Unquiet
Things

BEAUTIFUL DEATH from bloodmilk x BPAL
Aubrey Beardsley’s most depraved illustrations liquefied into something exquisitely quaffable. Jade and amethyst, narcotic and fatal. Shadowed mirrors tarnished and strange; a chandelier drowning in cobwebs; spider-bitten, bruised blackberry dread coiling low in your guts. Medieval torture devices materialize unbidden—Catherine wheels and iron maidens, promises of torment a perverse allure. The aromatic green menace haunting libertines and bohemians, emerald-tinted Victorian wallpapers slowly poisoning sleepers and dreamers beneath verdant, elegantly ruinous patterns. A harbinger of malefic ecstasy, a finger dipped in something that shouldn’t be touched, mustn’t be tasted, yet somehow cannot be refused.

BHELENA from bloodmilk x BPAL
A tableau vivant, marionette birch brooms sweeping in the sun past the face of a corroded moon; tears of resin wept by pine, coniferous shadows through stained glass windows, fragments of jewel-toned light escaping from behind black lattice. The peculiar, electric luminosity preceding a devastating storm—air charged with anticipation and dread simultaneously. Loïe Fuller’s serpentine dance as captured by Koloman Moser in watercolor and ink; her golden wings catching impossible light as she transforms from mortal to archangel before transfixed audiences. A wine-dark languor sweetened with just enough honey to make you mistake midnight for dawn.

Jouissance Parfums La Bague D’O A fluid-filled bag, a saline breast implant, as vessel for a single rose. An anemic rose getting a transfusion from a fainting couch. A human furniture type of installation, like someone standing naked, stock still, throat tipped all the way back, a lone rose arranged in their mouth. In an utterly sterile gallery.

Bath & Body Works Guilty As Fig Fig appearing as quick pencil sketch, half-erased; floating vanilla blossom clouds dissolving in May breezes; soft laundry musks in cotton tees worn threadbare from a hundred gentle cycles; the ghost of last summer’s jasmine tangling through the latticework of dreams; cyan swimming pool polaroids, chlorine filtered and faded.

Arcana Wildcraft Yggdrasil is a scent that immediately called to mind a passage I’ll never forget from Robert MacFarlane’s The Wild Places: “All travelers to wild places will have felt some version of this, a brief blazing perception of the world’s disinterest. In small measures it exhilarates. But in full form it annihilates.” An exhilarating, annihilating coniferous expanse. Primeval pillars connecting earth to heavens; green darkness sleeping, dreaming, without witness, beyond time; crystallized needles trapped in amber tears dripping slowly for millennia; smoke suspended in frozen-canopied cathedral stillness, heartwood rings marking winters too numerous to count; the forest’s indifference, wilderness continuing its slow communion with eternity while you stand mute and temporary and already forgotten.

Armani Privé Bois d’Encens: A peppery craggle of stones where incense once burned or might burn yet, vetiver roots drinking the ghost of unburnt smoke, cedar planks weathered by ceremonies that left no ash, flint poised, tinder arranged, the space between intention and flame where autumn’s last bitter breath meets winter’s sterile promise, austere echoes creaking through lofty spaces that know neither warmth nor chill, dusty light filtered through vacant windows, fresh in the way that morning air tastes sharp and sour before the sun softens its edges, the potential for incense hovering like a prayer never spoken aloud. Though at first glance, it might not be immediately apparent, Todd Hido’s photography comes to mind when I smell this – an atmosphere of ordinary spaces shedding their daytime purpose to become threshold places, a pause in time between being and non-being, a thing neither fully present nor absent.

The Birthday Cake Collection from Poesie…

Anne Carrot ribbons from a vintage peeler; cinnamon bark cracking under fingernails stained with garden soil, cream cheese clouds drifting heavily across late October skies, cake batter coating the back of a crooked wooden spoon, the vegetal beta carotene sweetness of autumn afternoons preserved in butterfat and spice.

Emma Scarlet seeds caught between perfect teeth; bloody berry stains bleeding through white cloth napkins, cake layers light as tissue paper; rouged lips brushing bone china; crumbs scattered across tatted lace.

Juliet Cool, piney cardamom pods drowning in honey, an amber jar hurled and shattered across old ceramic tiles in a fit of pique, golden liquid pooling languorously in afternoon light; bitter tree nuts cracking between strong deft fingers, shells scattered underfoot, too warm and drowsy to care, mahogany armoires and sandalwood chests exhaling their precious oils into scorching rooms, siesta stretching endlessly beneath shuttered windows, a surrender to the shadow of the sun stretching across weathered terracotta walls.

