, and sleeps in the ancient wounds of cursed soil. Predatory, perilous, and potent, you know – a real good-time gal. And my all-time favorite BPAL scent since 2006.
Arcana Wildcraft Dreamer Fatal temporality in a pale pink slip dress, frayed lace hanging by threads. Kinderwhore but not really, now not anymore– a tragic, beautiful mess, elegiac-grunge. Rich jasmine/lime vintage expectations, lush vanilla coconut doll parts, sweet plastic ache doing anything-anything to feel something different, something real. Rhubarb discordant, off-kilter, jangling/janky knife’s edge self-destructive poetry of sour survival and want. The girl was always doomed. But bitches, she’s still here. She’s still fucking here.
Liis Celestial Object A tender comfort in the annihilating face of the aloof suns, the indifferent cosmos, the total dark sublime. A small silhouette emerging from deep shadow, arms extended skyward toward infinity, engulfed in a lullaby of sepia and softness and warmth. Sweet offerings from home planets, celestial pastries, caramelized starlight, golden toasted nebula dust; gossamer sweets of crystallized petals, preserved blossoms, fruiting flower essences, and orchard nectar suspended in jellied orbs of weightless honey. Souvenirs from stellar nurseries, wafer crumbs and fragmented nougat, half-remembered songs hummed against the void, rations for the long journey home.
Immortal Perfumes Madame Moustache is a soapy-cozy-clean musk that’s so cute, it is almost ridiculous. It conjures rosy dimpled cherub cheeks, pinchable and plump; its nose wants booping, its belly needs a little blooping poke! Bubbly and plucky, adorable beyond reason – honestly, this smells like a tiny, tooting kewpie doll fart, a gentle cloud of foaming soft white soap, creamy lather, gentle musk that feels like marshmallowy cotton balls, and sudsy skin. The fragrance notes mention campfire or tobacco, and I don’t smell either at all, but …something evoking that sort of warmth? But warmth as a vibe, not a temperature; the essence of snuggly vintage comfort, a fluffy, cushy familiarity. But there’s also a plastic-y porcelain floral aura, like doll skin coolness rather than human skin, pulse, and breath, creating this odd little tension between the intimate warmth and the artificial, cutesy collectible charm of something endearing that you might win from an olde-timey state fair, like a proto-Labubu in a bottle.
Air & Weather Lilac Purple hedge clusters, tiny white woodland bells dissolved to mist at daybreak’s soft, drowsy threshold. Salt-tinged vapors drift landward, cool and questing, ruffled wisps drifting low, just outside the curtains. An atmosphere like tentative hope, like hushed waiting, like a held breath. A lingering musk, gentle, scarcely perceptible, threading through the stillness. Sun lifts the morning, a brightening shift parts the grey, the air begins to ease and warm; with apologies to Emily Dickinson… not knowing when the Dawn will come, I throw open every window.
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?
I’m thrilled to share that I have some writing in the forthcoming issue of The Scent Strip! The Scent Strip is a quarterly perfume community newspaper published by Immortal Perfumes, featuring essays, reviews, recipes, artwork, and writing from fragrance enthusiasts, and this issue’s focus is “Spellbound,” …it explores the connections between scent and magic, from the historical suspicion surrounding women who worked with aromatic plants, to iconic “witchy” perfumes like Magie Noire and Poison, to practical rituals like simmer pots and the sacred language of incense. There are Tarot spreads, Gothic reading recommendations, literary witch character perfumes, and explorations of how fragrance functions as a tool for transformation and memory.
I ended up writing two things for this issue…!
“Scent As Spell” muses on fragrance as enchantment beyond simple glamour. Anamnesis (recovery of forgotten memory through scent). Palimpsest (when a fragrance relationship changes over years, layering new associations over old). Pharmakos (the poison that cures). Katabasis (when fragrance takes you down into shadow). And more! Old words I’ve borrowed and bent to describe experiences bigger than the usual perfume vocabulary.
“Fantasy Perfumes for Fictional Witches” envisions imaginary fragrance descriptions for 18 archetypal sorceresses from fiction. An exercise in fragrant forensics, reconstructing legendary witches through the invisible evidence they leave behind: the materials they touched, the spaces they inhabited, the sensory traces on spell-stained fingertips. Sea witches and swamp prophets, ancient healers and rebellious teenagers, each distilled into their essential scent.
