Unquiet
Things

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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.

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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.

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Inside me are two wolves and they are both paintings by Kazimierz Stabrowski.

when they won’t shut tf up about meal prepping

when you didn’t do it but if you *did* do it maybe they deserved it

don’t talk to me or my giant sea slug ever again

not me definitely poisoning your ass

get in loser, we’re seeking out irreverent mischief

When you’re an eternally cursed creature of the night, but you got places to be.

if your nighttime skincare routine doesn’t involve separating your head from your body what are you even doing

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Okay, so here’s a dumb thing to admit. While I am OF COURSE aware of the lush, magical gorgeousness of Kinuko Y. Craft’s paintings and illustrations, I thought that her work was the realm of picture books and posters and her own personal projects. Somehow I had no idea that her illustrative enchantments enrobed the covers of some of my favorite books! This is probably not news to many of you, I mean her style is so distinctive–how could I have missed it, right? And yet, somehow I did.

Craft’s paintings have adorned the covers of work by countless authors, including Isabel Allende, Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card, Stephen King, C.S. Lewis, Patricia A. McKillip, Tanith Lee, Andre Norton, Isabel Glass, Juliet Marillier, and many more. As a matter of fact, it was this eerie cover art that initially caught my eye, and, in seeking out the artist–and in discovering it was Kinuko Y. Craft–I fell down quite the rabbit hole!

I haven’t yet read Tanith Lee’s omnibus Biting the Sun, but after spending several hours gazing at the exquisite details of this cover, it’s certainly now at the top of my list! And I think I might be moved to get my hands on the different versions of this book that exist…I mean look at this incredible Japanese edition! And this cover of the original book in the series (I think?) Don’t Bite the Sun was created by Brian Froud!

Here’s an excerpt from an interview in Locus Magazine (April 2017) that I really enjoyed reading:

‘‘One of the benefits I get from doing covers is, I get to read. The main thing I like about what I do is that I’m away from reality and the real world where I live, in a make-believe one – a land of someone else’s imagina­tion – as long as the project lasts. I need that to survive.”

Below are a few more of my favorites, and if you are keen to see more, here is a pretty comprehensive database of them!

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Maika is again joining me for this Winter installment of Stacked! And for more Maika-related goodness, be sure to listen in on their Pages & Portents series over on TikTok, wherein they share bibliomantic reveries, passages divined from books chosen at random from their mysterious shelves, on a  daily basis. 

Maika

The Houseguest and Other Stories by Amparo Dávila – This slim volume of short stories caught me by surprise, which is silly because it was showing up on numerous recommended reading lists not too long ago. Meanwhile it’s been patiently biding its time in my to-read stacks for a couple years. Shame on me. These are intensely disquieting and unnerving tales deceptively dressed in mundanity. It’s what you do not see or are not permitted to see that’s truly disturbing here, along with narrators you cannot trust, and the sparest settings that allow your mind to freely dress them in whatever ways haunt you best. I’ve seen Dávila’s writing likened to Poe, Leonora Carrington, Shirley Jackson, and Kafka, and that all rings true for me. This is the first collection of Amparo Dávila’s work to be translated into English. I dearly hope it’s not the last.

And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe by Gwendolyn Kiste – This is exactly what I want from a short story collection: intensely creative and vivid tales that are equal parts weird fiction, horror, and deep feels woven together with lyrical, evocative writing. It always feels like a cop-out to say this in a review, but the less you know about these atmospheric stories, the better. Let each one be a dark new experience for your imagination, your mind, and your heart.

The Rust Maidens by Gwendolyn Kiste – I was so taken by Kiste’s short stories that I immediately sought out another of her books. This novel was every bit as creative and beautifully written as the stories in And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe. I’d call it a dark fantasy meditation on loss, grief, and change. Our narrator, Phoebe, tells her tale both in the present-day as a 40-something woman, and back when she’d just graduated from high school and something very very strange began happening to other girls in her class, including Jacqueline, her cousin and dearest friend. Set in an Ohio town whose fate is tied to the existence of a dying steel mill, the atmosphere is heavy with grief and dread, but also an inescapable, bittersweet wonder. What happens to the Rust Maidens is visceral, horrifying, heartbreaking, and beautiful, and decidedly unlike anything I’ve read about before. And as I read, I found myself hoping that someone will option this to adapt as a miniseries or movie, if only because I’d love to see just the right SFX team bring the metamorphosis of the Rust Maidens to life. This was one of those stories that I worried might not stick its landing as it developed, but I was as satisfied as I was emotionally spent by the end.

In the Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss – I love how many dreamy and quite short short stories were packed into this book. It felt like a vivid feast of dark fantasy, dark fairy tales, and magical realism. Reminiscent of Angela Carter and Kelly Link. Surreal and unsettlings, enchanting without ever being saccharine or twee. I’d read another volume in a heartbeat.

