Unquiet
Things

One Day Jasmine Tea I didn’t expect to fall in love with a green tea scent in the year 2025, but I think that is what just happened. I’ve spent years avoiding green tea fragrances, having mentally filed them away with air fresheners and fancy dish soap, the sanitized accord of late-90s department store counters or the chemical approximation haunting hotel lobbies. One Day Jasmine Tea opens with that unmistakable aroma of a jasmine green tea steeped just a minute too long. There’s an emotional precipice there— an elegant pleasure on the verge of becoming bitter, bleak, and brooding on the tongue. But…not quite.

This is the scent of Uncle Iroh’s teashop after hours, the quiet moments when he sits alone, brewing one final cup while dust motes drift through evening light. The jasmine here isn’t some overly sweet and sultry floral but a stubborn, complex presence that blooms with the same quiet certainty as Iroh’s wisdom. “The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all,” he might murmur, though I think that’s actually from Mulan. There’s a transparency to the composition that cuts through any lingering cloying or animalic concerns – a herbaceous clarity like the mind clearing before a moment of mediation. Something earthen anchors the lightness, the way roots hold soil against rain, preventing erosion without calling attention to their essential work. Between these elements weaves an oolong note, a citrusy orchid thread that connects high and low like the lightning Iroh teaches Zuko to redirect – neither diminishing nor amplifying the current, simply guiding it to where it needs to go.

The fragrance stays steadfast, refusing sentimentality and yet somehow feels like an embrace that contains multitudes. It carries Iroh’s complexity—grief for his son, hope for his nephew, and the particular wisdom that comes only after you’ve lost everything and rebuilt from scratch. It manages to embody everything that made Uncle Iroh a steadying hand on the tiller, regardless of whether you first met him as a child or discovered him as an adult seeking comfort in animated wisdom. When evening falls on the Jasmine Dragon, what remains is the ghost of petals suspended in cooling liquid, a clean mineral afterimage lingering on skin; an echo of a proverb that only reveals its truth years after you first heard it.

It’s definitely not just “hot leaf juice.”

RE: Francesca Bianchi Sex and the Sea In Sex and the Sea–the perfumer wants us to imagine an intimate encounter at the beach (no thanks, lady, that sounds gross and dumb), but I needn’t have worried. This bright, giggly floral perfume is what happens when a Bath & Body Works sampler collides with a John Anster Fitzgerald fairy painting—a canvas promising Dionysian chaos that ultimately delivers nothing more than mild corporate ennui. Imagine a scene teetering on the brink of jubilation. Fairy figures hover like static electricity, poised for wild revelry but perpetually stuck in performance review mode. They look ready to erupt—tiny wings trembling with potential pandemonium, side-eyes loaded with maximum sass—yet somehow remain frozen in bureaucratic limbo. The kind of gathering that threatens spectacular chaos but settles for awkward small talk and tepid canapés.

Mimosa unfurls like the most passively aggressive bath product imaginable—powdery and sweet, that specific floral note that whispers “corporate compliance” instead of actual excitement. It’s the scent equivalent of mandatory team-building: technically pleasant, fundamentally forgettable. The pineapple note screeches like the most aggressive body spray top note—high-pitched, sharp enough to make your ears ring. A tiny giggle promises excitement but quickly fizzles. Underneath, a sour green vanilla stretches out—not quite cucumber, not quite sweet, just that weird vegetal edge that makes you go, “Huh. I don’t even see any cucumbers on this spread.”

From the concept to the execution I don’t think this one was ever going to be for me, but in the end it’s somehow even worse. Definitely several giggles short of a rager.

Arcana Wildcraft Love is Legal smells like a raisin soaked for a thousand years in demerara syrup, lit on fire on a sparking pyre of aromatic woods and sizzling cardamom pods, and burnt as an offering to Anck-su-namun. The sweetness isn’t confectionary but funerary—exactly what might have sealed a pharaoh’s tomb while mourners wailed outside.

The smoke hangs thick, refusing to dissipate around copper bowls of burning resins. There’s a peculiar duality here, twin capacities for terror and tenderness—first the sacred knowledge that bodies must burn to release souls, then the careful preservation of what remains.

There’s that scene in The Mummy where sticky black substances transform Imhotep’s lover into something neither living nor dead. This fragrance captures that exact moment when these materials become vessels for dark miracles. The woods don’t just smoke but consume themselves completely, a miniature celestial death. We are only alive because our sun is burning out, after all—and this perfume knows it, celebrates it, wears that knowledge like an amulet against the throat.

