Well, my move has been pushed back a week, so I am peeking into the blog here to share some of the scents I have smelled over the past month. After I am moved in, let’s say maybe the second or third week of April, I will check back in with a house tour and some Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab reviews!
DS & Durga’s Bowmakers is lovely and weird and I want to bathe in it. Bowmakers is all cool, peculiar woods, maybe cypress and cedar, a fleeting leatheriness, and what feels to me like the synthetic woody cozy ambery muskiness of ISO E super. This is how I imagine the scent of a Scandinavian minimalist YouTube lifestyle vlogger’s cozy 400 square foot apartment in wintertime. Specifically chosen sandalwood candles in amber apothecary jars, a very aesthetically pleasing and strategically placed tube sweet almond and musk hand cream, hundred-year-old but well-cared aromatic hard-wood floors. A tiny capsule wardrobe displayed prominently on a coat rack, where a thrifted leather jacket in excellent condition hangs for guests to admire, the fragrance of which mingles with a chilled early morning breeze gusting from the open windows while they’re airing out their bedroom as part of their 5 AM morning routine that they are currently filming for their subscribers.
Vanille Cannelle from E. Coudray is as if the labdanum and bergamot aspects of a classic chypre met up with the balsamic, resinous warmth of a vintage amber-y perfume like Opium. Swoony old-world allure and romance! I believe this is super discontinued.
I would love to see the movie that inspired Dolls from Moth and Rabbit but I am having a hard time getting my hands on it, so I can’t say whether or not this fragrance in any way conjures the essence or spirit of the film, its characters, or its story. Dolls is vaguely sweet, in a stovetop simple syrup made with water and white sugar kind of way, somewhat powdery in a dusty violet candy way, and gently floral, as in the floral notes that come in the form of blossoms from a flowering tree sort of way. Combine the delicacy and fleeting characteristics of these mild, mellow elements with ylang ylang’s rubbery musk and you do get a bit of a plastic doll head scent. Although I don’t know if the avant-garde film inspiration even had any dolls in it, so I could be reaching there.
I will tell you that I was wearing this scent while reading Catriona Ward’s new book Sundial and Dolls makes me think of one of the books main characters, Rob, a suburban housewife who is just trying to make a normal life for her two daughters. Rob senses with growing horror a chilling and evolving darkness and in her eldest daughter, Callie. Desperate for a solution for this child with whom she struggles to connect and doesn’t actually even like very much, Rob journeys with Callie to her childhood home, Sundial, in the middle of the Mojave desert. Shocking secrets are revealed gradually, nothing here is as it seems or as you expect, and once you think you’ve got the story straight, your expectations are subverted and turned upside down and inside out. This is an intensely brilliant, brutal, breathless tale that kept me guessing right up until the end. So this ended up more of a book review than a perfume review but Dolls is a scent of someone going to drastic measures while maintaining a facade of normalcy, and you can almost smell how heartless they are going to need to be in the realization that this scent is all window dressing with no heart or soul inside.
Do you want to smell like a queer feminist dark academia anime fairy tale with dangerous duels, creepy cryptic Greek chorus shadowpuppets, trippy plot details, gorgeous imagery and bombastic symbolism? With notes of lush rambling rose, zesty, herbaceous lemon verbena, and luminous white tea leaves, Alkemia Perfume’s The Lover Tells of the Rose will scratch this highly specific itch for you. Which is to say: the weirdos who get it, get it. And those who don’t, don’t.
Undergrowth from Rook Perfumes. Imagine the acrid smoke and smolder of a peaty whiskey and the antiseptic minty chlorinated burn of an off-brand mouthwash. Now stir it up with a half-melted lime freezy pop. Gosh. This is bafflingly terrible.
Comme des Garçons Monocle Hinokiis mildly terpenic, peppery cypress, stiff black waxy leather, and that creepy sterile electrical spark ozone scent that you smell on the jet bridge gangway when you’re waiting in line to board an airplane. It’s a deeply anxiety-inducing scent, conjuring imaginary but highly plausible scenarios wherein I have a connecting flight in Atlanta and that I have only 13 minutes to make it to the gate and the gate is all the way at the other end of the terminal. I don’t need this stress in my life!
