Unquiet
Things

Jorum Studio’s Gorseland is a convergence of many paths of light blazing through the borderlands between cultivated and wild, where neon-bright blooms stun with their electric intensity. While I spend my days mostly indoors, I’ve traveled countless wild paths through spellbinding nature writer Robert MacFarlane’s writing, where his luminous prose captures the poetry of wild places, showing how ancient ways and old growth persist alongside us, part of our daily world rather than separate from it. This scent unfolds like one of these vicarious journeys: sharp-edged and biting in the high places, then deepening to a piercing sourness in the shadows of valley-bottom herbs. The shock of fluorescent petals never quite settles as you climb higher, maintaining their strange luminosity even as shoots twist upward with their raw, cutting brightness. Eventually, softer notes emerge – the apple-sweet fluff of chamomile and grassy vanilla whispers of woodruff – like finding an unexpected meadow after a steep climb. In this scent, the air crackles with the voltage of growing things, refusing our attempts at categorization – too bright, too fierce, too alive to be contained.

Kintsugi Luna. Picture this: the devil girl from Mars levels her cotton candy raygun, and the blast floats eternally in zero gravity. Each crystalline sugar cloud drifts through stratospheric winds, spun and respun by ionized air. The atmosphere crackles plasma-charged, with impossible gamma rays that smell like electricity and stardust. This is pure space candy – confectionery untethered in the cosmic expanse, sugar crystals forming in streams of light. Sweet particles scatter like nebulae, catching starlight and spreading ever outward, a candyfloss cosmos; glittering, gossamer, and galactic.

Alchemy + Hyde no. 4 is a scent that somehow captures the essence of inherited wisdom – like old folk songs passed down through generations, carrying both the comfort of familiar melodies and the half-forgotten warnings woven between their verses. It opens with wintergreen’s silvery, shivery edge, sharp as a grandmother’s songs about doors best not opened, twice sung for blessing, sung thrice for a curse. The sweetness comes later, like memories traded at crossroads: green-bright cardamom and tonka bean’s honeyed hay bartered for safe passage, amber collecting in pools like sun-caught resin where old gods left their footprints in the mud. Oud’s leathered darkness and milky sandalwood whisper in voices from before the moon devoured the sun, when even memory’s perfume knew older tales. It settles finally into something almost familiar, the way scattered pages from a book of old folk songs might rearrange themselves into a lullaby, humming softly against your skin.

 Heal the Way is a collaboration between Snif and Alex Elle, and I’ve been wracking my brains trying to come up with something creative or interesting to say about this scent. Usually, I love diving deep into a fragrance, weaving dreams and memories into the description, finding those strange and perfect metaphors that capture not just how something smells but how it makes you feel. Different aspects of this scent seem to appear to and appeal to different people – some are catching the nuttiness, others are picking up on the palo santo, while to me it smells exactly like a can of vanilla frosting. Yet we’re all arriving at the same emotional destination: comfort. After two weeks of being ripped from my introverted little sanctuary to spend every waking moment with Yvan’s family for the holidays, I have been crabby and frazzled, and I’ve found myself instinctively reaching for this one. It’s fluffy, cozy, creamy comfort that somehow manages to stay light and airy rather than cloying, and despite being fundamentally a vanilla scent, it never tips over into grossly tooth-aching sweetness. The longer it wears, though, I’m catching more nuances – that lush, pillowy marshmallow frosting eases into warm, ambery-woody musk the longer it wears. Is it groundbreaking? No? Have I reinvented the wheel with this review? Sadly, also no. But maybe there’s value in collective experience – in many voices confirming that yes, sometimes what you need isn’t a complex artistic statement, but just this simple comfort, this quiet permission to rest.

Sweet Ash, another one from Snif, is the sweatpants of fragrances—the kind you reach for on those days when comfort is key. Like shedding the day’s roughness and sinking into something worn soft. As if fleecy, elastic-waisted comfort could hold memories of secluded landscapes and long, winding paths. A bit of wilderness, a chip of bark, a prickle of pine needles, a frill of moss, pressed and preserved, wrapped in a vanilla-scented hankie, tucked deep in a pocket where it’s been gathering warmth and memory. It’s the fragrance for a morning spent entirely indoors, sunlight filtering through half-closed curtains, creating a soft haze…with that scrap of woodland folded and kept close. This is what you spray on when you’re curled up on the sofa, feet tucked underneath you, a favorite mug of coffee steaming nearby, a collected volume of windswept travelers’ borderland wanderings balanced on your knee—a quiet companion to those moments of absolute stillness, of being completely at ease, while only the characters in books are adventuring.

