Armand Point, The Golden Legend, from “L’Estampe Moderne”
Celine Night Clubbing(I actually wrote this last month and forgot to include it, le whoopsie) You might be wondering how a sample of something called Nightclubbing ever even came to be in my possession, but for whatever reason, I have been weirdly intrigued by the idea of it, and serendipitously, an Instagram friend generously offered to send me a sample, so here we are! As a wallflower/homebody, the idea of nightclubbing in any form gives me the willies. And yet, I have somehow found myself on numerous occasions doing a nightclubbing-type thing. This is 100% because I am a people-pleaser and rather than rocking the boat, I just go along with the thing people want to do. When I find myself in these situations, I remind myself that, as a human, it’s good to have “experiences,” and I suppose I go into a bit of a dissociative/fugue state where I am looking at everything through rose-colored glasses, even while things are still presently happening. I call it rose-colored glasses, but I don’t know if that’s quite it. It’s more like “what are the good and lovely things about this unsavory situation that I can mine later for whenI inevitably write about it?” I smell that when I smell this perfume.
It calls to mind an album review I wrote several years ago for HÆLOS’ “Full Circle” – waxing poetic about that surreal stretch at the end of an evening when you’re in the cramped backseat of a car, forehead resting against cool glass, watching palm trees transform into celestial giants as streetlights become stars fading at the edges of your vision. Nightclubbing captures that moment when a beautiful night suddenly crosses to the other side of too late, triggering a nostalgic, aching void that’s perpetually lurking at your experience’s periphery. This is quiet aftermath after doing the thing, whatever the thing is, and it’s also the space between euphoria and melancholy where you’re sitting still, internalizing feelings you don’t yet fully comprehend but somehow recognize you will one day know all too well. It evokes that compulsion to desperately reach for connection in darkness, just to assure yourself that you are okay.
Beneath all this emotional complexity, Nightclubbing ultimately settles into a warm, sandalwood vanilla skin scent – vanilla as the throbbing heartbeat of a hand in your own when you’re no longer alone in the dark, the steady gorgeous thrum of human connection when the music has faded but its echo remains imprinted on your skin, a haunting reminder of the night’s ghostly tenderness.
…however.
That was upon my first sniff. It left me wildly feeling …feelings. Of some sort? It made me want to relisten to that album a thousand times, which I think I have done just in the past week alone. But sadly I can’t seem to recapture the experience of that first wearing of Nightclubbing. Now, every time I spritz it, it smells like a vanilla sandalwood air freshener from Bath and Body Works that one of my sisters uses all over her house, which doesn’t smell bad, but I also associate it with litter boxes that desperately need changing, so also..it kinda doesn’t smell great.
Sigh. The vagaries of fragrance!
Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab x Haute Macabre Persephone’s Ascent A Persephone-inspired composition, minus the pomegranate! How incredibly marvelous, I love it already. Instead, a pale floral incense with a core of bleak woods. The release of a bitter, burning, frozen heart. A bleeding fist breaking violently through the earth, clutching a soft bouquet of pallid blooms. A blackbird’s shadow in the snow. A weeping spider biting through its tears. A spill of grief transmuted through the incubation of dreams. An exhalation of fading winter memories. A weary spirit in two halves, the beauty of how in escape you kept both. A wrist ringed with the ghost of spring blossoms you’ll never smell. All the springs before you yet.
Diptyque Orphéon Cedar soda with juniper bitters. Water drawn from a limestone well surrounded by briar and bramble, thicket and thorn. Aerated ice chips that shatter between molars. A single cypress cone crushed between fingers. Cigarette ash that never quite made it to the tray. The condensation ring left on wood that won’t ever completely fade. Cold metal keys pressed against warm lips. The sharp intake of breath when the cosmic chords of Alice Coltrane’s harp arpeggios cascade through space, suspending time. Morning sky like a scrim of quartz; a little light, just enough to see by.
Serviette Frisson D’HiverA shriek, a howl, a prolonged tee hee hee hee; a pause, a champagne hiccup, and everything shatters. A tinkling cackle pealing and slivering like weaponized bells, crystal blades that split and splinter the night. A lake that holds more stars than the sky ever dreamed of possessing – celestial sparklers, myriad, multiplying before your feet, even as your eyes glance upward noting their absence in the sky. What lake reflects what cannot be seen? What ghost swallows its own echo before sound can escape? Scent as the most terrifying Sailor Moon villain who never existed: pale as bone, bright as a blade, each breath a shard of story where you are nothing more than a footnote. Pitliess – all razor citrus and winter’s exposed nerve. Each droplet a fragment flung from some terrible, glittering precipice. Mercy drowned long before you arrived. More stars than sky, more reflection than reality. You’re not getting out of this alive.