The Toilet of a Roman Lady, Juan Jiménez Martín (detail)
Myth from Ellis Brooklyn is the sort of crisp, dry, cologney-fresh fragrance I typically don’t love because it borders on the standard generic cliche of the guy with the abs and the towel wrapped around his waist in any old perfume ad. Except in this instance…there’s nuance or detail here working in its favor. So imagine instead of the cruelty and foolishness of the Echo and Narcissus myth…let’s say the gods kept their dicks in their pants and didn’t get carried away with petty vendettas, no one was scorned, humiliated, or shamed and these two just got to fall in love and live their lives. Maybe they opened up the blissful sanctuary day spa together. Maybe it features a reflection pool fed by a cool, clear spring, energetically charged by healing crystals, in the middle of a lush garden surrounded by shady woods and teeming with heady, fragrant jasmine and beautiful orchids. Maybe after a session of massage therapy, light healing, and intuitive counseling, they encouraged their clientele to spend a moment gazing at themselves in the still, crystalline waters, muscles loose and relaxed, skin pumiced and oiled, and then boop their own watery image on the nose and say “babe, I love this journey for you.” Myth is an uncomplicated, clean, woody mildly floral musk that just embraces and epitomizes feeling good about yourself.
Bosphorus Pearl from Alghabra ParfumsWhen I envision perfumes inspired by pearls, I expect something opalescent and luminous, maybe something with notes of white musk, rice milk, or coconut. Nope. Not here. Bosphorus Pearl is a pearl envisioned by someone who has never even seen the ocean, let alone a pearl. They saw a child clutching a sticky cherry lollipop in their grubby fingers, and thought, eh, good enough. This is a rosy-fruity abomination and I actually feel insulted by it.
Jovoy Paris’ La Litergie des Heures is meant to evoke burning incense in an old monastery, but with its notes of sour, fermented ketchup and cheesy bitter bile, but it smells less like peaceful prayers at the hermitage and more like a priest being demonically puked on in the frenzied throes of a non-church sanctioned exorcism.
Rue St Honore from Ouaiwhich is giving me some real idyllic springtime wisteria-draped cottagecore Crabtree & Evelyn Gunne Sax tradwife YouTube influencer exploited by their alt-right faschy podcaster husband for their perceived domesticity, femininity and purity vibes. Is this a field of violets and daisies and gingham picnic daydream or an escapist nostalgia-trap weaponized by Neo-Nazis? Maybe I am overthinking it, but there is something about this quaint floral garden fragrance that feels wildly wrong and deeply uncomfortable and makes me desperately itchy to stage an intervention for someone.
Serge Luten’s L’Orpheline is one of those fragrances that it took a really long time to interpret and appreciate. At first sniff, for the longest time, all I really smelled was a ghostly, soapy mist of fleeting, fading florals. I thought this was meant to be frankincense, so confused and underwhelmed, I always sort of checked out and never really paid any further attention to how it unfolded on the several occasions I tried to revisit it. Today, I think I am starting to understand. It is oddly incensey, in a way; if there were an incense of musty, dried bouquets, spectral resins from unearthly realms, and milky, artificial woods, freeze-dried, crumbled, and lit over a cold blue phantom flame. This is a fragrance faintly ominous and disquieting, of silence, and dust, and memories, and melancholia. The scent of a locked room that hasn’t been opened in over a century and witness to secrets best left well alone.
No matter how cavalier your attitude toward mortality, living through the death of a beloved person is to suffer an utter fracture in the underpinnings of your worldview and beliefs, a brutal violation of things thought unbreakable and everlasting. Grappling with grief is a perpetual choking of the throat, a deep immersion into the light-devouring waters of a hundred-year flood. On both my wrists I am finally wearing Sea of Grief, a collaboration between bloodmilk jewels and Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. I think I had subconsciously tucked this small bottle behind a stack of books because maybe it felt like too much to sit with. I lost my mother, my grandmother, and my grandfather in the years between 2014 and 2017, and just when I think I have a handle on my heartache, something small-a memory, a photo, or even a scent, will bring it all back and my heart is broken anew. I often think of that quote from Wanda Vision, “But what is grief, if not love persevering?” Now, I know lots of writers and philosophers have offered some version of this sentiment, it’s not new, whatever. A lot of people heard it for the first time on this show, though, and it offered a great deal of comfort, so just let them have it, okay all of you high-brow writers and poets on writer-twitter? (Sorry, still annoyed by that particular discourse.) Sea of Grief, though. I think it may be those words, bottled, as a balm. It opens bitter, almost too bitter to bear. Like an open wound treated only with the salt of your tears. I think this could possibly be the vetiver and the carrot seed at the opening. But so quickly, more quickly than you could possibly believe, it becomes one of the most incredibly stunning fragrances I have ever encountered. The rich, floral incense of neroli and the musky green candied nuances of angelica along with the complex resinous citrus of bergamot and chamomile’s light, sweet herbaceousness alchemizes the extremes in experience and shifting realities associated with grief into a potent drop or two of aromatic solace. It is a beautiful thing to continue to love someone, even when they aren’t there. Sea of Grief is a gorgeous comfort with which to scent this love you forever carry in your heart.
