Unquiet
Things

An addition to my monthly reviews of new or new-to-me perfumes is that I will be sharing a fragrance that I included in my monthly marinade that I’ve been particularly reaching for throughout the month. In case you’re new to the idea of my “monthly marinade,” it’s a practice wherein I’ll grab a handful of neglected bottles from the back of my cupboard and arrange them nicely on a tray every month, so I am more likely to reach for them and wear them!

This month is Spell 125 from Papillon Artisan Perfumesis a scent entwined and imbued with deep magic, history, and ancient mystery. If I understand correctly, it is a fragrance inspired by the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the ritual and ceremony pertaining to the weighing the deceased’s heart against a feather, wherein if one passes this trial, they reach the eternal paradise of the Field of Reeds. If not, well then too bad, I guess. They probably get eaten by a monster or something. Shoulda behaved better, not taken milk from the mouths of babes or festival loaves from the gods and whatnot. I believe this is meant to be a very atmospheric scent, and while it is, I don’t know that I’m getting what the perfumer intended from it. But who’s to say whether that’s a good or bad thing if one enjoys the result? From Spell 125, I get a strange vanilla salt that’s somehow sweet and savory, bright and dusky, earthy and airy at once, evoking both terrestrial concerns and something lighter and loftier. A sweetly green herbaceous melange conjures imagery of cool aromatic, woodsy marjoram incense, an offering to household gods (I can envision clearly the canvas painting by John William Waterhouse) lit for the afternoon, the smoke cleaning and clearing the domestic spaces, and left to smolder and disperse with the windows open, on a cloudless day in early autumn. This is a fragrance which conjures the loveliest peace of mind and sense of well-being, and although I don’t yet know otherwise, I’ll hazard a guess and say it’s splendid to experience such a thing while you’re still above ground.

…and here are all of the new things I smelled in March!

Nopalera Dulce de Cuerpo smells like the night sky over water, which sounds like nothing but is actually everything, a balmy darkness that has cooled just enough, where you find yourself tilting your head back and registering, not for the first time and not without a small interior lurch, how vast and indifferent all of it is. There’s something agave-bright and boozy in here, a kind of milky agave-adjacent liqueur that has a celebrity’s name attached to it, something that comes in a bottle shaped like a ruffled stiletto or a lacy skull, that you wouldn’t seek out but that works perfectly in this moment because this whole moment is a little outside your life. You walked past the lurid neon dregs of a party a half mile down the beach to get here. You’re wearing a sample of a fragrance you wouldn’t normally reach for. The drink in your hand was whatever they were featuring at the bar. None of it is quite yours, and all of it is exactly right, somehow, for this time and space, a little bit outside time and space. Underneath, the fragrance is vanilla and resin and something softly earthy and powdery, but it’s all filtered through the mist of the night tide, through salt and dark water and the musk of warm air that has been swirling over the ocean. Thoughts arrive and pass by like clouds over the moon. The sky, enormous. You, small and warm and human, all of your human grievances and desires and sadness and mania and wonder, which is fine, which is everything, which is all there is. Which is all you get.

Meo Fuscuni Last Season smells like what lives a bit deeper underneath the forest floor, the private teeming dark where mycelium threads wind through soil and small creatures conduct their business and pleasure and what-have-you under stones. Turn over a log, and there is a damp organic exhale, a little sneezy-shocking, a little sweet, something that was quietly happening without you and will resume the moment you put the log back. There is almost a campfire quality to it, not fire exactly, not the flame or the heat, but rather the ash settling back into earth, smoke absorbed into whorled bark and cool moss, and the soft bodies of things. This is the world Rien Poortvliet painted with such weird, goodnatured curious devotion, gnome lore, the integration of decay and domesticity, a hearth fragrant with leaf rot and good dark earth, a home where the worms are neighbors and the beetles are confidants and the mold on the rafters has been there longer than anyone can remember and belongs there, it practically holds the place together! This particular gnome has a tender heart and a melancholy streak and knows all the words to all the Cavetown and Haley Heynderickx songs and probably writes poetry about the smell of rain in autumn, the tremulous silhouette of a lone, dandelion on a late summer evening.