Seance Perfumes Love And Eternal Darkness Imagine Nosferatu as a gentle collector of flower meanings, his spindly clawed fingers tracing the delicate lines of rare Victorian botanical guides. Each pressed bloom becomes a document of human transience – a memento of lives that bloom and fade, capturing moments more complex and fleeting than mere survival, than markers of age. In this herbal sanctuary, he studies the intricate ways humans forge connection: a language of touch, memory, and fugitive emotion that exists far beyond the physical realm of blood. His collection traces the trembling edges of human vulnerability – how a single flower can hold entire histories of love, loss, and longing, each petal a whispered secret of a life about to vanish. A predatory creature probing sensitivity and frailty, an immortal examining ephemera. Here, a bouquet takes shape: pale lilacs unfurl their powdery breath, soft as pillowy sleep, nestled against sprigs of lavender heavy with twilight, white jasmine trailing memories like pale ribbons of moonlight, and a single sprig of forget-me-not – a promise so delicate it might dissolve at a whisper. Each flower carries the same hushed message: I will visit you in dreams.
Aftelier BergamossSweet grass crushed beneath wriggling toes burrowing into honeyed earth, the loamy green must of spring’s waking breath, Neko Case singing “maybe sparrow” plaintive at dawn in a golden grain of light-fall, wildflower valleys thrumming slow-footed with moss, burnished dew pearling, sun-soaked syrup suspended on unfurling ferns.
Chanel No. 19 reminds me of finding the perfect vintage vanity set at an estate sale—immaculate crystal bottles and silver-backed brushes arranged just so—but when you lean closer, you notice someone has etched a razor-sharp critic’s observation into the mirror’s edge. It’s not vandalism exactly, but a deliberate counterpoint to all that polish.
The fragrance carries itself with immaculate poise but sidesteps the accommodating softness we often expect from classic perfumery. Intensely sharp and dry and green, with an earthy, rootsy powderiness that feels pulled from some garden’s underground mysteries. There’s an acrid verdancy about it that reminds me of stumbling across a line from a Margaret Atwood poem or a Patti Smith lyric etched into pristine bathroom tile – the juxtaposition feels ridiculous considering we’re talking about a Chanel perfume, but that’s genuinely how it makes me feel. Alongside this runs what I can only describe as a leathery, grassy woodiness that makes me think of expensive boots walking purposefully through wild gardens.
That sour metallic tang and bitter effervescence feels unmistakably vintage to me, though I couldn’t tell you exactly why. But what keeps drawing me back isn’t just this quality—it’s how the scent seems to subvert its own refined elegance with what I can only call a punky funk. Like costume jewelry that’s outlived its original owner—slightly tarnished, impossibly elegant, carrying what feels like decades of stories. The fragrance exists in what I experience as a kind of gloomy luminosity, like sunlight filtering through grimy stained glass onto marble floors—both austere and achingly tender at once. It shifts on skin throughout the day, revealing facets that appear and recede like carefully guarded confidences. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of moss-covered stone steps leading to a garden where everything useful grows—medicinal herbs, not decorative flowers. Other times, it morphs into something mineral and cool, like running your fingers along marble that’s been sitting in shadow. Its most fascinating moments come when warmth breaks through all that greenness—not a golden warmth, but something more like the heat signature of intellectual fervor, the temperature of thoughts running too quick and deep to share casually.
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?
Eau La La by Genevieve very kindly featured me on her most excellent and fun Shelfie Sunday Instagram Series and I had a blast waxing extremely, purple-y poetic and at great length (because this is the only way I know how hehehe) about my lifelong fascination with fragrance and perfume and my 20+ years of collecting.
Here’s a brief snippet…
“In a world trapped in the claustrophobic confines of hideous reality, perfume is the crack that lets the light in – an expansive, boundless playground of the imaginary and surreal. It may only be a bit of psychic gossamer, elusive as poetry sculpted in mist, but it lets you slip through the world in a veil of elegance or a melancholy cloud of romantic longing, moving you to beauty that transcends the visual and tangible. A perfume might carry me to arid deserts with binary moons or moonlit forests where witches dwell in chicken-legged huts – places only imagination can conjure but scent somehow manifests.”
You absolutely must visit her account and peep at how she so beautifully pieced all my words and imagery together! Read more here!
I shared these musings over on Patreon last summer, and because I have nothing lined up to post here on the blog while I am traveling this week, I thought I could share them here, too. Incidentally, over on Patreon today, I shared the perfumes that I am traveling with!
Along with sentiments and quotes from books and cinema, I often squirrel away observations and ideas from my rambling internal dialogues to include in future perfume reviews. I have pages and pages of notebooks with “inspired” scribblings like “a putrid effluvium of hatred, distrust, and malaise,” or “aggressively piquant, like Kali-Ma with a necklace of peppers and chilis,” or “the moldy salmon scrapings of the inner rind of the pumpkin.”
I was thinking today of how back in 2017 or so, I started listening to the TANIS podcast. I was a bit late to the party; I was convinced I didn’t care for podcasts, so I had never listened to any at that point, but a friend had talked up how creepy it was, and I was intrigued. I’m not going to be that patronizing guy who gives you a whole rundown of what this podcast is about, other than to tell you it’s a mystery pseudo-documentary type-thing. Everyone has already heard it by now, so you don’t need me to fill you in. (Also, I listened to maybe 20 episodes back then, and even so, I still couldn’t tell you what it was about.)