The Seep by Chana Porter – I really enjoyed this queer sci-fi novella – about the softest alien invasion of Earth by The Seep, a hive mind species that merges with nearly every lifeform on earth, including most of humanity creating a seeming utopia – but I was very frustrated by it all the same. Everything I liked best about it – The Seep itself, the Seep-related technology and the way humans interface with and utilize it – only came in tantalizing glimpses and all-too-brief descriptions. On one hand, I appreciate how The Seep and its (their?) technology are technically secondary to the story itself, which is the journey of a trans woman who loses her wife and, secondarily, their shared community to divergent paths in the Seepified world. However none of that would’ve happened without The Seep, so the fact that we get so tormentingly little of it left me feeling unfulfilled by the story. Had this novella been part of a collection of stories or ongoing series set in this world, meaning I’d learn more about The Seep and Seeptech with each tale, that would’ve made this story able to stand on its own better for me. Nevertheless, it’s fascinating, poignant, and beautifully written, and I will gladly read more of Chana Porter’s work in the future.

Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3) by Seanan McGuire – I think there are currently 7 books in this ongoing series, which means I’m way behind. But I’m not in a hurry and I thoroughly enjoy how, each time I start a new Wayward Children story, it feels like I never left that world, but without the tedious hand-holding exposition that some authors employ to make sure you’re caught up on previous events in their series. I love the combination of melancholy and hope that permeates these imaginative, wonderfully queer books, whose characters are bereft outside of their respective magical worlds, yet refuse to stop searching for their respective ways back, and in the meantime find true kinship and relatably imperfect friendship with each other. If you were one of those kids who ever imagined a world made of sweets, this particular book is both a dream and nightmare come true. That is, for as much as the experience of reading a book you consider to be a lived experience.

I thought I’d also mention some books I’ve been leisurely snacking on while reading things like all of the above, because some books are begun, steadily read, and finished, while others are best visited, tasted, and inhabited intermittently:

Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them

The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

The Essential Gay Mystics by Andrew Harvey

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti

For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World by Sasha Sagan

Sarah 

My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones If you were the weird outcast kid who grew up loving all things horror then you may see pieces of yourself painfully reflected in Jade, the tough, traumatized main character in Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart is a Chainsaw, a love letter to horror if there ever was one. And I know, I know, everyone says that about this book, but it’s so true. Jade, a graduating senior, lives in a nowhere town, has a go-nowhere job, and lives in an internal world of slashers and gore and horror as a self-preservation in dealing with her abusive father, absent mother, and creepy predators everywhere she turns. Jade, convinced that the beautiful new girl in town is a “final girl”, fixates on this character, and in the wake of several murders, becomes increasingly obsessed and excited as she believes that she may be living through a real-life slasher movie in her own town. SGJ’s books are bleak and require a fair bit of patience from a reader, but man are they worth it.

Flowers for the Sea by Zin E. Rocklyn A harrowing fantasy of fate and power and vengeance that reads like “Rosemary’s Baby by way of Octavia E. Butler”, along with some Lovecraftian elements and a desperate mythology all its own, this was a quick, brutal read that I began and finished in the course of one afternoon. Survivors from a flooded kingdom struggle alone on an ark, among them the ostracized, despised Iraxi, pregnant with a child that might be more than human. This is the author from whom a few years ago I purchased my “support black women who write weird shit” tee-shirt and it’s one of my favorites and now she’s out there publishing magnificently weird shit and I am thrilled.

The Girls Are All So Nice Here by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn I keep getting sucked in by books like this, even though I know better. Another tale of people in their late 20s-early 30s looking back on something mysterious and murderous that happened during their time at university. And YES, on the surface, I love these plots, but it’s the characters that populate the stories that make a huge difference to me. Are they weird and prickly and have incredibly peculiar interests? Great, gimme gimme! Are they people who are desperate to fit in and be popular and it’s just a bunch of dreck about trying to be liked by everyone while desperately praying that no one sees what a pathetic loser they are? Ugh! I need more books about pathetic losers finding their own people and being fun, sociopathic pathetic losers together and then also add some murder and mystery, and that, for me, is *chef’s kiss.*

Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff Vandermeer Have you been dying to get into Jeff Vandermeer’s brain-bending weird fiction/eco-horror, but were perhaps intimidated by his non-linear games with time and sometimes abstract storytelling to really give it a shot? I feel like Hummingbird Salamander might be “Vandermeer-lite”, and maybe a good place to jump in. It’s still got those familiar themes of nature, power, and persistence, sand ecrets and isolation, but the structure is almost that of a detective noir mystery and it may be easier to follow along. A security consultant, “Jane Smith,” falls down a paranoid rabbit hole of eco-terrorism conspiracies and illegal wildlife trafficking after a barista chases her out of a coffee shop to hand her a random envelope. Vandermeerity ensues.