Poesie The Astral Library collection…

Always Time for Tea Beatrix Potter by way of folk art — a gingham potholder, a pot of something plum dark and berry-stained sitting on top of it, the arrangement a little crooked and entirely loved. Bramble and black tea deeply overbrewed, rambunctious and purple, the berry bleeding into the cloth, into the warmth. A wolf in a housedress who has made her peace with the housedress and also with being a wolf, surrounded by the good clutter of a life fully lived, none of it matching.

Bookish Warm vanilla between old dry leather, softened just enough by something sweetly human, a breath, a margin note, the soft powdery dark of a thought had once and never retrieved. Something that was alive in another century and left its mark between the pages. The library that is also a labyrinth that is also a storied digestive system, paper as skin, marginalia as scar tissue, every life ever lived inside it still faintly present, still warm, still giving off the slow elegiac sweetness of things that have been deeply, thoroughly read.

Library Ghost A marshmallow that exists the way the TARDIS exists mid-arrival, flickering in and out of solidity, present and then not, sweet and then just the memory of sweet. Whatever warmth it had was used up in trying to be seen; what remains is powdery and faintly mineral, cool as a waxen moon melting at the edges, the sugared impression of something soft that may or may not still be there if you turn around quickly enough. Still going about its business. Still almost there.

Myself Invisible Cool green and soapy-powdery in the way violets are soapy-powdery, which is the way the inside of a great aunt’s compact is soapy-powdery, which is the way a pressed flower found in a book you didn’t know you owned is soapy-powdery, but the green underneath is damp and dark, ferns through floorboards, moss reclaiming carved stone. A handful of violets held by something just out of view, a door in a hedge, the back of a wardrobe that is just coats and cold and someone else’s life pressed into wool, not Narnia, just the dark and the waiting and the green coming up through everything anyway, patient as a blackbird’s shadow frozen in the morning’s snow.

Through Dangers Untold Carnation bright and clove-sharp, almost brash with it, dragonblood resinous and red underneath, smoke and old earth and something that has been burning a long time. Bold and a little sunburned, the smell of someone who rides toward things rather than away, who has a sword and knows the name of every horse she has ever loved.

Yet to be Written Cold air with something abstract and sweet underneath that keeps not quite becoming itself, smoke from a fire not yet lit, an unfilled space that is also somehow full — a small sharp thing, a comic-tragic sting in the tail of sentiment. A future that was promised and hasn’t arrived, which is different from a future that was never promised at all. A door that was supposed to open. The inside of a chestnut before it opens. November as a feeling, a lifestyle, a graveyard where the ground hasn’t yet been broken.

Hilde Soliani Golosissimo A massive cocoa-dusted angel food cake, the kind of cake that served as a ballgown skirt for the cheap plastic doll jammed down the center of it (do they still do those kind of cakes for little girls birthdays? I loved them so much ) whose layers are stuffed with thick-almost-chewy chocolate mousse, aggressively strides up to you, slaps you in the face, breathlessly makes out with you, and steals your wallet. (Luckily for my wallet I had a 15% coupon for scentsplit.)

Eris Parfums Mother’s Milk

Sharon Doubiago wrote, “My mother is a poem I’ll never be able to write, though everything I write is a poem to my mother.”

Elaine gave me this: the love of beautiful things and gorgeous scents, the obsessive appreciation for art and baubles, and because we never spent time together obsessing over these things, I often feel like every perfume review I write is another poem for her. Mother’s Milk is the kind of fragrance I would have brought to her. Challenging and charming, like she was.

Milk bread soaked in rosewater, shokupan-soft and faintly floral. Something salty and slightly sour underneath, skin and dust on a windowsill in afternoon light. The rose absorbed into the milk, bready and close, and a vanilla that’s less sweet than earthy and buttery, sebaceous almost, warm and not exactly feral, but rather a soft purr. A muffled softness with an unresolved, swift bright electric thing reaching through it, grasping something, anything, everything, and never having it. Elaine is in that elusive thing.

Elaine was a depressive, manic, recovering alcoholic, twenty years sober when she died, an animal hoarder, a woman who somehow held down a job and paid rent (I will forever scratch my head at this, because she just never seemed like an “adult” to me), and charmed everyone she met while remaining a complete mystery to me. People were drawn to her. I was traumatized by her craziness and chaos. But I loved her and all the mystery of her, and I am haunted by the question of why she was the way she was, which I will never get to ask her now.

This perfume smells nothing like her, but she’s everywhere in it.

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?