I never got very far into it and I suspect it’s because I made the amateur move of listening to it at 5am during my early morning walks, where the streets were all dark and the houses unlit, the entire neighborhood was sleeping, and I felt like the only person in the world…and those were the mornings when I was NOT listening to an extremely unsettling story. TANIS, on top of that, made me feel like I was having a heart attack every morning. I don’t even know if it was actually that scary, but situationally speaking, it was scary as hell.
Anyway, I was thinking about it today for some reason or another, and it occurred to me…hey! I’d like to have a perfume that reminds me of listening to creepy-ass episodes of TANIS at 5am in the morning, alone in the dark. WOULDN’T THAT BE FUN, RIGHT?!
I’ve narrowed down the elements I would like to see included in this fragrance…what do you think?
Mystery:
-A deep, shadowy base note that’s hard to identify. Perhaps something like vetiver or patchouli, but altered to feel unfamiliar.
-A faint, elusive note that appears and disappears, like wisps of fog in the pre-dawn light.
Tension:
-A sharp, almost metallic middle note that creates a sense of alertness, like adrenaline coursing through your veins.
-A hint of ozone, reminiscent of the charged air before a storm, keeping you on edge.
Unease:
-A slightly sour or bitter undertone, just enough to create discomfort without being overwhelming.
-A cold, damp note like rain on concrete, evoking empty suburban streets.
Low thrumming dread:
-A deep, resonant base note that you feel more than smell, like the vibration of distant machinery.
-Perhaps a very subtle animalic note, hinting at unseen predators.
Prickling, hair-raised sensation:
-A tingling, almost electric top note that creates a physical sensation of alertness.
-Maybe a hint of mint or eucalyptus, but twisted to feel unsettling rather than refreshing.
Empty world atmosphere:
-A hollow, airy quality to the overall scent, suggesting vast empty spaces.
-Faint traces of familiar human scents (skin musk? coffee?) that are more ghostly memories than present realities.
The overall composition could be described as a scent that starts cold and sharp, slowly unfurling into something deeper and more ominous. It should create a feeling of being acutely aware of your surroundings while also sensing that something is not quite right with the world. Also the feeling like you’re the only person awake in a world that’s holding its breath, waiting for something to happen.
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?
Here are some musings that I shared over on Patreon last month, but I had so much fun thinking about it, I thought I might share it here, too…
If you were ever inclined to summon me through olfactory means, forget the perfumes. Set aside the bottles with their crystal stoppers and pretentious names and the same four influencers waving bottles of Fulton and Roark in your face (anyone else notice this lately?) The scents that would draw me across time and space aren’t found in glass vials but in ordinary places hiding extraordinary power—a backyard tree, a garden herb, a lakeside path, a kitchen spice cabinet.
Lime Blossom
Our small lime tree produces blossoms whose fragrance bears no resemblance to the fruit itself. The scent is remarkably elusive—more delicate than jasmine, more ephemeral than honeysuckle, yet in their general fragrant family. It possesses a waxy, honeyed quality without any heaviness, a pearlescent aroma with the faintest sheen of green.
The fragrance never quite resolves itself—one moment offering a metallic brightness, the next dissolving into a gossamer floral sweetness. The blooms are small white stars against green, but their scent has a peculiar effect—you breathe it in and lose a bit of time. Not enough to notice consciously, but when you finally step away, there’s a subtle shift in the world. The angle of shadows has changed imperceptibly, or perhaps it’s the quality of light. Something has altered, but the transition was so gentle you can’t quite place what’s different.
Marjoram
Where lime blossom quietly steals time, fresh marjoram does the opposite—it gifts you time, expanding moments through unexpected memory. One brush against those leaves and suddenly my childhood unfolds before me—that worn, cardboard box of Avon potpourri Christmas ornaments from the attic, dust motes dancing in half-light. Time doesn’t contract but extends, allowing me to linger within recollections I’d forgotten I possessed.
Unlike other culinary herbs, marjoram plays a generous trick. It possesses a warm, slightly piney aroma laced with subtle citrus and an unexpected mustiness that makes no botanical sense. It carries the essence of Christmas in a 1980s suburban home, captured and preserved in an herb that has absolutely no business reminding me of holiday decorations.
What captivates me most is the precision of the association—not Christmas broadly, but specifically those ornaments, that cardboard box, that particular December quality of light in our living room. The scent doesn’t evoke a generic holiday memory but rather a moment so exact and crystalline that it feels like time travel of the most personal kind. It’s not that marjoram smells like Christmas; it’s that marjoram smells exactly like my Christmas, circa 1987.
Cypress Loam
A walking path circles a small lake behind the library in the neighborhood where I grew up. I lived there from ages 8 to 28, knowing every corner of that landscape as only a child-becoming-adult can. On the side where the cypress trees grow, their knobby “knees” breaching the soil, resides a wonderful aroma. Sweet, earthy, damp, with a subtle touch of spice that eluded identification for years.