Ineke’s Field Notes From Paris opens with a sort of bitter orange incense and powdery orange blossom vintage bubble bath vibe, with a rich, ambery tobacco note lurking underneath, and balanced with both earthy, herbal coriander and creamy, honeyed beeswax. It’s a fragrance that tickles the nose in a way that suggests spiciness, but maybe it just skirts the edge, I am not sure. I also wouldn’t quite lump it in with the gourmands. However you might categorize it, it’s nothing at all like what I expected, but it’s certainly got an incredibly unique appeal.
There’s just no other way to put it, Jasmin from Le Galionis quite possibly the sluttiest fragrance I have ever smelled. And I mean that from the bottom of my slutty heavy metal music video-loving heart. Imagine the late Tawny Kitaen swirling around in her lacy lingerie in a Whitesnake video where she’s cartwheeling across David Coverdale’s cadre of Lamborghinis and then sticking her tongue deep into his eardrum as they’re racing down the highway at 120 mph. Boozy champagne kisses, musky sweat-soaked sheets, heady, narcotic nocturnal blooms, and effervescent hairspray aldehydes–Jasmin is the scent of a joyfully depraved midnight rendezvous accompanied by epic guitar solos and censorship advisories.
Black Opium smells like someone squeezed Strawberry Shortcake’s sweet freckled face until the top of her plastic molded head popped off and you smeared the cloying, syrupy ichor that dribbled out all over their body, and then they rolled around in a heap of rotting jasmine that reached the point in their lifespan where the blooms stop smelling beautiful and immediately start to smell like a cracked bucket of pee-stained underwear. Thus adorned in a doll’s blood-jam and sticky toilet flowers, they boldly assure themselves they are sexy as hell and head out to the club. Oh, to have the confidence of a person wearing one of the world’s shittiest perfumes.
Tonight on Midnight Stinks is Maruyama from Parfum Prissana. Fragrant tree bark, bitter green herbs, a sweet, musky loaminess, a dusty oddball spice of some sort, and a botanical balsamic, almost maple-y nuance. If this were a color, I think it would be a hazel eye, or maybe Panetone 3995 C, a sort of cross between olive and smoky topaz. As a Taurus, my blood type is probably the sweet earthiness of Maruyama As well as some combination of briny green olives and lustrous golden brown topaz. If it were an OG cottagecore power couple, it would be beloved friends, Frog and Toad. Although…I might say this scent leans a little more goblincore. Either way, if you’re a country mouse or an earth mama or I don’t know, a secret gnome or whatever, this scent is lovely and you’ll enjoy it.
…and lastly, over on TikTok I slowly lost my shit in a hotel room during a recent business conference and documented the scents I wore while I was there. Wheeeeee!
This here blog may be a little blank and empty over the next few weeks as we pack up and move house. Until then, me and my lil sweeties are wishing you all the goodness and loveliness and weirdness that your hearts can handle. See you soon, friends!
Hello, fans of moody art capturing the morbid, melancholic, and macabre! Here’s something fun!
Pre-order your copy of The Art of Darkness by August 31 from any retailer and be one of the first 100 readers to enter your information into the Quarto form and you’ll receive a lovely thank-you-package including a The Art of Darkness postcard, sticker, and autographed bookplate from me, the author! Link in comments!
Well, hello friends of midnight shadows and all that lurk in those murky corners! It is cover reveal day for THE ART OF DARKNESS: A TREASURY OF THE MORBID, MELANCHOLIC AND MACABRE.
I am so extremely-over-the-moon thrilled with the somber, surreal, multi-layered magnificence of Alex Eckman-Lawn’s cover art–it’s really a dream come true for this artist’s incredible work to be gracing the cover of a book that I’ve written. Aside from the cover art, I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to work with SO MANY DREAM ARTISTS to include in these pages!
