Unquiet
Things

I’m posting this month’s collection of fragrance reviews a little earlier than I usually do! I am headed out west for a work-related trip and won’t be back until after March 1, so I’d rather do it sooner than later. Here’s everything I sniffed and pondered upon in February, including an elusive search for a new vanilla to love…

LBTY Hera Reigns (Wherein I reimagine Hera with mean-girl main character energy at the center of a domestic thriller…) Book club is three women deep into dissecting this month’s pick: a salacious true-crime account of a podcaster’s obsession, reconstructed movements, tracked patterns, and a hunt for gruesome details. Someone’s pouring more wine. Someone else pivots to the local murder. A woman from the neighborhood (not one of us, that tacky slut with her tits always hanging out at Whole Foods, at pilates, at parent-teacher day) was found dead in the park two weeks ago. Last seen somewhere on Riverside. Then Karen mentions (almost casually, refilling her own glass for like the 3rd time, Jesus Karen) that she saw your husband’s car at the Riverside Hotel on Tuesday. The one on the highway. She wasn’t even sure it was his at first, but that dumb vanity license plate. The rosé in your own mouth pools unswallowed, sours imperceptibly. You were in the middle of mentally cataloging the rosy peonies you need, the blush ranunculus, the garden roses with that specific peachy undertone for the gala centerpieces. Your phone’s open to the florist’s website. But Karen’s words pique and prickle, a tickle, a tingle. The imaginary floral spreadsheet fades, and other, uglier thoughts rush in, unbidden, unwelcome, unspoken. Tuesday. You were at yoga. He said he was at work. That piquancy, that bright, sharply-not-sparkly effervescent quality, suddenly feels less like exuberance and more like electricity. The itchy-eerie kind that precedes the air when a storm threatens. The room keeps talking. You keep smiling. But something underneath has shifted, darkened, as if the darkness is only just now becoming aware of itself.

Haute Macabre x BPAL Light As A Feather Stiff As A Board: a lullaby sung backwards, an incantatory influorescence. Ephemeral floral and shadowed herbal, somehow both purified and unblessed, a conjuration of the unseelie court and a glory of seraphim. Cool, slightly medicinal, pale translucent blooms drifting like shawls woven of mist and moonlight, a frenzy of elf maidens at the feast, trapped in stained glass. The incense of suspended places, a liminal hush of resins, dusty echo of wood. Tarnished silver, clouded glass, filtered light, words illuminated in the margins, scattered like moths, humming and glowing.

Diptique Eau Duelle rustles like a susurrus of sighs stirring through the reeds from that exact territory Algernon Blackwood describes in his short story/novella, “The Willows.” Dry vanilla, grassy and herbaceous, maybe even rhizomatic, swaying, shifting, and restless. A humming of place, a hollow wind. Silvered marsh lights, bizarre fancies. Soft moonlight on myriad murmuring leaves. Vanilla as the uncanny antagonist of the nature trail, the weird tale the willows tell.

Pigmentarium Murmur is a perfume of Lynchian vacuum and void, the kind where silence and absence are loaded with meaning, even if you have no freaking way to articulate what that meaning is. In 1993, my sister and I cut school one day, unplanned, out of the blue. We drove around the tiny downtown of Daytona Beach (we lived locally) and browsed used bookstores and record shops. Eventually, we got brave enough to peek into Wig Villa, a shop we’d always been curious about. Disembodied plastic heads lined the walls. The silence was absolute and inexplicably dreadful. Not a soul in the store. Just us and the heads and that weird, empty air. We later arrived home to find several packages on the porch. Our mother had ordered oversized plaster statues of Jesus and Mary from Fingerhut. This day and these moments live in my memory as surreal, dreamlike, slightly nightmarish… but somehow…not bad? Just deeply, impossibly weird. Pigmentarium Murmur smells like my memories of these moments, a little freaky, a little odd, but strangely very dear to my heart. A hollow plastic note (imagine “vanilla doll head” minus the vanilla), a rose that’s pale and powdery, almost like makeup dust on porcelain, muted and earnest and lurking but endearing rather than sinister, and a sandalwood that’s soft and creaky like old wood, dreamy and worn. All existing together, but also separately, dreamlit portraits at suspended intervals, vacant vignettes, in that teeming emptiness.

A variety of vanillas I have been testing throughout the month to find the ultimate vanilla…

Kyse Parfums Bonbons à la Vanille: Duncan Hines buttercream frosting and Starbucks cakepops. It’s a vanilla’s vanilla. It’s okay.

Fugazzi Vanilla Haze: A plastic doll head full of ozone, like a Barbie farted canned air, disorienting, unpleasant, and deeply hollow.

Indult Tihota: A throwback to the mid-to-late 2000s MUA fragrance board obsession, and since I don’t remember it from the tiny sample I had at that time, I am trying it again. A weak cocktail of whipped cream vodka topped with a scant scattering of expired confectioners’ sugar and garnished with a few strands of scorched, frizzled hair. I feel the need to time-travel and interrogate all the Tihota fangirls because I do not get it.

Tauer Vanilla Absolue: Why is there rose in this one??? I mostly loathe rose, and for a scent literally called Vanilla Absolue, finding a prominent rose facet feels like a profound betrayal!

Arte Profumi Sucre Noir This is a sweetened condensed milk/wispy cotton candy/crispy-turned-soggy cereal marshmallow/Pink Sugar-esque little thing, and I would like it to be way more noir-er.

Tada Parfumeur Vanilla Mystique There is no mystique here and no vanilla either (makes me think of “there ain’t no vista and there ain’t no view and there sure as hell ain’t no vista of no views.“); this is a crass, rummy, dried-fruity amber.

Parfum d’Empire Madagasgar le Baume Vanille …now this is interesting. A bit musty, a bit woolly, a bit vegetal. A sort of syrupy herbal liqueur-novelty-lozenge. Linty, fuzzy, stuck in a moth-eaten pocket. A powdered snow-vanilla bean phantom at the back end. Weird and unexpected, but this is not the vanilla I am looking for, either.

Shaman Bourbon Vanilla is a bit cool and medicinal; balsam and anise are listed in the notes, so it makes sense it would come across this way to me. The longer it wears, the more I am reminded of Myrrhe Ardente from Annick Goutal, so I will just give you the review I wrote for that one: At first, it is decidedly medicinal… like an antique herbal expectorant one might procure at the local apothecary run by an unlicensed homeopathic pharmacist. It might cure you, it might kill you. It soon becomes whispery smoke and mysterious veils and soft, powdery incense made from mystical dream-tree resins. I am pretty sure Myrrhe Ardente is discontinued, but if you ever wanted to try it, Shaman Bourbon Vanilla is basically the same thing!

Arquiste Architects Club is a sophisticated vanilla chypre with salt-spray Atlantic air crispness at the back end, which makes me think of an upper-crust aristocratic party on board a yacht in international waters, posh people drinking gin and tonics. Maybe a woman in cabin 10 fell overboard. Maybe there’s a mystery. Maybe not; maybe it ends as a very intimate vanilla-skin scent.

Il Profumo Vanilla Bourbon is vanilla extract dribbled straight out of the bottle. Not store brand, more like the good stuff from Penzey’s, with a filigreed sweetened floral honey threading through it like gilding on fancy notecards. Not super basic…but also not far off from basic.

Did I find a new vanilla to love? Or did I perhaps discover one already lurking in my collection?

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