I left Florida for seven years, convinced I’d never return to the place you’re supposed to leave behind forever. Then life happened—grandparents fell ill, a relationship ended—and at 36, I found myself living just five minutes from my childhood home. The first time I walked that library path again, the cypress loam scent hit me with such force that time compressed and expanded simultaneously. Recently, Yvan sprinkled cinnamon on damp soil for some pest-related issue, and that combination—spice mingling with mineralic soil—recalled exactly those library walks, those years before and after, the place I couldn’t escape.
The scent is earthier than a temple but somehow just as sacred. When sunlight streams through the cypress canopy and the ground releases its secret aromas, a perfect moment emerges where everything feels alive and ancient at once. If Miyazaki’s forest spirits possessed a scent signature, this would be it—that specific mineralic dampness that reveals why ancient cultures believed trees could talk. The cypress loam doesn’t just evoke a location but a timeline—the person I was, the person I became, and the unlikely circular journey that brought me back to where I began.
Cardamom
Unlike the other scents that connect to memory or specific places, my relationship with cardamom stands apart. It’s not entangled with nostalgia or childhood or anyone else but me. It defies categorization—refusing to fit neatly into any olfactory family. While other spices lean decidedly warm (cinnamon being the prime example), cardamom exists in contradictions. Cool and woody one moment, then floral and green the next, with unexpected piney-lemony facets that appear and vanish like apparitions.
My attraction to cardamom reminds me of what occult scholar Pam Grossman says about witches: “Daughters, mothers, queens, virgins, wives, et al. derive meaning from their relation to another person. Witches, on the other hand, have power on their own terms.” Where my other beloved scents derive meaning through their connection to my past or to places I’ve known, cardamom demands nothing but direct experience. My love for it isn’t mediated through memory or association—it exists purely in the present moment, sovereign and self-contained.
I find myself in the kitchen, mortar and pestle in hand, inhaling deeply over freshly ground pods like some sort of spice pervert. When perfumers attempt to capture cardamom, they typically emphasize its warmth, yet miss its strange, alien coolness—that medicinal edge that renders it so utterly fascinating. I’ve sought perfumes solely for their cardamom notes, but nothing quite captures its peculiar magic. It exists in its own parallel universe, following none of the established rules—autonomous and complete, requiring no validation beyond its own existence.
So there they are—the four scents that would instantly draw me into your summoning circle. What scents would I need to conjure you? I would be delighted to know which non-bottled aromas would call your spirit across the veil.
The photo is actually a lemon blossom from our lemon tree, but details, details.
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A free read for everyone on my Patreon today: The April Marinade
This month, I’ve been communing with bottles that sigh, weep, and dream in shades of green—feral greens that reclaim abandoned places, that seep through sidewalk cracks, between forgotten stones. Green as both color and voracity—ancient, insatiable, gloriously indifferent to human concerns. Beneath concrete and compromise, the truth emerges: we’re all still crawling with green.
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One Day Jasmine Tea I didn’t expect to fall in love with a green tea scent in the year 2025, but I think that is what just happened. I’ve spent years avoiding green tea fragrances, having mentally filed them away with air fresheners and fancy dish soap, the sanitized accord of late-90s department store counters or the chemical approximation haunting hotel lobbies. One Day Jasmine Tea opens with that unmistakable aroma of a jasmine green tea steeped just a minute too long. There’s an emotional precipice there— an elegant pleasure on the verge of becoming bitter, bleak, and brooding on the tongue. But…not quite.
This is the scent of Uncle Iroh’s teashop after hours, the quiet moments when he sits alone, brewing one final cup while dust motes drift through evening light. The jasmine here isn’t some overly sweet and sultry floral but a stubborn, complex presence that blooms with the same quiet certainty as Iroh’s wisdom. “The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all,” he might murmur, though I think that’s actually from Mulan. There’s a transparency to the composition that cuts through any lingering cloying or animalic concerns – a herbaceous clarity like the mind clearing before a moment of mediation. Something earthen anchors the lightness, the way roots hold soil against rain, preventing erosion without calling attention to their essential work. Between these elements weaves an oolong note, a citrusy orchid thread that connects high and low like the lightning Iroh teaches Zuko to redirect – neither diminishing nor amplifying the current, simply guiding it to where it needs to go.
The fragrance stays steadfast, refusing sentimentality and yet somehow feels like an embrace that contains multitudes. It carries Iroh’s complexity—grief for his son, hope for his nephew, and the particular wisdom that comes only after you’ve lost everything and rebuilt from scratch. It manages to embody everything that made Uncle Iroh a steadying hand on the tiller, regardless of whether you first met him as a child or discovered him as an adult seeking comfort in animated wisdom. When evening falls on the Jasmine Dragon, what remains is the ghost of petals suspended in cooling liquid, a clean mineral afterimage lingering on skin; an echo of a proverb that only reveals its truth years after you first heard it.
It’s definitely not just “hot leaf juice.”