The Shape of Darkness by Laura Purcell Stricken by an illness that has left her fragile and vulnerable, Agnes Darken struggles to provide for her elderly mother and her beloved orphan nephew Cedric. As the age of the photograph dawns in Victorian Bath, Agnes’ business as a silhouette artist is dwindling, and money is ever more scarce. When her silhouette clients start turning up murdered, Agnes, frantic and terrified, consults Pearl, a young spirit medium. Laura Purcell’s stories are always evocative with rich descriptions and historical details, whether its spiritualism and silhouette making as in this tale, or prisons and phrenology, as seen in The Poisoned Thread (also titled The Corset.) Wintry and eerie and immersive, they are all wonderfully haunting tales for curling up on a chilly evening. Although! I will say that the first of Purcell’s books that I read, The Silent Companions, will forever remain my favorite.

A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan I first saw this title recommended by Roxane Gay sometime last year. And when Roxane Gay shares reading suggestions, my ears perk up. The kind of story I’ve taking to internally referring to “MFA nightmare-induced weirdness,” A Touch of Jen is about an awkward couple who is weirdly obsessed with one of their former coworkers. They stalk her on social media, they roleplay as her in the bedroom–it’s a little creepy. After running into her they somehow garner an invite as guests on one of her group trips, and things between the couple begin to splinter and fracture as they both become more obsessed in their own, separate ways. In addition to interpersonal weirdness and fucked up relationships, there are self-help cults and actual supernatural things going on in the story (or at least we are led to believe there are) and this is just weird and fun. If you liked Mona Awad’s Bunny, I think you will enjoy A Touch of Jen.

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I do love a good putter. I might suggest I am in fact the Queen of Puttering. I can draw a chore or a task or an errand out for a good length of time, and I enjoy taking my labors slowly. But there’s something to be said about getting all the stuff that you need to do, even the stuff that you want to do, out of the way early in the day to clear up your schedule so that then you can do absolutely nothing.

I hate the term hack. So let’s call this something else. Call it whatever you like! My trick is this: wake up as early as you can handle on a Sunday morning and get everything done in X amount of time. After that, the day is yours. On days when I’m really out of sorts, but I know having done something will make me feel better, I give myself an hour. On days when I’m more motivated and energetic, I might say, “ok, I’m up, it’s 7am, I will give myself till noon to do all of the things I can fit into that time, and then I am DONE!”

Last Sunday I was up by 6am, I scraped my overnight-risen sourdough into a boule and into the refrigerator for a cold ferment, I soaked some dried black beans, I dumped all of the vegetable scraps into a pot to make broth, I made two Pullman loaves of white bread, I pinned out a shawl, I started the black beans on their all-day cook, I folded laundry, and I made a chopped salad for lunches during the week. I made two casserole dishes of mac and cheese. I tried a new thing, a Japanese paper marbling technique called suminagashi. And at noon I called it quits and then I read and watched movies for the rest of the day.

All of these were things that I actually wanted to do! I just…didn’t want to spend all day doing them (although trust me, I could draw even one of those things all day long) because I also wanted to be cozy and curl up with some stories. This is my compromise.

I’m a bit of a bean snob. I get a little upset when I see people dump a can of plain, unseasoned black beans on top of their nachos to float on top of that beautiful river of molten queso like a bunch of little mouse turds. COME ON! Cook them properly! This is my tried and true recipe, although you can really adapt it and make it your own. It makes for the most delicious and flavorful pot of beans and you if you try it, we can possibly be incensed together when the mouse turds inevitably show up in someone’s vegan nacho Instagram reels.

The chopped salad is a thing I’ve been seeing all over TikTok, it’s basically some veggies in a vegan green goddess type dressing, chopped up all tiny and you scoop it up with tortilla chips. Here’s an interesting variation that includes tahini and feta, which looks good! Anyway if you don’t want to click any of those links, do this: chop up a head of cabbage, a couple of cucumbers and some scallions. Blend up a shallot, a cup of spinach, a cup of basil leaves (I would use more spinach and less basil next time), the juice of two lemons, 1/4 cup olive oil, 2 Tbsp rice vinegar, 2 cloves of garlic, 1/3 cup nutritional yeast, and 1/4 walnuts. I also added a fresh jalapeno! It really made for a lovely lunch throughout the week.

I’m trying to eat less by the clock, and more just when I feel hungry, and less “proper meals” unless I really just feel like it. Sometimes at lunch or breakfast I really just want a snack, not a whole big thing. So I’m trying to pay attention to that! And then sometimes I actually do want a whole big thing, so I am trying to plan for that ahead of time and have things like macaroni and cheese already on hand.

Doing new things is hard! Especially if you see your less-than-perfect first attempt and you tend to beat yourself up about what a moron you are, a dumb-dumb who can’t ever do anything right. So sometimes it’s just easier to not try at all. At least you didn’t fail, right?

Yeah… me too. It sucks!

I have been interested in the art of suminagashi for some time now (here’s a nice video if you want to see how it is done.) One of my sisters got me a little starter kit for Christmas or my birthday sometime in the past year or two, and I stashed it away immediately and have been afraid to even look at it ever since.

I finally gave it a try. I would say “I’m not sure what prompted me,” but I am pretty sure it was Yvan, and I tell you what–it is really good to have an objective party with no attachments to the outcome egging you on and keeping you accountable. Even if it is just to say “are you really gonna let that nice gift your sister got you collect dust in the corner?!”