So, what else can you expect to find this the pages of this darkly artful tome?
Throughout history, artists have been obsessed with darkness – creating works that haunt and horrify, mesmerize and delight and play on our innermost fears. While these themes might scare us – can’t they also be heartening and beautiful? In exploring and examining these evocative artworks The Art of Darkness offers insight into each artist’s influences and inspirations, asking what comfort can be found in facing our demons? Why are we tempted by fear and the grotesque? And what does this tell us about the human mind?
Of course, sometimes there is no good that can come from the tenebrous sensibilities of darkness and the sickly shivers and sensations they evoke. These are uncomfortable feelings, and we must sit for a while with these shadows – with a book, from the safety of our armchairs.
The Art of Darkness and all of its dreamy, disturbing gloomy glimpses will be released into the world on September 6, 2022! Stay tuned for more details.
A gathering of death-related links that I have encountered in the past few months or so. From heart-rending to humorous (sometimes you gotta laugh, you know?) from informative to insightful, to sometimes just downright weird and creepy, here’s a snippet of recent items that have been reported on or journaled about with regard to death, dying, and matters of mortality.
French Oakmoss from For Strange Women, along with fresh marjoram, is probably one of my favorite smells in the world. Funny, how they’re both very green scents, although I’d certainly put them on opposite ends of the spectrum. Marjoram being a sweetly herbaceous, rather cheery scent, and oakmoss, though it has a complex sweetness of its own, leans more toward the shadowy, sequestered musk and honeyed loamy–leatheriness of ancient lichen blanketed under the aromatic foliage primeval forests. Lavender and violet subtly brighten the gloomy…nearly claustrophobic nature of this fragrance (and perhaps I only feel suffocated because my nose is literally glued to my wrist because the perfume is that compellingly gorgeous) and enhance it with a focused, faceted intensity. It’s too calming a scent to call melancholy, but it’s too moody to call meditative. What is the name for such a feeling? Whatever the fancy word is for a contemplative moment wistfully frozen in time, it smells like French Oakmoss from FSW. is the name for such a feeling? Whatever you call it, it smells like French Oakmoss from FSW.
Occult Bookstore from Black Baccara. With notes that come across to me as warm sweetly spiced cinnamon and cool camphoraceous cedar, it’s a study in contrasts, with the barest, ghostliest whiff of a brittle, woody paperiness evocative of crisp pages brimming with mystery and magic. More than a singular bookshop though, this conjures for me a charged atmosphere electric with possibility and psychic connections; it awakens memories I have of Cassadaga, a tiny, rural central Florida community of mediums, healers, and spiritualists about an hour from where I live. Somehow this also captures the mood of centuries-old historic buildings, the aura of a haunted hotel where you can get a tarot reading or an energy adjustment, and all the little shops where you can buy crystals or candles or a Catsadaga calendar with photos of the areas feral felines where proceeds from the sales help to support & provide responsible stewardship for these four-legged personalities roaming the streets.
More than this though, it invokes a very specific visit when my sister and I spent the day there and then had a few glasses of wine at the hotel bar and chatted late into the night. At just before midnight we noticed the place which had been quite noisy earlier had become strangely quiet and we were the only ones left–it almost felt as if no one else had ever been there at all, and we had only imagined their presence. We roamed the empty streets for hours which you’re probably not supposed to do at that time of night, but we didn’t want the evening to end. The scent of cypress mingled with the inky night air as we made our way back to the hotel. This weekend in January, right before the pandemic is one of my fondest, most precious memories, and somehow I found it again in this bottle.
Gucci’s Mémoire d’une Odeur. Herbal, dusty bittersweet, dreamlike green musk. The sorrows of strange lullabies lilted in gentle whispers, fairytales of snow-blooming trees, borne from bones. A fragile, longing, shimmering bell. A fleeting dew, a pale mist drifting low in a meadow, vanishing into an empty sky. A melancholy elegy for the whimsy of childhood. A deathbed poem at dawn.
Female Christ from 19-69 is all weird, chilly herbal woods, and rather a chemical, synthetic vibe.…like an artisanal toilet bowl cleaner. But in a good way?
