Unquiet
Things

Arielle Shoshana x Michelle Visage Wednesday Helena Blavatsky on a wilderness retreat, divining the eternal mysteries through campfire ash with a spindly stalk of celery. Occult celery, theosophical vegetable. Investigating unexplained laws of Nature, the truth within the bitter ribs. Humble soup stock vegetation as messenger between worlds. Smoky pinewood/cedary outdoor incense curling around paradoxical aqueous/empyreumatic heart, enrobed in sweet, camphorous honey, cinched with crisp herbaceous green strings. Smoked offerings minus the charred flesh, channeling divine wisdom through fibrous green wands. Finding eternal essence in a produce bin bonfire, whether we call it God or Nature or High Priestess of Camp Celery. An extremely peculiar and exceedingly perfect conduit of otherworldly revelations and one of the most unique things I have ever added to my perfume collection.

Maison Crivelli Iris Malikhân The opening from the sprayer releases something akin to a decrepit lightning bolt locked in a dusty crypt. Sharp, electric decay, musty current, moth-eaten voltage. Then…a bit of shadowy aromatic lycanthropy, and it’s again what I thought I loved. A phantasmagoric zoetrope, a being resembling a Maria Germanova-type, shapeshifting through theatrical roles, a noble lady draped in jewels, a swaggering pirate, a beggar woman cloaked in rags, an avant-garde fairy in Stanislavski’s embodiment of The Blue Bird by Maurice Maeterlinck. Ghostly photographs, the specters haunting antique cartes de visite. At turns, powdery, leathery, metallic, vegetal, austere, sophisticated. Moscow Art Theatre witch-queen caught mid-transformation, glamorous and gloomy, enigmatic and a bit unsettling.

Obvious Parfums Un Musc Haruka Tenou energy, chilly sporty musk. Willowy sapphic athletics. Crisp androgynous elegance in fluttering white tennis shorts. Ginger brightness competing against vetiver earthiness, canceling each other out, whittling down to dank earthworm glow. A weakened Sailor Uranus attack – Minor Phosphorescent Subterranean Flicker! or Weakened Subsoil Incandescence Rustle! or something like that! Muted radiance, cool, composed, understated power…or not even power exactly. Powered up, but on a dimmer switch. (Somewhat similar to my thoughts on Glossier You, but more singularly Uranus – no Neptune softness here, just that elegant solo energy.)

EPC Velvet Incense The melted-down essence of an entire perfume collection in a cauldron – harmonized, reduced, cohesive. Waterhouse’s The Magic Circle, that vaporous pillar of smoke rising from glowing depths, flames crackling with magic and power. In my book The Art of Fantasy, I admired this work, noting the conspiracy of ravens looking on with menacing curiosity from beyond the symbolic ring, the landscape glowering claustrophobically with ominous intent – but inside the circle, equilibrium. Ambery cedar exhaling cool, crisp pepperiness – not “spiced” heat but sharp, bright, almost mentholated edge cutting through resinous warmth. Muted, velveteen ambery-sandalwoody sweetness, thick and plush, wrapping around that cedar spine like soft fabric pulled taut. Everything finding its place in the spell. My perfume cabinet already smells like this … which means I don’t need this fragrance… but also means I absolutely understand its appeal.

Arquiste Nocturnality A canned neon energy drink cocktail crushed under the heel of a Jeffrey Campbell boot circa 2013, slick neoprene shine and sculptural platform weight, sticky fluorescent syrup pooling underneath. A stiff pleather jacket draped nearby, late 90s cheap-chic sheen, rubbery and glossy and fruity, an early-evening synthetic glamour. Fluorescent shimmer catching light. Acidic citrus bruised against latex. Chemical gleam mixing with something vaguely floral, a sharp luminosity, its glow all edges. The fruity bits abandon ship, no goodbye, just gone home, shimmied up trellises and through cracked suburban windows, meanwhile, the real party starts. What remains is animalic and feral, musks and patchouli sprawling like they own the place, earthy and musky and undeniably alive, and a little undead in that unsettling way that makes you unsure whether you’re smelling something or becoming something. It smells like Dead and Beautiful, a 2021 Chinese vampire film about five gorgeous, obscenely wealthy friends so jaded by excess that they embark on increasingly extravagant and dangerous expeditions just to feel something. After a disorienting encounter with a shaman deep in the jungle, they awaken transformed, vampires…or perhaps the spell merely reveals what was already festering beneath the Valentino and the cheekbones. Cedar grounding the animalic chaos, cool and austere, against the earthy, confrontational patchouli. Something resinous underneath, a smoky, slightly ritualistic quality, like witnessing something you shouldn’t in the dark, and then pretending you haven’t been changed by it. The aromatic evidence of what happens when beautiful people do beautiful, terrible things. By the end, it’s all leather-bound mysteries and the ghost of neon bleeding through, that downtown after-hours underbelly where the loss of self in intoxication becomes indistinguishable from revelation, clinging to skin like a confession or a curse.

FZOTIC Ummagumma Have you ever been eating chocolate, maybe some single-origin, maybe Ecuadorian chocolate, so intensely dark and aromatically bitter with like zero percent cocoa butter and no sugar? It really doesn’t even taste like chocolate anymore, it’s a bit punitive actually (but in an okay way?) And you thought, hey, you know what this chocolate needs is a few grinds, twenty or so, from the teakwood pepper grinder, spicy and textured and gritty. A handful of cedar shavings, bright and dry and papery. A new pair of high-quality, stiff leather boots. I certainly never thought that either, so I guess that makes two of us, and shame on us for our profound lack of vision. Because this is both rich and austere, intense and accessible, and there’s an additional salty balsamic smokiness that makes it really, really interesting.

My impressions from Poesie’s Cardamonth 2026…

Aphrodite’s Breakfast Creamy French toast from inside a lilac fairytale, cardamom-spiced, lost in the raspberry wood, a flask of green tea on your belt, astringent and clarifying.

Weighted Blanket A tiny creature hollowing out a plump, moist, sticky date and lining it with vanilla-scented cottony spider webs. Cozy but insular. Intimate and contained. A cocoon of richly spiced-sweetness.

Comfort What is the collective noun for a movement of moth wings? A tremor? A pulse? A dusting of something precious catching the light, an herbal sarsparilla coolness, a shimmer of vanilla powder, a half-remembered breath of spice from the threadcount of dreams.

Dolce Far Niente POV: You are the brittle cookie, strange-spiced-sweet and chocolate-laced, inside the silver house-shaped tin. Parting the embossed curtains, against the glass panes of an aluminum row house, you watch a middle-aged person creak cross-legged under the tree, bathed in 80s Christmas bulbs, electric sharp, plastic-bright. The lights catch the tin’s edges, refract the nostalgia and crystalize to crumbs. a mass-produced sweetness that tastes like wonder and sugar and joy.

Glimmers Overgrown satyr sauna, shadows of warmth in wintry desolation. Cloven hooves in the dust. Dry spicy kindling, feral musk lingering in the cold air. Pine needles scattered across the floor, cedar beams dark and skeletal. A phantom fire burning long ago.

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