It was fun. It was fun! I HAD FUN. I can’t even believe it. Dripping that ink in the water, watching the concentric circles grow, and slowly swirling it to watch the patterns change and evolve was meditative and lovely. If you are a scaredy-cat like me who wants to be creative but doesn’t know how and you want to do an art but you don’t know where to begin, I highly recommend giving this suminagashi kit a try.

So…why was I trying to get all this stuff done and clear up my afternoon? Because I have been dying to watch Woodland Darks and Days Bewitched and I knew it was a three hours long documentary! And I also know it takes me twice as long to watch a thing as the thing actually runs…so I really needed to clear some time on my calendar, ha.

If you are a folk horror enthusiast, this is an outstanding resource. It is so well-researched, so beautifully crafted, so very worth every second of that three hours you spend with it. And there are so many films mentioned that I had never even heard of, my goodness! Luckily, some thorough soul has put together a list of every movie referenced in Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, so now we can work our way through all of them.

In the meantime, unrelated to anything, and I know you didn’t ask, but let me leave you with the best piece of advice I have ever come up with:

“It may well be one of those days when the devil’s gonna try and show you his butthole every chance he gets, but friends the secret is …you don’t have to look”

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Outremer’s Vanille is a profoundly vanilla-y vanilla. It’s nearly a straight-up, high-quality, really lovely vanilla extract, with a rich, balsamic, warmth, and some pleasant plastic butteriness. A little lump of vanilla waffle cone incense stored in an empty tub of vanilla frosting. There aren’t any weird twists or turns, it’s a fairly linear scent from to finish. I think this is the first thing I would recommend to a vanilla fiend who doesn’t want any funny business with their vanilla fragrance.

So, Synthetic Jungle: Imagine a rain-soaked stroll, grey streets, grey sidewalks, grey, colorless people. A flash from the corner of your eye, a vibrant raincoat with an unexpected print featuring the lush, layered exuberance and verdant cacophony of the imaginary jungles of artist Henri Rousseau, an artist who had never left France to see real jungles. His inspiration came from Paris’ botanical gardens, zoological galleries, and from geographic illustrations in prints and books. This is dizzying descent of a scent, an aromatic Stendahl Syndrome, conjured by someone who fully knows this jungle sprung forth from the depths of dreams. It is a clashing, chaotic chypre and white floral canvas, aswirl with sharp, woody oakmoss and the crisp springiness of lily of the valley and the intense, acrid greenery of galbanum. Wrapped in a plastic rain slicker and rubber wellies.

Stella from Tocca is a fragrance that I have probably received about a million samples of over the years and which I have been strangely resistant to trying. I was convinced that it was going to be a really boring, conventional sort of scent, though I’m not really sure what I was basing that on. Probably because the majority of these samples came from Sephora, and on the interesting-o-meter, most perfumes from there score pretty low for me. Stella…is not necessarily bland or boring, but I will say it’s not my thing. It’s very pretty, in a starter-scent way. I don’t mean for young people, necessarily, but I don’t not mean them, either. Maybe just for someone who doesn’t yet know what they like. A sparkling fruity-floral with notes of milky peach Calpico and blood orange San Pellegrino and watery freesia that dries down to the scent of what I recall teenage girls spritzing in the bathroom between classes to freshen up, a sort of citrusy-powdery-soapiness. Before it reaches that point though, it’s got this soft, shimmering watercolor quality that reminds me of certain pieces of contemporary fantasy art: flowers and fairies and young maidens and probably a unicorn just outside the canvas, yet to be coaxed forth by an innocent and guileless hand.

Gris Charnel from BDK Parfums is a scent that I find confusing and disappointing. Mostly, I think I am disappointed in myself, for not having read the perfumer’s inspiration for the fragrance. Some dribble about two tourists whose glances cross paths, they dance until dawn and then slip away for an intimate encounter. Yawn. I got bored and checked out several times just now while trying to sum that up. Now if they slid through a portal into an Edward Allan Poe story while they were making out in a dark alley, then I could forgive myself for getting thrillingly suckered in by the copy (and to a lesser extent, the darkly poetic name, which I feel somehow tricked me into thinking it was something that it was not.) It must have been the notes I was excited for then, which mention black tea, fig, and cardamom essence. That sounds really lovely. But I’ve tried this several times and I don’t sense any of that loveliness. Instead, it’s a bit like a low-end tea sampler that includes selections with various unspecified “fruit flavors” but in reality, no matter which one you brew up, all they taste like hot Kool-Aid water. And there’s a weird, acrid smoky element that hovers unpleasantly, like charcoal heated air…so imagine smoking hot Kool-Aid water in your hookah. Even if I pretend an olde-timey goth poet was smoking that hookah, it’s still a bit of a dud.