Immortal Perfume Queen of Night Though Queen of the Night draws inspiration from the Countess de Castiglione, in my imagination, it constructs a dream world where the gilded beauty of 18th-century rooms coexists with decay and dereliction – Marie Antoinette’s ashtray as Turbeville might have found it, forgotten in some dust-shrouded chamber of Versailles, where moth-eaten velvet curtains hang heavy with decades of tobacco smoke. Here, sugared almonds and crumbling macarons lie crushed into tobacco ash, and leather gloves rest carelessly beside crystal ashtrays clouded with time. The florals drift through like pressed flowers discovered between the pages of centuries-old letters, and abandoned crystal coupes veil their honey-sweetened whiskey stains beneath sheets of dust. The sweetness and smoke weave together in a sense of isolation and romanticism frozen in time, rustling and sighing with the ghosts of lost revelries through those long-waiting twilight rooms where memory crumbles into ruin and withered autumn leaves.

Lvnea Ronds de Sorcière is an impossible rose: not blooming, not remembered, not real. Soil dreaming itself into petal-shape, a spectral geometry of what cannot be. No rose exists here—and yet. The scent traces the negative space of a flower, its phantom outline pressed between layers of mud and membrane and memory. Things in the dirt whisper beneath—shadows of dark roots and old bones, beetle carapaces, the soft click of mandibles against stone. Churning earth under an impossible weight. Petrichor trembles at the edges, a breath caught between forgetting and never having arrived at the start. The illusory rose dies. Mushrooms rise from its void, soft-fisted and eyeless, shouldering aside the last whispers of petal and memory. Here, in the dark breathing of soil, fungal threads weave their own cartography. No mourning: just the unrepentant pulse of growth, of things that emerge from darkness with the quiet violence of becoming.

This Strawberry Shortcake X Scentbird collaboration is probably not something that would ever have been on my radar, let alone something I would have purchased for myself. But as “olfactory revenge” because I bought myself something for Christmas that my Best Friend had intended to get me–they sent me this instead. Here are some thoughts…

The costume I imagined was undoubtedly scratchy, sticky polyester performance—a bright explosion of red and pink, with a vinyl jumpsuit that caught light like a light-up toy’s colorful, pixelated glow. A blow mold mask perched atop, its plastic curves capturing some uncanny cartoon essence, and a bonnet that framed everything in soft ruffles. The fabric catching dust motes in an afternoon sunbeam with that particular vintage fabric smell that hints at something slightly worn and not necessarily anytime recently. A child transformed into a living cartoon, all synthetic shine and determined imagination where reality fell short. If that visual—this moment that never actually existed—were a Polaroid half-developed, a scratch-and-sniff sticker, it would be pure wish-fulfillment: not the vivid cartoon, not the plastic toy’s sharp edges, but tender, wistful third thing. Soft candied undertones swirled into the frothy berry cereal milk pooling at the bottom of your favorite bowl, the one that fits perfectly in your little hands. Soft pastry cream pooling beneath pale pink strawberry syrup, faded, translucent, and condensed milk warming against skin. And at the very center, a tiny ache—for the costume I never wore, the moment that was only ever a desperately dear, whole-hearted wish. I was expecting something tooth-achingly sweet, and this is only just shy of that. What I didn’t expect was how relentlessly charming it would be.

Stora Skuggan’s Pine is definitely pine: bark-rough, evergreen-needled, mineral-edged, and windswept. But beneath its damp-sapped woodland weight is …a weird, savory surprise? Picture it: a late afternoon light filters through pine branches, thick and amber-green. The forest closes in—not a real forest, but a micro-memory invented just for this moment. My chihuahua, also a figment of my imagination, darts between tree trunks, a teacup blur of muscle and movement. The air is pure, bracing conifer at first. Sharp. Resinous. Each breath knifes my lungs, cold and green. The trees rustle, and a weird, whistling wind carries an unexpected scent. Corn chips, the warm, salty smell of a dog’s toe beans. My little pupper bursts from a thicket, tail wild, dirt-smeared, slightly feral. In his mouth: a raven’s skeleton. Bleached bone, delicate as paper. The forest seems to pause. I grab him to me and hold his small, trembling body close. He drops the fragile corpse at my feet. The dark branches fold behind us, dense and silent.

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