Unquiet
Things

The above is a little peek at June’s scented thoughts for my lovely Midnight Stinks Patreon supporters.

Every month I take a few moments to do a bit of scentomancy: I throw open the doors of my wooden perfume cabinet, close my eyes and take a big sniff, and reach in to choose a bottle at random. I then spritz a card with the perfume, write some thoughts, and mail them all out…hoping against hope that the aromas of the perfume will have survived the travel!

This month, the selection is Rouge from Comme des Garçons.

Comme des Garçons Rouge is an odd and surprising scent, and at all not what I expected to smell from this glossy, cherry red popsicle of a bottle. It instead reminds me of an artwork by the fabulous and flamboyant Argentinian painter Leonor Fini. In Les Sorcieres, we observe five frenzied witches swarming and swooping on their broomsticks through a swirling blood-red sky. This scent mirrors these feverish sensations of airy, dizzying fizziness and couples them with a terrestrial earthiness, like herbs and leaves and things freshly dug from a garden patch. Rouge smells like an effervescent shrub (the vinegary drink, not the bushy plant. But also minus most of the vinegar) of rhubarb and beet, fiery ginger root, and floral pink pepper. A witch’s cauldron tipple that tapers to a beautiful gingery incense.

Les Sorcières makes an appearance in the pages of my book The Art of the Occult: A Visual Sourcebook for the Modern Mystic, although regrettably, you will find no mention of perfume in its accompanying caption. Oh, how I wish a publisher would contract me to write a kooky book pairing works of art with kooky perfume reviews! What a fun idea. Maybe I just need to write that book and hope that someone is interested in publishing it? I mean…that’s about as niche as niche can be, but surely that will appeal to a certain swath of people? What do you all think?

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