RE: Francesca Bianchi Sex and the Sea In Sex and the Sea–the perfumer wants us to imagine an intimate encounter at the beach (no thanks, lady, that sounds gross and dumb), but I needn’t have worried. This bright, giggly floral perfume is what happens when a Bath & Body Works sampler collides with a John Anster Fitzgerald fairy painting—a canvas promising Dionysian chaos that ultimately delivers nothing more than mild corporate ennui. Imagine a scene teetering on the brink of jubilation. Fairy figures hover like static electricity, poised for wild revelry but perpetually stuck in performance review mode. They look ready to erupt—tiny wings trembling with potential pandemonium, side-eyes loaded with maximum sass—yet somehow remain frozen in bureaucratic limbo. The kind of gathering that threatens spectacular chaos but settles for awkward small talk and tepid canapés.
Mimosa unfurls like the most passively aggressive bath product imaginable—powdery and sweet, that specific floral note that whispers “corporate compliance” instead of actual excitement. It’s the scent equivalent of mandatory team-building: technically pleasant, fundamentally forgettable. The pineapple note screeches like the most aggressive body spray top note—high-pitched, sharp enough to make your ears ring. A tiny giggle promises excitement but quickly fizzles. Underneath, a sour green vanilla stretches out—not quite cucumber, not quite sweet, just that weird vegetal edge that makes you go, “Huh. I don’t even see any cucumbers on this spread.”
From the concept to the execution I don’t think this one was ever going to be for me, but in the end it’s somehow even worse. Definitely several giggles short of a rager.
Arcana Wildcraft Love is Legalsmells like a raisin soaked for a thousand years in demerara syrup, lit on fire on a sparking pyre of aromatic woods and sizzling cardamom pods, and burnt as an offering to Anck-su-namun. The sweetness isn’t confectionary but funerary—exactly what might have sealed a pharaoh’s tomb while mourners wailed outside.
The smoke hangs thick, refusing to dissipate around copper bowls of burning resins. There’s a peculiar duality here, twin capacities for terror and tenderness—first the sacred knowledge that bodies must burn to release souls, then the careful preservation of what remains.
There’s that scene in The Mummy where sticky black substances transform Imhotep’s lover into something neither living nor dead. This fragrance captures that exact moment when these materials become vessels for dark miracles. The woods don’t just smoke but consume themselves completely, a miniature celestial death. We are only alive because our sun is burning out, after all—and this perfume knows it, celebrates it, wears that knowledge like an amulet against the throat.
The House of Brandt’s London Fog is some spectral cousin to fog—something that exists in the otherworldly luminosity of Agnes Pelton’s “Winter, 1933.” The perfume pulses with the same geometric abstractions that hover in Pelton’s misty void, not the creamy bergamot-laced Earl Grey of marketing copy, but a cold, misty-creamy radiance emanating from some unseen source rather than actual tea or milk.
Imagine if fog machines at every art school party since 1987 had been secretly emitting tiny particles of Pelton’s visionary essence instead of glycerin—a milky bath of fog that somehow has its own consciousness. The promised vanilla isn’t gourmand or even particularly sweet—it’s the idea of vanilla translated through some cosmic filter, the way the visionary artist rendered natural phenomena as pulsing light forms floating in electric blue atmospheres. The promised lavender exists only as a faint purple outline around a gossamer cloud, a geometric frame containing something vast and dreamy within it.
The scent creates a numinous space around the wearer, a sanctuary of vapor and light. Whispers of lemony citrus thread through lactonic vanilla, while soft sandalwood provides not structure but a luxurious dissipation—a comforting dissolve into soft, meditative disembodiment that feels both intimate and infinite at once.
Poesie Persephone Rising In a parallel cosmos where abduction never happened, Persephone Rising emerges untethered from underworld shadows. Not the reluctant queen but the goddess who chose her own ascension.
Pomegranate here isn’t the fateful seeds of captivity but bright explosive bursts—a celebration of life’s vibrancy, the scattered rubies of liberation. The sugared violets don’t whisper secrets of darkness but instead sparkle with morning dew on petals never touched by netherworld air. These aren’t funereal flowers but triumphant blooms stretching toward perpetual spring. The sandalwood and vanilla orchid create not the suffocating luxury of an underground palace but the earthy-sweet foundation of a goddess coming into her own power—the scent of divinity unfurling without interruption. No halfway existence, no divided seasons. Something luminous and gossamer dances at the edges. Not the weight of a seduction that reshaped mythology, but the buoyant radiance of a goddess rising through her own agency. The body electric, carefree and unfettered, never bargained away for six seeds of compromise—playful notes of someone whose brow was never creased by the solemnity of sorrow. This is Persephone complete, unbifurcated—spring that never learned winter’s name.
Poesie Hades What becomes of the god of the underworld when his story lacks its central theft? This fragrance answers with quiet subversion. There’s something contemplative here, almost monastic—clean yet somehow ancient. Here is Hades who never ascended to claim what wasn’t his. Not the predatory fog of abduction but a crystalline solitude—the cool, expansive emptiness of a throne room perpetually missing what it never knew to want. Something in this scent carries the contradiction of sunlight penetrating deep forest shadows—warmth that shouldn’t exist in darkness but somehow does. Not the stereotypical gloom of the underworld but a calm, steady light uncomplicated by possession or desire. Not passion but the unexpected vulnerability of a god eternally untouched. There’s tenderness here, and a strange innocence preserved by isolation. The boundary between realms remains unviolated—not a portal for theft and trauma but a liminal space respected, left uncrossed. This fragrance holds the dignity of restraint, the hushed sacred quality of desire never acted upon. No pomegranate stains here—only the translucent stillness of a domain complete unto itself, ruled by a god who never learned to yearn beyond his borders. Between these two fragrances lies the negative space of a myth unmade—the sweet relief of a story never needing to be rewritten, sanitized, or reclaimed. Just two deities, whole within themselves, existing in separate completeness across an unviolated boundary.
Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab The Dregs of a Bottle of Vanilla Extractis what happens when you abandon your witchcraft supplies in the garden during a thunderstorm and return to find something unexpected has birthed itself. The remnants of Snake Oil’s characteristic molasses-thick vanilla incense (this is not meant to be a Snake Oil spin-off as far as I know, but that’s what I smell!) are here, but they’ve been washed with rain and submerged in soil until they’ve gone feral. That first breath is unmistakable petrichor – that post-storm mineral tang with its peculiar astringency that normally makes my nose wrinkle in distaste – but here it doesn’t outstay its welcome. Instead, it transforms, pulling the sweetness of vanilla back from the brink of excess and anchoring it to something more elemental. What begins as two opposing forces—decadent vanilla luxury versus earthy, rain-soaked austerity—eventually melds into something that feels like sweet, damp secrets buried under fallen leaves, waiting patiently to be unearthed.
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The Serpent in the Carnations(Snake Oil-soaked carnation petals, spiked with a dash of clove and allspice.) Wait, haven’t I smelled this before? Flipping through last year’s reviews, I discover I’ve already waxed poetic about this scent. And yet here I am, astonished all over again, falling into the same serpentine trap. The enchantment is complete; I’ve forgotten I was already enchanted. This is the second time I’ve declared this my favorite from a collection, which tells you everything you need to know about its power. I stand by every word of my previous devotion – the art nouveau femme fatale, the mortuary spice of carnations, Snake Oil’s heavily sugared incense creating that wicked bohemian ghoulishness. The layers of decadence unfold like those Symbolist paintings themselves. The very pigments ground from these carnation petals and serpent scales, mixed with poisonous metals and the tears of corrupted saints. This fragrance emanates from Salome’s skin as she dances, each veil she drops releasing another layer of this scent into the room, until even the most virtuous observer feels their resolve melting away. It lingers on Klimt’s Judith as she approaches Holofernes, infusing her with terrible purpose and unwavering conviction.This is decadence crystallized into a new element on the periodic table – one that devours light, creates shadows where there should be none, and causes flowers to bloom backwards into the earth. I want to bathe in it not once but daily, create a religion around it, convert followers through scented whispers. The Serpent in the Carnations isn’t just corrupted by forbidden knowledge – it’s the reason knowledge became forbidden in the first place.
The Fourth Veil (ripples of sage-green silk covered in a mossy velvet-burnout pattern of wildflowers and slithering ivy) conjures a very specific, very private sanctuary of nostalgia for me. When I was very young, there was a moon-shaped waxen knick-knack… I think it was meant to be a room freshener of some sort, but it hung from a cord, and my mother was using it as a curtain pull. I used to hide behind the dusty, pleated fabric and drag my nails over it, scoring the smooth surface, collecting the sweet, powdery floral wax on my fingertips, which I would then run through my hair so that I could smell it all day. This scent echoes that pleasant waxiness and builds on it with something that smells like a wildflower and algae shampoo, sweet and brackish and slightly herbal, and a note that channels the olfactory version of arsenical wallpaper, verdant trompe-l’œil tendrils climbing over a musky base of translucent, chalky minerals that seem to trap light and transform it into something vaguely bioluminescent.
Pink Fuzzy Handcuffs (pink cotton candy, candied rose, and vanilla sugar) transforms what could be a cloying rose soliflore into something unexpectedly compelling – like stumbling across a street vendor in some fantastical night market who specializes in tanghulu made not from strawberries or cherries but from enormous, dewy rose petals. Each crystallized bloom catches the neon lights, creating jewel-toned fragments that shatter between your teeth with a satisfying crack. The sugar shell is a hyper-concentrated, almost electric pink that buzzes on your tongue and makes your fillings ache in a kaleidoscopic way. This is a gleeful, rosy, sugar-spun audacity.
The Pearl (a salt-encrusted cocoon overflowing with almond blossoms, sweet patchouli, and dried peony petals whipped into orris butter) opens with an unexpected fruity-tarty-sweetness, as if someone had sliced a perfectly ripe persimmon atop a bed of dried apricots. This initial surprise fades as the scent settles into something truer to its nature. It becomes the olfactory embodiment of iridescence – if the pearlescent interior of an abalone shell could release its shimmer as fragrance. There’s something mineral and organic happening simultaneously here, like salt crystals forming on driftwood at low tide. From there, the scent unfolds in luminous ripples, revealing the strange not-quite-colors that exist inside shells – those blues that aren’t blue, the pinks that aren’t quite pink, the greens that seem to flicker in and out of existence depending on how the light hits. It smells exactly how that color-shifting, mysterious inner world of abalone looks – ethereal, ancient, and somehow both oceanic and otherworldly at once.