Basilica from Milano Fragranze is a gourmand-adjacent spooky scent, it flirts with foodiness but it never actually goes there. It’s an eerie earthy musk (but think graveyards rather than gardens) creamy cedar and milky vanilla woods, and mysterious amber-myrrh resins, both warm and cool, enveloping and remote. It’s like a curmudgeonly ghost monk from a crumbling, haunted monastery has left the centuries-old ruins and paid a visit to a sweetly-bustling local bake sale. I love this and the only thing that is stopping me from buying a full bottle are the hundreds of full bottles of fragrance that I already own and will never use up before I die.
No. 23 from Fischersund is a scent and perfumery co-created by Jónsi from Icelandic minimalist post-rock and dreampop band Sigur Rós. It’s a densely tarry and leathery scent, charred wood and peppery smoke, that dries in your hair like green, aromatic moss and balsamic fir needles and pine. It also makes me think of salty licorice and hangikjöt —but not candy and actual smoked meat, really. More like a bitter, herbal chewiness, and scorched and smoldering birch and juniper and the ghost of blistered proteins? It’s stygian, enigmatic, and bleak, and maybe this is what my doppelgänger who just climbed out of the Katla ash storms and trekked through the Jordskott forest smells like. (I realize with those references I’m mixing together both Icelandic and Swedish creeping horror —catastrophic supernatural volcanoes and prophecies about evil forests—but whatever!)
Grimoire from Anatole LeBreton features a lemony-balsamic sweetness suggestive of curative sweets and a cryptic dustiness evocative of brittle parchment and rare texts, all encircled with a pungent fog of bitter, caramelized cumin and decomposing mosses and herbs. This scent conjures imagery from a 17th-century oil painting steeped in alchemical knowledge and symbolism and ancient traditions mingling science, philosophy, faith, and artistic spirit:
“A shadowy scenario unfolds as a lone wax candle burns deep into the night. Various lenses and prisms refract the faint glow of the flickering flame to vaguely illuminate a crude, darkened laboratory, whereupon an oaken table, dusty flasks precariously balanced, bubble with a disquieting phosphorescence and engines of distillation chug and clank murkily nearby. Brittle scrolls and yellowed manuscripts, embellished with colorful emblems and arcane symbols scribbled hastily in the margins, are scattered haphazardly on a dirt floor to further illustrate this scene of curious chemical phenomena and scholarly chaos. A wan, stocking-footed man with a funny cap alternately pores pensively over massive tomes or perhaps pumps a small bellow to encourage a sullen, smoking fire, while lost in analytical reverie.”
Yes, this is what Grimoire smells like. Yes, I did just quote a passage from The Art of the Occult, a book that I wrote. Is that tacky to mention? Maybe. Is it relevant? Entirely!
Safanad from Parfums de Marly. Oh my goodness. Never, ever has a fragrance before elicited such an immediate response from me of “holy moly, this is what I imagine so-n-so smells like!” Safanad is a rich, velvety amber, projecting an opulence amplified by orange blossom’s bewitching florals and jasmine’s heady musk, which always seems to me both elegantly amorous but also offers an animalic eroticism. This is a fragrance that seems at first vexingly overbearing and almost outrageously assertive but the better you get to know it the more you appreciate its sumptuous exuberance and enthusiasm. And of course, I am envisioning none other than everyone’s favorite flamboyant and glittering space aunt, Lwaxana Troi: daughter of the Fifth House, holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx, and heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed. And much like this character, Safanad at first seems too much, nearly suffocating in its madcap glamour, but underneath its gorgeousness runs a deeply woven thread of melancholy, obscured for a time by orange blossom’s more hypnotizing facade but which, in fact, masks some really somber, sorrowful facets. Both Safanad and our beloved Betazoid galactic life coach Lwaxana are complex, compelling, and thoroughly beautiful.
I don’t dare read any other reviews of Chanel no. 19, because I’m almost certain that everything that can be said or written about it already has been explored at length. It’s an endeavor both frustrating and intimidating. But then I have to remind myself that I don’t have to be an expert or a guru or ensconced in academia or have years of scholarship under my belt in order to share my thoughts on something so profoundly subjective as fragrance. You Don’t Have To Know Everything About Something In Order To Love Something. I’m not delving into the history of a scent or a house or a nose, I’m not deconstructing the notes and the ingredients; I have absolutely no interest in that, and quite frankly, you can find that elsewhere. I’m just trying to tell you what I think something smells like. So. I’ll tell you that I adore this scent. Intensely sharp and dry and green, with the earthy, rootsy powderiness of iris, the acrid verdancy of galbanum, and vetiver’s leathery grassy woodiness, and that sour metallic tang and bitter effervescence that I always attribute to old costume jewelry; note-wise, I’m not sure where that comes from, but it seems to be a hallmark of these classic fragrances. And it subverts that refined elegance with a punky funk that elevates it to something that feels timeless as opposed to a bit stodgy. The marvel of this scent is its gloomy luminosity, how it’s both austere and achingly tender at the same time. It makes me feel a deep nostalgia and melancholic longing for something that never was, for a past I never lived.