Mathilda Fudgy coffee thick and dark; sandalwood incense drifting from small altars, a dusting of dark, aromatic grounds offered up as prayer, the sharp and bitter and sweet and unctuous drawing richer smoke from burning wood. Private, intensely personal ritual, the intimacy of small devotions.

Scout Perfume as lesbian pulp fiction blurb: Sharon was a good girl who loved innocent coconut cake… until she met Veronica and her jar of sinful candied cherries! What happens when the innocence of this sugar-sweet babe meets those luscious cherry-red lips? One taste of those syrupy, brightened fruits and Sharon discovers hungers she never knew existed. Will she return to her vanilla world of church socials and proper ladies… or surrender to the sticky-sweet decadence that Veronica’s red fingernails promise? A torrid tale of confectionery corruption and the dangerous women who seduce with sugar!

Burberry Hero Parfum Intense unfolds like dusty amber tobacco nestled in a mahogany humidor, cedar oils so intense they conjure a romance novel Fabio carved entirely from fragrant wood; golden resin pooling in the grain of his impossible biceps, abs you could grate cheese on if they weren’t made of aromatic cedar, pectorals broad enough to land a helicopter if they weren’t so heavily forested with sawdust, a sprinkle of black pepper like errant chest hairs poking through his unlaced pirate blouse. Thighs like ancient oak trunks offering not seduction but the domestic comfort of a Snuggie, strong arms thick as timber promising Calgon-take-me-away escape, the performative masculinity of rippling wooden muscles dissolving into something unexpectedly nurturing, pipe tobacco sweetness without the acrid burn, fragrant wood shavings soft enough to curl up against those carved shoulders. Fragrance as guilty pleasure romance novel, the kind you read alone in Cheeto-stained sweatpants: Johanna Lindsey’s never published ‘My Lumber Lord’s Love Log.’

Incense Rori feels like building an altar to the temple of dreams – not that it smells like any of these things individually, but the way someone in a dream can be your mother even if they look nothing like her, the golden balsamic woodiness conjures walnut and mulberry and rosewood; the creamy gentle spice suggests whipped orange blossom honey, marigold-infused sandalwood attar, ink perfumed with clove and honey and musk. Applied before sleep and still whispering the next afternoon, it becomes a nightly ritual for dream incubation, precious enough to justify its price not for special occasions but because sleep itself is the special occasion, the potent pantheon of dreams deserving its own sacred preparations.

The discovery set from Air & Weather

Spilled Milk What happens when confection becomes performance art? Elaborate sugar sculptures dissolving under cascading cream; crystalline roses and spun-sugar ballerinas melting into sweet rivers, froth of sweetened milk cascading down intricately carved faces, delicate fondant flowers and buttercream architecture liquefying into pools of pure sweetness, warm dairy – heavy cream, whole milk, half-and-half – turning ornate edible masterpieces into sticky syrup.

28 Flower What does morning taste like to a garden? Cool rain drumming on greenhouse glass; greenery sap stuck to garden snippers left out overnight, wet soil between bare toes during morning garden rounds, the sharp green snap of stems cut too close to the root, spring water collected in terra cotta saucers placed under dripping eaves.

Linden Can an ineffable thing also be a platonic ideal? Tissue-thin blossoms suspended in pale morning light; bees’ dreams of endlessly circling invisible nectar sources, spring greenery touched with the faintest breath of honey, petals so delicate and precisely what linden should smell like that you can only point and say “there, that.” It’s everything it should be, and only just that.

Raleigh Gold What if opulence came in small, chewy packages? King Midas’ dried fruit mix spilling from golden bowls; dates and figs heavy with ancient sweetness, walnuts touched by gilded fingers, every dried apricot crystallized into amber, treasured delicacies hoarded in marble-lined pantries where sunlight never fades the jewel-toned preserved fruits.

Bon Parfumeur Myrrh Shadow 403 smells like the Crypt Keeper’s signature ice cream flavor, an inexplicable combination of sour medicinal powders and resinous, demulcent sweetness. Apothecary ice cream served in dusty parlors where softly spiced cola syrup was dispensed by skeletal hands, bittersweet olde-timey remedies dispensed, ironically, in a dusty tomb lined with crumbling marble shelves and cobweb-draped medicine bottles, stone walls saturated with the balsamic phantasmagoria of centuries-old incense. It vaguely recalls the whispery smoke and mysterious veils of Annick Goutal Myrrh Ardente – except Myrrh Shadow 403 emerged from the freezer creamier, sweeter, colder: mystical tree resins churned into midnight, ghoulish horror host gelato.

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