Horreur Choco-Tique (dark chocolate, ruby cocoa, blood musk, golden honey, thick black wine, champagne grapes, tobacco flower, plum blossom, tonka bean, oakmoss, carnation, benzoin, opoponax, and sugar cane) Imagine licking a chocolate lollipop only to discover an impossibly tiny stained glass cathedral trapped inside it. Press your eye against the glossy cocoa surface and see microscopic nuns bathed in divine grape juice light, aubergine and amaranthine rays streaming through intricate amethyst-hued filigree whorls and whirls of the vitreous panes. Each lick dissolves another layer of bitter chocolate veneer, revealing more of this sugared sanctuary within. The chambers grow increasingly purple-stained as you reach the center, where fermented grape sweetness meets cocoa dust in an unlikely communion. Somewhere in the sticky core, a miniature priest made entirely of dark chocolate lifts a tiny candy chalice of Concord concentrate to lips that will never taste it, forever frozen in a moment of grape-stained reverence.
Plume of Incense (tendrils of sandalwood, agarwood, and cypress incense, moss silk, calla lilies, and yellow amber) Cypress leaps out first – almost tactile in its intensity, a lemony-green sharpness that feels like running your hand along a prickly branch. Then the scent shifts and settles, becoming a soft, languid incense drifting through empty rooms. It transforms into an indolent sphinx of a fragrance, stretched across sun-warmed stone, with delicate wisps of aromatic smoke curling from its enigmatic smile. The agarwood and sandalwood form the creature’s body, substantial yet somehow also ethereal, while the yellow amber creates its half-lidded eyes that watch with ancient, unhurried patience. This incense has all the time in the world to gradually enchant you into reverence, each tendril of smoke winding around your senses with the languorous confidence of something that knows eternity is on its side.
Mars and Venus (a stolen moment preserved for eternity in a gleaming amber jewel, entombed in malachite swirls of oakmoss and velvet) Forget enemies to lovers, this scent captures lovers to landscapes, passion transformed into geological wonder. A clean, crisp amber polished smooth by ocean tides holds the memory of ancient heat at its core. The fragrance shifts into mossy-musky dampness, like vegetation slowly reclaiming abandoned statues in a forgotten garden. When warmed against skin, it exhales a humid velvet aura, luxurious yet wild, as if cosmic bodies once pressed together have now cooled into mineral formations still somehow radiating their original warmth. Time has crystallized divine indiscretion into something that will outlast even the gods themselves, leaving only this aromatic evidence behind: a perfumed fossil of desire.
Discarded Weapons (toasted rice, almond cream, champaca resin, fig, and roasted coconut meat) The camera pans across perfectly toasted rice grains, each one glistening with a hint of savory oil. A steady hand sprinkles roasted nuts, arranging them in a mesmerizing pattern that took fourteen takes to perfect. The creator’s chopsticks move to the dessert compartment, revealing jammy Fig Bar Cookies topped with large flakes of sea salt that catch the light like tiny crystals and coconut shavings, their edges curled and caramelized from slow caramelization. A sweetness remains restrained, a mellow complexity. Our lunchbox artisan steps back, still filming, and watches the comments section explode with hearts and flame emojis. This fragrance hits that sweet spot between culinary art and comfort food – savory, sweet, and somehow both elaborate and profoundly satisfying at once.
Snake Skin (a sinuous leather variant of BPAL’s Snake Oil) Charting the void with phantom maps, new territories over familiar terrain. Leather emerges first, strangely mentholated and cool, running your hand against the grain of scales. Snake Oil’s incense weaves through the leather landscape, a compass that points to itself, creating landmarks that shift each time you attempt to find them. An unexpected almond whisper hides in the coils, sweet and slightly bitter, the pit left behind after devouring whole the fruit that was forbidden. Engulfing its own origin, repeatedly shedding and reforming as it warms on skin, leaving behind the undertow of the past while somehow still carrying it forward- the same beast viewed through different dimensions, simultaneously ancient and newborn, forever caught in the moment of transformation.
Need more Lupercalia scents? Have a peep at my Lupers reviews from 2024 and 2023 and 2022 and 2021 and 2020. Looks like I skipped a few years but we’ve also got 2017 and 2016 reviews as well!
…PSSSST! Did you know I have collected all of my BPAL reviews into one spot? I’m about a year behind with adding new stuff to the document, but as it stands, there are over 60 PAGES of my thoughts and rambles on various limited-edition scents from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab over the years: BPAL REVIEWS BY S. ELIZABETH (PDF download)
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Arcana Wildcraft Oxomoco is (to my nose, anyway!) the scent of Leonora Carrington’s shadowy, enigmatic “The Feast of Samhain” distilled into fragrance—a realm where darkness consumes light, where fathomless frankincense overwhelms a pale, luminous core with primal intensity. Smoke spirals and weaves through soft coconut milk, creating a landscape of raw, mystical contrasts: hand-captured frankincense emerges not as a delicate whisper but as a profound presence, its tendrils curling against the saline, creaminess like umbral fingers of smoke tracing a tenebrous shroud. Threaded throughout, cedar and amber drift like ghostly mediators—subtle conductors that amplify the tension between the scent’s disparate elements, lending depth to its complex intricacy The coconut milk lurks like a secret silver thread, barely visible beneath the deep, consuming woodiness—both elements distinct, stubborn, refusing to blend yet creating a complex, unresolvable presence, elemental and strange and unutterably glorious.