If I’m choosing complimentary samples or maybe I am placing an order comprised solely of samples, I will look at the new arrivals and go for whatever sounds the witchiest, or alternately, the weirdest. I ask myself” “would Stevie Nicks wear this? Would Morbidda Destiny wear it? Would Barbara Steele scent herself with it in Black Sunday or Curse of the Crimson Altar or basically any role she’s ever played? If so, let’s grab it. And this is how I ended up with Betwixt and Between by Anka Kus. My version of judging a book by its cover and throwing it the cart without even reading the synopsis or author blurbs on the back. Sometimes it works out. This is one of the times it does not. Sniffed right from the vial it is immediately a syrupy fruity-rose, which is strange because I don’t think there is anything vaguely fruity listed in the notes, but there is amber, and sometimes that’s how amber’s rich sweetness comes across to me. For a few moments it settles down and there is a musky veil of smoke that is absolutely gorgeous. It’s not a sooty, burning smoke, it’s more the aura of smoke, maybe a room where incense is frequently lit, although there is none burning at present.
And then-betrayal! The fruit is back! This is an intensely jammy candied rose, squeezed from fresh fruit juice and pulp, heated and stirred with mounds of sugar and honey, and then cooled in little hand-crafted, flower-shaped molds until what you have are little fruit jellies, vivid nibbles of blackcurrant and pomegranate and lush summer roses. Hours later, those wily fruits were never there at all and it’s just that ghostly cashmere smoke again. I don’t care for this scent, as I am almost irrationally anti-fruit, but I know that some of you will really enjoy it, and I can’t help but to think it would make a lovely Valentine’s Day fragrance.
The first few times I tried Süleyman Le Magnifique from Fort & Manle, I couldn’t figure it out, but for whatever reason, today it feels different. This is a dispassionate cool, woody floral incense. An ornate, centuries-old chest with polished wrought iron embellishments, once brimming with rare woods, precious flowers, and sacred resins, but which has slowly emptied over the years. It is a vessel which now holds but the barest perfumed memory of its past riches, alongside the bitter, vanillic fragrance of the aged container itself, and a thin scrap of parchment, a fragment of poem; not of youthful frenzied hearts and fevered love, but a sober observation from one who has been around the block and seen some things– and has something to say about it. Perhaps in the vein of these lines from Sappho’s tablets:
Death is an evil.
That’s what the gods must think.
Or surely they would die.
Süleyman Le Magnifique is the scent of your collected wisdom and experiences– and having lost some parts of yourself in the process of gathering. Some of those pieces you lost were hope. But many of them were fear. And if you want to give the gods a piece of your mind, this is the perfume to reach for before fearlessly airing your grievances.
I don’t want to get into the actual notes or the perfumer’s inspiration for After Every Ounce of Joy (Leaves My Body); he mentions on the site that he hides the notes in a separate link so as not to overly influence the collectors and enthusiasts who are smelling it. Out of respect for those sentiments, I will keep mum on those points and just share my experience with it …which has become one of profound obsession. Initially what I smell is an overwhelmingly acrid note, like burning rubber, but more tarry than smoky, or maybe new vinyl siding. It’s leathery and vaguely animalic and it also somehow reminds me of cold, dry air. After about 15-20 minutes, a warm, sweet skin musk emerges and it’s at this moment that I cannot stop huffing my wrist because it’s so elusive and secretive. And underneath that, there’s something even more magical, a powdery, balsamic floral-herb that I can’t put a name to, and it seems like something you might only encounter in a dream. It’s so far removed from that initial whiff of melting plastic but at the same time this whole delicious skin scent is still enrobed in a transparent PVC shower curtain, which sounds a little morbid in a Laura Palmer way, but you can’t pretend it’s not there. But like I said, I am obsessed. And Chris Rusak is a genius.
