2024
December Perfume Reviews
categories: scents & sensibility
BPAL Antique Lace Through the tiny gabled window of a dollhouse attic, a secret scene unfolds: a miniature lace shawl lies draped across a trunk, its delicate stitches dusted with what could be petit four crumbs, could be breakfast cereal marshmallows – fairy-sized sweets scattered by some forgotten child’s hand. Beside it, pearly mothballs like strange sugar drops rest among cobwebby linens that exhale their milky-musky-powderiness. From a diminutive crystal perfume bottle in the corner, phantom florals and delicate vanilla mingle with dust motes in the afternoon sunlight, the whole tiny world held in perfect, timeless suspension. (This is a scent I have had for a long time but have never reviewed until now. I am sad to say that I think it is long discontinued)
In Arquiste Venice Rococco, I am reminded of that iconic scene in The Company of Wolves, and my imagination does the rest: the wedding party dissolves into wolves, but their powdered costumes and countenances still hang in the air – rice-white, chalk-soft, cloud-thick, falling like snow in a fairy tale gone corrupt and perverse. Powder piles in drifts against the walls, powder floats in sheets through candlelight, powder settles like ash on abandoned masks, powder dusts every surface until the mirrors suffocate in white. The scent floats between reality and nightmare, each breath drawing in more sweet, choking powder. Underneath all those layers of white lies something wild – teeth behind the powder puff, claws stirring up fresh clouds with every step. This is what’s left at the banquet table after the cursed aristocrats’ lycanthropic transformations, their abandoned feast drowning in drifts of violet-white dust, confections, and silverware scattered like bones beneath a blanket of perfumed snow.
I have a discovery set from Anjali, whose only scent I have had any previous experience with was Under The Mango Tree, via the Seattle Perfumers discovery set.
I am still in the midst of sampling them, but here are thoughts on a few so far:
– Monsoon Madness: Sitting by an open window on a rainy morning, curtains fluttering in the damp breeze, a single rose in a vase before you. Its crimson blooms, a vivid velvet contrast to the early glooms, offer their dawn song to the ghostly morning light. Beneath it, a misty musk mingles with barely-there spices, like steam rising from wet earth. The fragrance undulates like those curtains – whispering past, then drawn back, never still, never quite solid.
– Mantra: Where pools of clearest water catch the light, seek the violet that blooms beneath no soil. Bright as amethyst, suspended in golden amber, yet flowing like honey through crystal streams. Each ripple reveals its secret – a flower preserved in liquid that cannot wet, a sweetness that flows yet never moves. Beneath it all, warm amber holds these fragments, a fleeting eternity captured in impossible depths.
– Tiger Bright: In halls of cedar and cypress, vetiver traces a map in sharp strokes. In the shadows, leather guards ancient secrets, pepper sparks like flint on stone. Then – at the perfect moment, revelation: when sun meets crystal – hold aloft the light of spice through smoked glass. Turmeric and coriander illuminate what was always there and mark an X in gold. The fragrance hovers like illuminated dust – austere yet radiant, earthbound yet strangely weightless.
Eauso Vert Fruto Oscuro: In the basement of an ancient Spanish mission, there’s a forgotten wine cellar where the air is thick with centuries of fermentation. The massive barrels have burrowed into the cellar floor, their wooden staves blackened with time. Here, the California Raisins – those claymation creatures of 80s fame – have found their true calling as bacchanalian priests of a midnight sabbath.
They dance in the dark, their wrinkled bodies glistening with communion wine that’s gone deliciously corrupt. The sacrament itself has evolved, developed consciousness, learned to crawl out of its casks at night. It carries the memory of fruit that ripened past the point of virtue, fruit that chose to embrace decay as a form of transcendence.
Black cherries prowl, lush, wayward creatures of the night, leaving trails of wax and ink in their wake, while patches of moss grow in impossible shades of purple. Somewhere in the darkness, a quince tree has taken root in the stone, its fruits fermenting on the branch, dripping jam that tastes like the midnight confession of wicked ghosts.
This is fruit that has rejected the sun, each drop a tiny black mass, an unholy celebration of fruit that’s gone ravenously feral in the dark.
TLDR; fruit as creature of the night; goth California Raisins; a black mass of unholy cherries
Born to Stand Out Be My Cookie What begins with the promise of toasted grains and caramelized sugar spreading across a baking sheet in a pre-heated 350 degree oven. soon collapses into an unpleasant fruity morass of rehydrating dried fruits – raisins, cranberries, apricots, dates – forgotten in weak rum and lemon juice until they’re all swollen and sodden and gross. (I was trying to come up with a really disgusting Lovecraftian adjective to describe the distended, grotesque nature of the scent at this point, but I gave up. These pulpy masses dissolve murkily when stirred reluctantly into lumpy, sticky porridge whose very revolting nature renders it immediately abandoned. Time passes, and what remains is merely a cloying potpourri, less a deliberate composition than a reminder of culinary aspirations left to wither on a countertop. Alternately, a fruit cake that mysteriously drowned in a lake in 1984 but somehow appears on your holiday table every year like clockwork, bloated and putrid, its origins forever unknown and unspoken.
A Lab On Fire What We Do In Paris is Secret is a perfume I reviewed several years ago, but after recently catching a whiff of it, I concluded that I wasn’t mean enough the first time. In this perfume, I catch whiffs of three fragrances I absolutely loathe – the worst of the worst: KvD Saint, Thierry Mugler’s Angel, and V+R’s Flowerbomb, each contributing its own special brand of cloying falseness, lurking in here like problematic d-list influencers. The combination of bright, honied heliotrope, candied litchee, and powdery vanilla marzipan creates something so aggressively artificial it’s like that specific brand of try-hard glamour that screams, “I learned about luxury from watching unboxing videos.” It’s not badly made; it’s just so deliberately vapid and performatively trendy that it makes you wonder if it’s trolling you. The kind of perfume that would absolutely post a Mukbang video of itself eating other, better fragrances and then crying for the camera in a halo of ring lights.
DSH Perfumes Manhattan is firelight through a vintage lens – all warmth and no flame, the way old films captured hearths in silver-screen shadows. The glow feels richer than memory, grounded in something earthy and lush, a cherry left at the bottom of a glass, soaked in honeyed spirits, plummy with promise. A bitter note cuts through the sweetness, a tiny nibble under the gazes of those who love you, a warmth so enveloping and tender it breaks your heart just a little and brings tears to your eyes. You recognize it instantly: that feeling of safety and love that you can only experience now through the lens of nostalgia because you’ll never be that young or small or loved that way again.
The scent wraps around you like a childhood memory that softens into sadness when held too long. It’s the kind of velvet golden haze that catches in your throat now, because you know such perfect shelter can’t exist outside of memory, outside these few precious frames of black and white film where the firelight always burns just right, and everyone you’ve ever loved is still young and beautiful and waiting in the next room. This is a softly devastating scent, and one that requires emotional steadiness to wear – it has a way of dissolving the present and opening rooms in the memory where beloved ghosts forever wait patiently for you with open arms, where the little heart you long outgrew is forever full.
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