2025
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.
You can preorder this issue and quarterly subscriptions here!