Vanilla Vibes from Juliette Has A Gun, you had one job. For a fragrance with vanilla right there in the name, there is a shocking lack of it in the execution. Instead, it is a humdrum aquatic, with a sour, salty marine aspect and the barest whisper of sandy musk. I hate to use the word “boring” because that’s more of a judgment than a description, but I think in this case it’s perfectly warranted. I mean if this were a person, it wouldn’t even have a face. As a matter of fact, this is that same faceless person in a 50-year-old mermaid suit at Weeki Watchee barely submerged underwater and doing a terrible job entertaining children, and they’re actually so bored themselves they are texting on their phones instead of swimming and if you look closely you can see their toes poking through one of their fins. And you know what else? They smell nothing like vanilla at all.
I am swooning after sampling Sweetly Known from Kerosene. I’m neither a fan of sweet treats or sweet fragrances, but as it happens my current favorite sweet stink is also from the creators at Kerosene, and it’s a coconutty-pina colada- Biscoff masterpiece called Unknown Pleasures. So I’m not surprised that I like this one, too. They seem to be able to handle sweetness with nuance and complexity and make it interesting, rather than cloying or childish. Sweetly Known incorporates notes of Cardamom, Cocoa, and other confectionery notes alongside musk and it smells like a miniature bundt-shaped small French pastry flavored with rum and vanilla, offering a softly milky, tender custardy center and a dark, crackling caramelized crust. There’s also a smoky, dusty note that makes it feel like you’re burning the incense or smudge stick version of this dessert and elevates what might be a sugary experience to something absolutely sublime.
As a long-time anime and manga fan, I was of course never not going to be drawn in by the reference to Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell, a stylish and strange cyberpunk neo-noir in which exists a world wherein people merge with machines, and boasts an iconic storyline that asks consciousness-expanding questions and examines what makes us fundamentally human. Notions of philosophical inquiry aside, The Ghost in the Shell from Etat Libre d’Orange is a confused, chaotic concoction that makes you think someone fed a bunch of molecules to an AI and tasked it with creating a perfume. There’s a head-scratchingly metallic green floral note, a synthetic fruit that winks in and out of existence–a sort of speculative lactonic peach– and a plastic, prosthetic musk alongside a pungent, bittersweet note that veers between cumin’s weird, woody funk and a rotten belly button infection. And sure you can be grossed out by that, but we’ve all got human bodies and they all occasionally do stinky human things, so simmer down. Lazy people who have ever gotten their navel pierced are intimately familiar with this aroma.
The funny thing is, it’s possible that I like Ghost in the Shell and its reality-warping, neon city, mechanical-limbed artificial absurdity. When it works, it’s a really playful and unique skin scent. When it doesn’t, it’s a cyborg with digitized BO. But I’m not sure I’d take my chances with the purchase of a full bottle, let alone a bespoke upload of it directly to my olfactory cortex.
This weekend I married my comrade in adventure, my ally in mischief, and my kindred spirit in silliness. We are each other’s no. 1 biggest fan in all the best ways and none of the Annie Wilkes ways! And though we’ve been together a decade now and really, marriage is not going to change anything all that much…still…everything does feel a little different now, somehow?
We did it up very small. Just a backyard ceremony at his parent’s house with five other individuals in attendance. And a dog and some ducks and a big bumblebee which landed in my bouquet!
I didn’t want anything too overwhelming or to have anyone (including and especially me) to put too much work into any aspect of this, and this extended to what I wore. I think I kept it fairly simple. This pretty olive green linen dress from Of Her Own Kind, a pair of little brown boots that I purchased used, a straw hat with an Anne of Green Gables vibe, some shawls that I knit myself, and a bouquet that I made from some grocery store sunflowers.
And for perfume? I wore Rose 31 from Le Labo, a rose blurred from the edges completely inward by woodsy aromatic mosses and sweetly musky resins. Yvan once told me that he thought it smells like his childhood Mossman Masters of the Universe toy and I smile thinking about those fuzzy green muscles, every time I spray this subtle elegant scent.
It was a beautiful day and I never actually thought I was going to get married (it sounds pitiful, but I had convinced myself that I wasn’t the sort of person that people want to marry) and so…of course, I had to make a How To Wear ensemble for it. And with a few exceptions, this is indeed what I wore.
I envisioned a Ghibli-inspired wedding with flying machines & enigmatic ghosts & adorable monsters & artful nostalgia & enchanted worlds within worlds…but as I mentioned, I don’t want any work or fuss and I didn’t want to spend more than $15 on this stuff so I just wore my cute straw hat and pretended.