The House of Brandt’s London Fog is some spectral cousin to fog—something that exists in the otherworldly luminosity of Agnes Pelton’s “Winter, 1933.” The perfume pulses with the same geometric abstractions that hover in Pelton’s misty void, not the creamy bergamot-laced Earl Grey of marketing copy, but a cold, misty-creamy radiance emanating from some unseen source rather than actual tea or milk.

Imagine if fog machines at every art school party since 1987 had been secretly emitting tiny particles of Pelton’s visionary essence instead of glycerin—a milky bath of fog that somehow has its own consciousness. The promised vanilla isn’t gourmand or even particularly sweet—it’s the idea of vanilla translated through some cosmic filter, the way the visionary artist rendered natural phenomena as pulsing light forms floating in electric blue atmospheres. The promised lavender exists only as a faint purple outline around a gossamer cloud, a geometric frame containing something vast and dreamy within it.

The scent creates a numinous space around the wearer, a sanctuary of vapor and light. Whispers of lemony citrus thread through lactonic vanilla, while soft sandalwood provides not structure but a luxurious dissipation—a comforting dissolve into soft, meditative disembodiment that feels both intimate and infinite at once.

Poesie Persephone Rising In a parallel cosmos where abduction never happened, Persephone Rising emerges untethered from underworld shadows. Not the reluctant queen but the goddess who chose her own ascension.
Pomegranate here isn’t the fateful seeds of captivity but bright explosive bursts—a celebration of life’s vibrancy, the scattered rubies of liberation. The sugared violets don’t whisper secrets of darkness but instead sparkle with morning dew on petals never touched by netherworld air. These aren’t funereal flowers but triumphant blooms stretching toward perpetual spring. The sandalwood and vanilla orchid create not the suffocating luxury of an underground palace but the earthy-sweet foundation of a goddess coming into her own power—the scent of divinity unfurling without interruption. No halfway existence, no divided seasons. Something luminous and gossamer dances at the edges. Not the weight of a seduction that reshaped mythology, but the buoyant radiance of a goddess rising through her own agency. The body electric, carefree and unfettered, never bargained away for six seeds of compromise—playful notes of someone whose brow was never creased by the solemnity of sorrow. This is Persephone complete, unbifurcated—spring that never learned winter’s name.

Poesie Hades What becomes of the god of the underworld when his story lacks its central theft? This fragrance answers with quiet subversion. There’s something contemplative here, almost monastic—clean yet somehow ancient. Here is Hades who never ascended to claim what wasn’t his. Not the predatory fog of abduction but a crystalline solitude—the cool, expansive emptiness of a throne room perpetually missing what it never knew to want. Something in this scent carries the contradiction of sunlight penetrating deep forest shadows—warmth that shouldn’t exist in darkness but somehow does. Not the stereotypical gloom of the underworld but a calm, steady light uncomplicated by possession or desire. Not passion but the unexpected vulnerability of a god eternally untouched. There’s tenderness here, and a strange innocence preserved by isolation. The boundary between realms remains unviolated—not a portal for theft and trauma but a liminal space respected, left uncrossed. This fragrance holds the dignity of restraint, the hushed sacred quality of desire never acted upon. No pomegranate stains here—only the translucent stillness of a domain complete unto itself, ruled by a god who never learned to yearn beyond his borders. Between these two fragrances lies the negative space of a myth unmade—the sweet relief of a story never needing to be rewritten, sanitized, or reclaimed. Just two deities, whole within themselves, existing in separate completeness across an unviolated boundary.

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab The Dregs of a Bottle of Vanilla Extract is what happens when you abandon your witchcraft supplies in the garden during a thunderstorm and return to find something unexpected has birthed itself. The remnants of Snake Oil’s characteristic molasses-thick vanilla incense (this is not meant to be a Snake Oil spin-off as far as I know, but that’s what I smell!) are here, but they’ve been washed with rain and submerged in soil until they’ve gone feral. That first breath is unmistakable petrichor – that post-storm mineral tang with its peculiar astringency that normally makes my nose wrinkle in distaste – but here it doesn’t outstay its welcome. Instead, it transforms, pulling the sweetness of vanilla back from the brink of excess and anchoring it to something more elemental. What begins as two opposing forces—decadent vanilla luxury versus earthy, rain-soaked austerity—eventually melds into something that feels like sweet, damp secrets buried under fallen leaves, waiting patiently to be unearthed.

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