Unquiet
Things

Heretic Nosferatu As I have been wearing this fragrance, I am struck by how nothing seems quite linear about it, how delicately “outside of time” it feels. I realized it reminded me of the feeling I have after waking up and trying to recall the dream I was just having. I am half-here, half-there, both places and neither at once. Nosferatu is like that–fragments from last night’s dreams, scrawled in the grey dawn before they fade: the moon’s reflection in cooling bathwater. Soft fog, carved from shadow, packed with frost. A brittle wisp of dried lilac, phantasmal at twilight, fragile rustles of the restless dead. Storm-struck stone, its hollow sparking echo dimly illuminating a subterranean cavern, ghost light lingering between vespers, dawn, and never. The creeping moss of midnight rains veining the marble tears of weeping saints.

Pineward Borealis paints a stark landscape of frost-encrusted pines and barren rock, a scent so austere it verges on ascetic. It’s relentless in its portrayal of a world where survival, not beauty, is paramount. The fragrance opens with a glacial gust that scours the senses, carrying with it the sharp, mentholated breath of winter winds. This initial surge slowly gives way to the scent of ancient conifers, their woody essence concentrated by the cold into something almost medicinal in its intensity. As Borealis evolves, there are hints of bitter herbs and roots, their astringency amplified by the unforgiving chill, like sparse vegetation clinging to life in frozen soil. A fleeting, ghostly floral note emerges briefly, a spectral echo of summer long past before it’s subsumed again by the pervading bitterness and cold. Underneath it all runs a current of salinity and ozone, evoking vast, turbulent seas and the isolating expanse of arctic tundra. Unyielding and austere, its bitter intensity never softens, but persists with the tenacity of the raw, indifferent environment it evokes.

Zoologist Macaque (Yuzu Edition) I’ve spent countless YouTube hours watching travelers wind their way through Japan’s remote mountains in search of hidden onsen. Macaque conjures what I imagine in those moments before slipping into these natural hot springs: that sharp intake of breath as mountain air fills the lungs, a bracing brightness that stings like citrus without any trace of sweetness. Then comes the dry herbal/woody medicinal presence of cypress wood warming in the sun, and finally, the contemplative drift of incense carried on thermal currents. Its smoke is different here – softened and diffused by rising steam until it becomes almost tactile, like silk suspended in air. There’s something sacred in this solitude of smoke and steam, something that recalls the aftermath of a hot shower but earthier, more ancient – less about soap than the quiet ritual of purification, with just a whisper of mineral-rich air. The lasting impression is of warmth remembered rather than felt, like late afternoon sun lingering after the day has begun to cool.

Francesca Bianchi Voluptuous Oud First impressions of Voluptuous Oud are like opening the door to a grand parlour – a brief, sharp intake of leather and wood that quickly softens into something far more gracious. The oud here isn’t the fierce creature of perfume lore, but something more measured, like old leather chairs that have absorbed decades of warmth and welcome. Each breath reveals new facets of comfort – buttery undertones, traces of wood worn smooth by time, the particular richness that comes from allowing things their full measure of ripeness. This is a scent that understands the difference between abundance and excess. It settles into its own nature with quiet assurance, offering the kind of comfort found in well-loved spaces where every element has found its proper place through long association. Everything arranges itself just so, creating a world of perfect comfort and refinement – until you notice that somewhere, somehow, the shadows have begun to lengthen in impossible directions, vetiver’s bitter fingers grasping at the edges of what might be more than shadows. Yet what lingers longest is that buttery sweetness, rich and golden as an afternoon dream of darker honey, its lushness tempered by threads of burnished, brooding vanilla and sandalwood that render it less confectionery and more contemplative. This is precisely the sort of artful, beguiling fragrance one reaches for when they wish to romanticize their life, those days when a simple afternoon begs to be transformed into something more mysterious and meaningful. It reminds me irresistibly of Saki’s short story “The Open Window,” where a young girl transforms an unremarkable afternoon into something extraordinary through sheer force of imagination. Like the best storytellers, it creates its own reality – perfectly composed, utterly convincing, and just possibly not quite what it seems.

