Unquiet
Things

Nearly Noon A melancholic’s cream-stained regency morning dress worn well past midnight, white muslin and satin grown heavy with torpor, lace-trimmed cap askew over hair unwashed and unpinned for days. Yesterday’s rice pudding congealing in bone china teacups, spiced cardamom linen sachets tucked into untouched pillows, the intimate smell of unwashed scalp beneath crumpled muslin caps. The ontological vertigo experienced by a doppelganger’s reflection – am I the copy or the original, is this morning or evening, why does this chemisette smell like vanilla and the milky price of sweetness, the ghost of tiny, crushed wings. The sleepless moon, bedimmed and bedeviled, bears witness to another pale, faceless shadow in the window.

Arcana Wildcraft Otherworld Marble checkerboard chilled beneath wan feet, the beauty and horror of a centuries-long waltz. Longing, glamour-twisted, pale and thistledown silver. Silk slippers worn to bone, candlelight cold and shimmering, dreams translucent, yielding, disorienting. A flittering fae floral of twilight shimmers, shadows, and sighs. A paradoxical longing of vanilla, an amber just beyond the mirror’s reflection. Uncanny pollen encompassing the bleak chill of winter in summer’s blazing throat, spring’s sweet promise as the last autumn leaf drops with the dying sun. Morning light, iridescent and impossible, and dreams, everpresent, beyond recall. (I think this was limited edition or seasonal, but it may be back at some point?)

Oddity Delulu Beautiful foolishness, madcap delight. Coloring book fruit bowls come to life scribbled wild outside every line, Aladdan’s cave jeweled jello towers giggling, wibbling, sweet reckless audacity of spinning til dizzy-drunk, dress helicopter-whirling eyeballs pinwheel-wild. Mandarin acid-bright, cartoon citrus. Rhubarb’s pink bite. Blackcurrant shadows pooling, brief gravity, wry mordancy. Peachy fuzz osmanthus, vetiver’s tannic grip, a self-aware undertow of flat champagne effervescence, Tartness with sass-filtered sweetness, bright bright primary colors, slightly chaotic energy of cars shaped like pickles and animals wearing tiny hats doing important jobs, delightfully absurd, winking impish. Breathless, tumbling; catching joy by its wrist as it races past.

It’s a scent that combines the feeling of radical kindness and demented glee and calls to mind why I love the stories of shows like Steven Universe. As a matter of fact, I think the whole cast of Steven Universe smells like this, the way they can be simultaneously deeply caring and completely unhinged with joy. That combination of genuine sweetness with chaotic energy – it’s Garnet’s cool confidence meets Amethyst’s wild abandon meets Steven’s pure-hearted enthusiasm. The fragrance has that same quality of being deeply good-natured but never boring, sweet but with enough “edge” to keep it interesting.

I just read John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet and this is a scent that sort of makes me think of what he wrote here, “You can’t see the future coming–not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.”

D’Annam Japanese Whiskey I don’t drink a lot of whiskey, I don’t know the difference between whiskey or scotch or bourbon or rye. But if we do have whiskey in the house, it is usually a Japanese variety. We like Nikka or Hibiki. I think they have a slightly smoky, caramel-y, sandwoody, vanillic, chestnutty…whiskeyness? I don’t talk about beverages as much as I talk about perfume, so obviously I’ve got some work to do if I ever want to become a whiskey reviewer, hehe.

SO, in this fragrance, imagine the aspects of those notes, but you’ve cooked all the alcholic stinging sharpness out of it. You stir in the tiniest bit of sugar, and then you hand whisk the shit out of it like people did with that viral Dalgona coffee recipe during the early months of the Pandemic. Now you have this pillowy whipped, frothy cloud of slightly smoky, caramel-y, sandwoody, vanillic, chestnutty whiskeyness minus the boozy aspect. And you wear it like a pair of cozy handknit fingerless cashmere mitts.

This is a lovely cozy wonder of a scent, but it is $380, and I am not sure it’s THAT lovely, cozy, or wonderful!

Atelier des Ors Lune Féline Extrait A hooded figure watching from beyond the shadows, but shadows of what, and why in a place no shadow should be? The insidious intrusion, the confounding juxtaposition, the thing found in the wrong place. The stirring of things best left unstirred. Resinous orchid musk, feral balmy, rotting-earthed humidity. Milky murk, like looking through the eyes of the dead. Honeyed spices part buried, cinnamon-cardamom-disinterment deferred, the ground is wrong, a terror in the terroir. The boundless and hideous unknown, a carnal effluvium of the eerie and the weird, reinterpreted as a not-too-bad, funky vanilla fragrance. Actually, kinda lovely.

Serviette Byronic Hero An underripe raspberry swimming in an oversized leather jacket, smoking the wrong end of a cigarette. The raspberry has Chuck Bass’s face. The shadow it casts is an equally scrawny and pitiful rose. The rose has no face, and yet it is screaming, white noise, static, a broken radio. The jacket sleeves hang past invisible wrists, past the point where wrists should end. Chuck Bass raspberry has dessicated and wizened and shrunk up into a little freeze-dried mummy, aged before ripening, a little mummy-berry rattling around the ashtray of your skeezy older cousin’s El Camino.