Chris Rusak’s Beast Mode is a scent that I don’t hear a lot about from the hoi polloi, but I’ve heard enough from niche bloggers that I consider perfumista royalty to pique my interest. Exactly what I heard about it, I couldn’t tell you. I guess the name itself stuck with me. The site describes this fragrance as a “minimalist weirdo. A creature of deception. Perfume nerdery” and while I don’t actually know anything about this perfumer, I will say that this nondescription captured my imagination and which evolved into a little crush. The sort of obsession that you develop on someone you glimpsed on the subway reading a dog-eared copy of a book by your favorite author, in this case, let’s say creepy Japanese manga artist Junji Ito, and then you had a series of unsettling dreams about them, so you wrote an ode to this stranger in the local alternative paper’s missed connections section. And like Japan’s most successful and lauded horror author, Rusak has injected an extraordinarily potent amount of weirdness into this scent. Beginning with a mundane peek into the spice cabinet, you are subjected to a surreal descent into madness featuring fenugreek’s uncanny curried maple syrup-ness, a dry, itchy tingle of salty musk, an enigmatic spike of aniseed, and an oily conflagration of black pepper. I can’t make heads or tails of this scent, and as a matter of fact, I like to imagine it as a many-headed, rattle-tailed beast, much like its very name. It’s truly one of the most eccentric and singular fragrances I have ever sniffed and I stand in admiration of its sublime strangeness.

I have had so many people ask me about Thin Wild Mercury over the past year that I was starting to think I had been living under a rock or something and somehow some long-standing beloved cult favorite had passed me by. I don’t like to be the last to hear about something good! But here I am and here we are. So I understand this is a line of fragrances telling aromatic fables of the iconic spirit of Los Angeles. I know very little of Los Angeles, other than I traveled there once, and during that time I visited an incredibly bizarre and disturbing cat sanctuary in the middle of the desert. I also had a nervous breakdown in an Air BnB. Believe it or not, those two situations were entirely unrelated. So, Chateau, 1970. A bastion of old Hollywood and notorious celebrity hideaway, this olfactory ode to the Chateau Marmont mentions wilting roses, crisp linens, and vintage wood furniture and I do think all of that comes across. It’s an incredibly languid scent, like Lana del Rey in front of her vanity singing in a sleepy, drunken drawl into her mirror about how her moon is in Leo and her Cancer is sun, which if you ask me is a very weird way to phrase that thought. There’s dreamy indolence to this scent, moments frozen in time, captured in a Polaroid picture, dust motes floating forever above a lone rose in a chipped vase just beyond the mirror’s cloudy reflection, never settling on the bloom. A powdery musk of memory of a night that never really ended, a faded photograph that belongs to no one anymore, wrapped in tattered linen and quietly slipped under a shabby fringe of carpet in a shadowed corner of an old bungalow. 

I have some more brief impressions of Thin Wild Mercury’s offerings. And strangely, they’re all food metaphors and comparisons. Classic Taurus vibes, here, always! Whisky, 1969 is a heady combination of woody, musky oakmoss and a smoky sort of umami. Like …spiced loamy lichen wildness and leather and soy sauce that’s also a little nutty and boozy. It’s weird but it works. Laurel Canyon, 1966 with its zesty orange rind and warm, peppery clove and honeyed, almost chewy amber note is on the opposite end of the spectrum, a bit like a spice cake with a thin, sugared citrus glaze. Zuma, 1975 is a salty, grassy, sandy gremolata with bitter citrus and woody herbs served atop some fresh-caught marine delight just outside the sniffing range of this scent. I’m not saying it’s fishy, or seafoody or even …foody, but there’s definitely a sense of an almost palatable salinity

I’ve received so many samples of Andrea Maack’s Coven from Luckyscent over the years and for some reason I can’t recall any of my previous thoughts on it….which I interpret to mean that it never really impressed me as especially good or bad. This time, however, it’s really left an impression. With notes of soil and moss, Coven is meant to embody a shadowy woodland walk, and I think it’s clear the results are pretty divisive. One reviewer notes, and I am paraphrasing here, that it smells like dumpster juice. My own partner thinks it smells like an exploded car battery. I can’t deny that there is a sickly sweet rot at play here, like the dark shadows of Dol Guldur slowly encroaching the Greenwood forest as the feral wizard Radagast the Brown watches in horror while the vegetation blackens and decays before his eyes and many of his beloved animal friends are sick or dying. As it dries, the whiskey becomes apparent, and a strange, sour cumin note emerges to combine with the mossiness and the sense of black mold and mildew and it conjures a sort of hungover Witch-King of Angmar, badly in need of a bath.

Tom Ford’s Ombre Leather is a fragrance I both weirdly like and I don’t like and I can’t make up my mind. The new car leather scent is front and center, like you literally just slid into the seat of some posh, luxury vehicle to take it for a test drive. The smarmy salesperson slithered into the passenger seat next to you and they are wearing that screechy-sweet jasmine scent from Tom Ford that you really despise and at first you want to roll down the windows but you can’t figure out how they work so you just give up. But somehow the syrupy musk of the jasmine alongside the smooth, slightly bright, slightly animalic leather is a striking combination. But the two notes never really meld, they sit separately for the duration of the scent’s journey, and much like that trip twice around the car lot with the stranger that you’re not going to buy the car from anyway, it’s ultimately an awkward ride.