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Nevertheless, She Persisted is all warmth and edge, a richness cut with a chipped blade, a silver that’s earned its patina, illuminated by a cresting shard of dawn. The scent blooms like resin warmed by just enough light to see by, bittersweet, gentle as prayer, steady as stone. It moves like metallic honey, like quicksilver caught in amber – inexorable and incandescent, a sliver of sunshine given weight and anointed with purpose. Beneath its surface lies something unflinching and resolute, like steel threaded through silk, like granite veined with gold, like a sword of thunder wrapped in a ballgown.

4160 Tuesdays Shazam! Not all observatories are built of steel and glass. Some are carved from ancient wood and wisdom, where mechanical planets trace their paths through the perpetual twilight of desert mysteries. Here in the thin mountain air, elevation sharpens the senses: first the bright bite of altitude, then the way spices catch in the throat like distant light. Time dissolves in the dark. What begins as calculation—the precise geometry of pepper’s gentle ignition and austere cedarwood gears—softens into something warmer, more profound. Each celestial model points inward, finding its own true north in bitter cocoa and burnished amber. Brass orbits wheel overhead at the angle of eternity while censers trace their own paths below, drawing cosmic dust and incense into the undertow of old magics. In the smoke and spice of these shadowed alignments, the machinery of night turns ever inward.

Miskeo Parfum Épices immediately called to mind Audition’s Asami, that icon of patient malice and elegant vengeance, trading her torture kit for a spice collection. She conjures a pristine hostess in her leather apron, each pocket meticulously lined with strategically curated powders and preparations: cardamom’s strange cooling caress, coriander’s numbing bite. Her cedarwood spoon dissects the mixture with surgical precision, stirring sweet-sharp resins and honeyed smoke into something exquisitely lethal. When the spices settle, they leave behind a slow dreamy surrender of soft musk and patchouli’s eerie earthiness – even the deadliest hostess exacting her long game of vengeance knows the art of perfect measure.

Finally trying a few from Filippo Sorcinelli, here are my thoughts…

Notre-Dame 15.4.2019 is what happens when the witchly spirit of venomous anisette, honeyed plums, and midnight-plucked flowers from Christian Dior’s Poison decides to possess a gingerbread man, wrapping itself in a crust of dark spices and unholy sugar.

Basilica of Assisi If Heinrich Lossow’s painting “The Sin” got a modern perfume brief, but plot twist – the nun is doing laundry, and instead of a garden variety horny priest, she’s being visited by a biblically accurate angel, all burning eyes and razor wings and divine perversity. It’s giving Clovis Trouille’s ecstatic scandalous nuns but make it fresh linens and benediction. A slutty nun chypre laundry musk that somehow makes perfect sense. Sacred and profane, bleached and debauched.

BPAL x Haute Macabre The Veil Falls Like Leaves I wore The Veil Falls Like Leaves earlier in the week, and at first, it was very much that seasonal dead leaves/softly decomposing autumn harvest element that BPAL does so well. But by the end of the day, I was like, “What am I wearing that makes me smell like a posh art gallery weirdo?” So I built a little review around that, hehehehe.

The Veil Falls Like Leaves (leaves, vanilla, and leather) Found your local bog witch at the gallery fundraiser, trailing damp, earthy autumn leaves in her wake, each step releasing whispers of sweet autumnal decay and sour, earthy fungi. The wild things clean up nice but never quite lose their feral heart – you smell it in the manky, softly rotting vegetation that lingers beneath her gallery-appropriate veneer. This is autumn’s sophisticated glow-up, where decaying harvest and sweet-tempered spice mingle in the air. As the night deepens, something softer emerges: traces of expensive, elegant leather and fancy high-end shampoo that smells of earthy, loamy vanillagf, like a well-worn jacket catching the scent of damp, moss-tendriled hair, adding an unexpected intimacy to all that earthen wisdom.

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