2026
May Perfume Reviews
categories: scents & sensibility
I was traveling for most of the month, so I didn’t have much time or energy to try things, but here are my musings on five fragrances I sampled this past May…!
Witch NY Basil-ica A not-nearly-long-enough playlist on a Sunday morning, Haley Heynderickx and Cosmo Sheldrake trading sweet, playful verse in a sunlit patch of floor. The tardigrade in its shrubbery, with its little dappled patch of moss, the bug collector scooping the centipede out the window, carefully easing the praying mantis priest into a jam jar. A small disturbance of anise, sharp and green and dark, and then the green rushes in through the window, tangy lemon balm and the acrid green resin of unripe fruit leaves and clean, crisp cedar, a breeze of honeyed effervescence gone flat, warm and golden and slightly sleepy. The sound a fern makes when it uncurls, a soft incantation for rainy windowsills, a potion brewed in a thimble, a love letter from the slug to the fruiting vine.
Heretic Queen Of The Night Honeyed night blooms open pale against absolute black, a luminous vanilla moment, sweet and strange and fleeting the way a face emerges from darkness before the darkness rushes in. Vetiver, dry and dusky and gritty, the black sand of dreams. The mortuary scent of jasmine, a bitter shiver of arsenical wallpapers. The scent of the thing that presides over the voice that whispered your name, and there was no one there, which is worse than if there had been someone. The road that looks different on the way back because something has shifted that you cannot name or locate or defend against. The cat that peers into the shadows and sees what you cannot. The hour between 3 and 4am. The goddess of objectless dread.
Pearfat Parfum Sister Hildegard Thin cold air and clover and wildflower sweetness, morning dew on stone, the sort of bright bright, expansive, anything-is-possible morning that makes you want to set out with everything you own in a small bundle on a stick. A small figure against a large landscape, stepping off into something with no idea what that something is. Then: a door in the meadow, and beyond it woodsmoke and char and animal warmth, pine resin and ash, the dark beyond the firelight pressing in close. The flames a waystation, the meadow a small window just behind you in the distance… but you are not the same person who left it, you’ll never be that young or that bright or that foolish again. But you’ve learned you can light this fire of glow and illumination for every version of yourself you encounter along the journey.
Flâner Yakisugi Wood Incense in a cypress enclosure, herbal smokiness that is not now-smoke but then-smoke, absorbed into the walls over many generations. Resinous and pencil-dark and cool, a bitter astringency, dusty-dried to a husk of itself, the aromatics of a space long tended. The knowing of which wood to burn and when and why, a knowing internal and undemanding, unhurried, uncommodified. Then the world got very loud and very fast, and people forgot how silence felt, and the how in the feeling was a healing, and someone noticed the forgetting and put a price on it, because people were so harried and hollowed out they would pay anything to remember what standing still felt like. Two hundred and sixty-nine dollars, and it doesn’t even include a sound bath or a breathwork session or an adaptogen bar, just a metaphorical cedar door wrapped in a mountain fog of the then-smoke, which became a now-amenity.
Syd Botanica Butterfly Tamer A History of British Butterflies, Morris, The Reverend Francis Orpen, 1864; forest green cloth binding, gilt-stamped butterflies on the spine, hand-colored plates behind tissue guards, the smell of a volume that has been handled with reverence and also with muddy field boots, airy and ozone-tinged, the mineral shiver of pre-rain shrouding delicate papery grasses and flowering herbs, pale gold at the tips, cool green at the root, something floral but not quite flower, the honeyed dust of dried chamomile, the ghost of a garden in late summer. The slightly breathless Victorian naturalist earnestness of a parson who looked closely at small winged things, who catalogued every county and date and friend who once glimpsed one in some hedgerow, who recorded with equal gravity the testimony of Mr. H. Sims, certain he saw one Silver-washed Fritillary near Norwich on the 24th of August 1810, who struck at it with a forceps and missed, and the testimony of J. C. Dale, Esq., certain he saw one Purple Emperor settled on some rushes in Cambridgeshire in July 1818, wings half-expanded toward the sun, and the diary entry of a Miss Eulalia Cramm of Shropshire, who recorded with great excitement the appearance of a Velvet Obscura on her windowsill, though she could not be entirely certain it was not a very large moth.
Bonus! I do a sort of review for a body lotion over on Instagram…!
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