Heretic Parfum Coeur Noir The first breath of Coeur Noir defies its brooding presentation with an unexpected lightness – a cool pastel candied dust, compressed powder sweetness, like fruit wisps and sugared flower petals ground with chalk. This is anchored by a woody, resinous vanilla, but rather than cream or confection, it calls to mind a delicate, aromatic booklet of papiers d’Armenie. The lightness is deceptive, though. As it settles on skin, the sweetness begins its slow retreat, like an eclipse gradually dimming the sky. What emerges is more contemplative – a dusky, myrrh-like quality, that smoky-sour-shivery incense that suggests the shadows promised by that black heart-shaped box, a liminal space of perpetual twilight chill, never reaching full dark.
Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Poppies and Lupine may not be intended as such, and I may be the only one who experiences it thusly, but it feels like a phantom companion to their long-discontinued but much beloved (by me, anyway) Danube. I know it’s a bit lazy to describe a fragrance in terms of another fragrance, but for context, here is what I wrote about Danube many many years ago:
Danube 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.
Where Danube carries you into that crystalline submersion, that childhood moment of perfect underwater suspension, Poppies and Lupine exists in the languid aftermath. This is what happens after you’ve surfaced, water droplets evaporating from sun-warmed skin, as you lie half-dozing by the pool’s edge while twilight seeps slowly into the world. The fragrance possesses a deeply narcotic quality that immediately brings to mind Milla Jovovich singing “In a Glade” – that haunting Ukrainian folk melody that seems to exist outside of time, vocals drifting through some ancestral dreamscape. I’ve found myself playing this song on repeat while wearing this scent, each enhancing the otherworldliness of the other, creating a feedback loop of beautiful melancholy.
Imagine moonblooms floating on still waters, their heavy heads nodding in the limpid, liminal space between wakefulness and dreaming, their reflection creating a hypnotic double-image that blurs the line between what’s real and what’s reverie. There’s something dozy-drowsy in its incense-laden whispers, the gentle floral sway of a midnight lullaby. The scent swathes with the unhurried cadence of half-remembered dreams, each note blurring softly into the next as consciousness unspools and drifts. I find myself returning to this scent not for brightness or clarity but for its gentle dissolution of boundaries – those moments when consciousness folds back upon itself and you become both observer and observed, dreamscape and dreamer simultaneously.
DSH Perfumes Emerald Hyrax There’s a softness here that feels almost geological—the kind of green that exists between moss and stone, in those damp crevices where nothing much happens except the quietest possible growth. The space where a fern’s tiniest root might tentatively unfurl, where moisture pools in the smallest shadow, where time seems to pause and collect itself. Like a small, fuzzy creature curling into an impossibly delicate nest of lichen and loam; like a monk’s pillow woven from the most tender moss, bathed in the hazy, frozen light of quartz; like an agate’s whispers of its time in the earth.
Liis Choux Choux There’s an Icelandic milk biscuit balanced between vanilla wafer and hard tack– it’s called Mjólkurkex, but don’t ask me to pronounce it. It’s got the subtle taste of a treat but the tooth-breaking texture of something shockingly punitive. Imagine someone tried to gussy it up with a sifting of icing sugar on top, a powdery dusting through the delicate whorls and swirls of a doily. But maybe that’s not enough, so they’ve added a few fragile curls of sweet cream butter, sculpted in the shape of spring flowers. But also, what if you maybe just wanted a proper dessert? They’ve served a small slice of the airiest, fluffiest whipped lemon chiffon cake, too. Exactly the sort of thing that would make a Scandinavian minimalist weep with complicated emotions.
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“Horror assaults our senses with relentless precision – the crescendo of a nerve-shredding score, the stomach-dropping revelation in a match-cut, the visceral impact of practical effects. Yet there’s one sensory dimension that remains frustratingly out of reach: the olfactory landscape of fear. We can see the expressionist shadows of Nosferatu, hear Tomie’s seductive whispers, feel the controlled violence vibrating beneath American Psycho’s polished surface – but we can only imagine their distinct bouquets of ancient evil, obsessive beauty, and expensive madness.”
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Every month, either according to mood or whim or random theme, I gather a few bottles of perfume from my cupboard with the intent to spend the month absolutely marinating in them. Hence, the Monthly Marinade!
Lately, I have been craving incense and those related dark, smoky, resinous vibes, so here’s the gang I conjured forth for February. If you are interested in full reviews of each one, you can read about it over on my Patreon today.
(You must be a member to read it, but even members at the free tier can access it!)
Spoiler alert! One of these fragrances is the February scent for my Aromatic Angel patrons, who receive a handwritten and scented note card in the mail from me every month!