Mizensir’s Celebes Wood is a scent I love, but I think I love it more for someone else. This is a frou-frou boozy woodland party of a fragrance. A dozen rowdy princesses gather in the forest at midnight, all glitter and glamour and flowing hair and dazzling tiaras and ballgown pockets stuffed with cakes and confections and clutching jeweled flasks of sweet, strong liqueurs that cost half a kingdom to procure. There’s gossip and gifts and drinking and dancing and sweet kisses and secrets under the moonlight. And these princesses aren’t sleepwalking or under a spell, they’re alert and more alive than they’ve ever been, women with agency and autonomy and a vision for the future that will shake the very foundations of their world, because it doesn’t involve pleasing parents or marrying princes or making themselves or their dreams small or hiding their hearts’ truest songs. So…yeah. That kind of party. This is a sumptuous ambery scent, opening with a sweet, spiced swirling of almost effervescent sparks, like someone tossed cinnamon and cardamom on a flame, and when the embers die there is a deep, rich heart of tonka bean and resinous labdanum and something a lot like patchouli, but creamier, and less earthy. It’s beautiful and on the right person it could be devastating, but somehow it’s not me.

Dragonfly from Zoologist is a scent that apparently I’ve been sampling for so long I’m left with only fumes. But I’m not sure that I need a full bottle. I don’t own many scents like this…which is not to say it’s incredibly unique, because I’m not sure that’s the case. It’s a sort of gentle, watery floral musk with cherry blossom and peony and sweet, powdery heliotrope. While it’s nice, it’s quite pretty even, I’d definitely put it in the aquatic category… and I don’t love aquatics. Even one as wearable as this. I guess that’s what I mean when I say that I don’t have many like it. I’m sure there are lots of things that smell similar, I just couldn’t tell you what they are because I don’t wear or typically even sample them! I’ve read that dragonflies thrive in fresh, clean water and I think there is something of that purity that comes across in this scent. Purity is such a fraught term and so I hesitate to even use it, but that is the first word that comes to mind, and honestly, now that I have said that, you know who I can imagine wearing this scent? The brave and ridiculously sweet Laura Lee from Yellowjackets. This scent is perfect for this character. [Note in including the link just now, I realize that they have reformulated the fragrance. This review is for the original formulation.]

Maya from Tocca is a scent that I bought on a whim a few months ago when I was grabbing a few travel-sized scents from Sephora. Tocca scents generally don’t work for me and this one is no exception. They are all, or at least the one I’ve tried, these ridiculous fruity-florals that remind me of somehow of Edible Arrangement fruit bouquets. I don’t care for fruity florals but I don’t think this is a bad version of one. With top notes of black currant, violet leaf, and some underlying jasmine and rose, it’s a bombastic burst of jammy, patchouli-cloaked fruit, and musky florals, and it was driving me nuts because it reminds me so much of a scent that I used to wear in my late teens, when I first started taking classes at community college. The reason I remember this is because our cat peed on my bookbag and I tried to cover it up with this particular fragrance and 15 minutes into class I realized with a sinking heart that my solution was not working, so I gathered up my stuff and left and was too embarrassed to ever return. That scent was Tribu by Bennetton. I just checked the scent notes and it also lists black currant and violet leaf, jasmine, and rose. It does not of course list cat pee from one Leroy Parnell, our Siamese cat at the time, but in my memory Tribu and screechy, skanky cat piss are inextricably linked. Maya does not share that aspect with it. It’s just a run-of-the-mill fruity-floral. It’s fine. A touch of cat pee might make it more interesting, though.

Megamare from Orto Parisi is an absolute Atlantean kaiju of a fragrance. A massive, mysterious sea beast, a preternatural creature of divine power, wrapped in radioactive seaweed, rises from the unfathomable depths of an otherworldly ocean trench to surface in the middle of a typhoon. Tsunamis wreak havoc around the globe, saltwater instantaneously soaks every surface, a strange cloud of mossy musk forms, algae blooms, visibility drops to zero within seconds. At the vortex of this calamity is MEGAMARE, a gentle creature cursed with a hulking stature and an immensely briny, brackish odor that can be detected from other planets, other dimensions. It takes in the citizens of the world in a sweeping glance of its kaleidoscopic cyclopean eye and thinks “fucking hell, these humans are garbage” and disappears into the abyss never to be seen again. But its unearthly DNA changed the very essence of the seawater, and from every place a drop fell that day, a strange aromatic blossom appeared. And so history will never forget the vast flowering of judgment, the day of Megamare.

Baccarat Rouge 540 from Maison Francis Kurkdjian is a fragrance that no one ever talks about and that certainly no one’s ever heard of. That’s sarcasm. But I have to pretend that this is a thing that has flown under the radar, or else I’m going to have a hard time reviewing it. I mean how do you talk about a scent like this without saying the same thing a zillion other people have already said? (See that’s a thing about me. You can like my writing. You can love it. You can absolutely despise it. All of those are fine with me. What is *not* fine is when someone says that I sound exactly like someone else. That’s what makes me mad and sad and actually hate myself a little.) What *is* fine, sometimes, is smelling like someone else. Maybe a zillion other someones. This is one of those times. Baccarat Rouge 540 is not a heavy scent, it’s not especially complex or nuanced, and there’s not much in the way of projection. It’s not a masterpiece. It’s not especially unique. Sometimes you don’t want those things, though. You don’t want a weird, challenging, avant-garde artsy scent. Sometimes you want to put on a soft, cozy sweater that has a vague hint of a perfume that you wore last week still clinging to the fuzzed-out neckline. A caramelized spun sugar candy floss half-remembered dream of a scent, with a creamy-clean core of barely detectable cedar and a halo of glimmering jasmine fairy dust. That’s Baccarat Rouge 540. It’s hardly there and there’s not a lot to it. It’s a thoroughly enchanting, and outrageously expensive skin scent, But… it’s good. And sometimes that is good enough.

Zoologist’s Chipmunk is a chipmunk who is a CEO of some mega-corporation that’s actually a front for some shadowy organization that has been around for centuries and whose fanatical leadership is trying to open up a portal to another world and bring forth a demon god whose emergence on earth will usher in the end times. By which I mean it’s a cool, woodsy forest breeze, and something that smells earthy and dry, like the metallic tang of cold rocks, and of the nocturnal furry musk of creatures you wouldn’t want to meet in the dark. There’s nothing warm or sweet or cute or chipmunk-cheeked about it. It smells…ominous, somehow.  These are oddly hollow woods, cursed groves, silent and strange, wherein a twitchy-tailed, beady-eyed, rodent cyborg chipmunk is conducting a mandatory board meeting of imminent doom.

October’s Table from Hexennacht is a collaboration with Alyssa Thorne photography and inspired by a piece of moody floral photography of the same name. From the notes listed, what I immediately pick out is the smoked vanilla and caramelized marshmallow, autumnal spices, kindling branches in the form of a sort of apple-y wood, and soft, honied beeswax, which they note is vegan. This is every bit as lovely and cozy and warm as you would expect, there’s the most interesting and delightful aspect of it that I can’t match to any note, but there’s an underlying something that skews it slightly off. Sitting near a chilled window late in the evening as freezing rain ices the streets outside. The lamp casts a soft glow, you’re wrapped in shawls and blankets, you’ve got a steaming mug of something strong and sweet, and a treasured collection of ghost stories in your lap. You’re ensconced in the comfort and safety of your lovely home…and yet. The wind moans softly through the trees, rattling the branches, skittering their skeletal wooden bones across the roof, like clacking dominoes of the dead. The lights buzz and flicker intermittently, and each time they dim, the shadows in the room lengthen and darken and grow. You realize with a feverish swoon and a start that you’ve been holding your breath and your heart is pounding furiously. In between each throb and thrumming beat is where the haunting riddle of this scent lies.

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A respite from winter’s darkness, with the celebratory twinkles and warm glowing wonders of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s annual Yule collection! See below for my thoughts on some of these lovely, comforting fragrances.

Hildegard’s Cakes of Joy (spelt, nutmeg, clove, and a dollop of honey) I’ve long loved me some Hildie and was super jazzed to see Atlas Obscura post a recipe this past autumn for her “cookies of joy.” I then recalled that I actually own a book of her recipes and remedies and when I peeked inside, sure enough–there’s the recipe! So of course, now that I’ve got the instructions along with an inspirational scent, I think she’s giving me all the signs that I need to make these cookies. The scent itself is that of grainy, honeyed sweetness and it did indeed bring a joyful smile to my face. I’m usually not a fan of nutmeg (I suspect it is harvested from the underside of the devil’s dingleberries) but the spices in this fragrance are so smoothly measured and sifted that I can’t even pick it out. And what began as a rich, baked kitchen scent is eventually suffused with light and radiant warmth, it’s like a stained glass dream of a cookie. As you can see, I did actually make the cookies and quite frankly, they are the best cookies I have ever had in my life.

Pssst…need more Hildegard von Bingen smells in your life? BPAL also offers The Choirs of Angels as part of their Ars Inspiratio collection inspired by works in The Art of the Occult!

The Garden of Shut-Eye Town (lavender twined with passionflower, breeze-touched sways of wisteria, lemon balm, cowslip, poppy, and star-sparkles of chamomile) Every time I sniff this I get something different and then everything I thought I smelled begins to go fractured and unfamiliar. At first, it’s a sort of spiced lavender, but not spices, exactly, more like a well-seasoned salty, peppered lavender. But I also get a soft floral coconutty apricot something-something from it? And also a lemony-ozone musk? There’s a lot going on in Shut Eye Town and it’s all so varied and interesting, I wonder if anyone gets any actual shut-eye. A line from a book I just read has been stuck in my mind recently, “the nest of a hummingbird, high in a hemlock.” For some reason this scent conjures that vision for me.

Gingerbread, Vetiver, and Black Tea at first I thought this was a slice of soft ginger cake and lemony black tea, but the more this wears it becomes a gingery-peppery pfeffernusse cookie with an iced lemon glaze.

Crystal Gazers (white musk and yellow frankincense, black plum, neroli, verbena, and green cognac) A crystalline, sparkling fruity-floral, that dries down to a soft creamy almond musk.

Violet Fog (orris root and white sandalwood bruised by violet petals, champaca attar, and smoked lavender) So, weird story! In early December I posted a photo on Facebook of a cocktail I had created one evening, consisting of the following recipe that I had just made up to go with a new gin I was trying: “Measure with your heart: gin, orgeat, lime, crème de violette, sparkling water, butterfly pea flower tea.” It was lovely and tasty and I christened it a “Violet Fog”. I had no idea that there was soon to be a Violet Fog in the Yule update! Synchronous serendipity through the psychosphere!

Violet Fog the fragrance smells of crushed candied violets, starry midnight ozone, musky darkness, and going in an entirely different direction, here’s a thought. One of my favorite books of poetry is The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan; I feel like Violet Fog is the base from which many of these poems could be aromatically interpreted. There’s something of late-night longing and loneliness wrapped up in this combination of notes that perfectly evokes the sadness and solitude of these poets’ writings.

Sugar Cookies with Extra Sugar there are no notes listed for this one, only that “this perfume is ridiculous, ” and if by that they mean “this perfume is ridiculously incredible” then, ok, I absolutely believe that. In the bottle, it’s a Royal Dansk Danish butter cookie (a combination of the piped vanilla ring and the heavily sugared pretzel-shaped one) but as it wears, it’s less buttery baked good and more a sublime candied vanilla musk. With sprinkles! Sugar Cookie Satyr is a crumbled tin of those cookies combined with feral, virile, earthy musk and ALL of the aphrodisiac after-dark spicy-spices and formed into inappropriate shapes with highly NSFW cake pop molds.

Scientific, Occult, and Inexplicable (The bronze, brass, iron, glass and polished wood of Victorian scientific instruments obfuscated by a swirl of incense and a spatter of ectoplasm) A sense of detached antiquarian speculation that is somehow minty/mentholated-adjacent without any actual mintiness, cool and frosted, with an unsettling metallic tang and an added undertone of unease. This is a scent that causes a weird, unsettling feeling, almost like the olfactory equivalent of infrasound, frequencies so low that they’re inaudible to humans, and which can cause symptoms of uneasiness, fear, and chills down the spine…and which are sometimes linked to perceived paranormal experiences!

Gingerbread Limoncello Is somehow magically dense and chewy AND fluffy. Moist, light, and cakey old-fashioned gingerbread scented with warm spices and a kick of freshly grated ginger for contemporary palates and topped with both a sweet-tart lemon glaze AND velvety clouds of lemon cream cheese frosting.

Alischereshasa (an imp’s worth of Alice stuffed into a 5ml of Rakshasa plopped into Scheherazade’s mother bottle). In the spirit of turduckens and piecakens, the Blaps labbies have metaphorically stuffed imps into 5mls into motherbottles in order to make a series of absurd combinations. I get a lot of rich, fruity-resinous red musk and honied rose from this one, tempered by a milky sandalwood. A rosy-golden-hued fairytale of a fragrance. Separately, you know that invisible imp of the perverse who sits on your shoulder and tells you to do the thing that you know you shouldn’t do? Midwarkust (an imp’s worth of Darkness stuffed into a 5ml of Midway plopped into Lust‘s mother bottle) is an exuberant scent of candied devilry and jammy-juicy ambrosial wickedness and that’s exactly what this diminutive low-level trickster smells like.

Second Sight (lilac-dappled beeswax, champaca smoke, and agarwood) buttery, tangy ether; spreadable honeyed ectoplasm. Something like coconut oil and sour milk? But also a grassy vanilla. So different than I thought this might smell! I feel like this is some sort of precognitive coconut jam, rich and aromatic, and you want to slather it on warm toast, maybe a thick, sweet slice of Japanese milk bread.

Sugarplum Snow White There is definitely a part one and a part two to this scent. It opens with a deep plummy-fruitiness that’s also somehow a bit aquatic. Sort of a saucer of candied plum compote floating in the clear, blue depths of a fountain. End scene. With no preamble, Snow White’s subtly sweet, creamy iced rice milk is present, just a small, simple glass of it with the tiniest dollop of whipped cream on top. No sign of plums or fruit. This really is like two very separate, scents in one! Sugar Plum Snake Oil is quite the opposite in that there is an immediate melding of the glittering Queen of the Kingdom of Sweets with that heady vanilla musk and it evolves into an enchanting spun-sugar-shard incense.

The Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Yule collection of midwinter perfumes are currently live and available for purchase. As this is a limited edition series, sample sizes imps are not available for Yule 2022.

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