I made a little video about getting out of my head when I am feeling bad, and spending time in the kitchen. I hope that you’ll give it a watch! It’s mostly me puttering and clanking spoons, but put me on in the background at a reasonable volume and we can keep each other company while we kitchen witch our crappy feelings away!
Over on the Midnight Stinks TikTok, I shared a gathering of my favorite vanilla scents, as per a commenter’s request. I thought I might share a blogged version as well in order to have a written account for those who are interested!
A forewarning: so as not to be too overwhelmed with possibilities, I gave myself the constraint that any scent I choose must already be found within my perfume cupboard, and it must be something a actually own in a size larger than a sample– which to my thinking at least, means that I have spent enough time with it to think of it as a favorite. Your logic on this might vary, you might have favorites that were love at first sniff, but I’m not here to debate anyone about that. You do your favorite lists your way* and I will do mine my way, so here goes!
*PS this isn’t to say I don’t want to know about your favorite vanillas! Please share in the comments!
• Dior Addict is a billowing cloud of honeyed amber and vanilla, jasmine and orange blossom with creamy tonka bean chiffon sandalwood lace. It’s femme fatale by way of baroque gothic lolita.
• Vanille Insensee is a warm, wispy citrusy vanilla but it’s hard to pinpoint which citrus it is that’s lending a crisp, very mildly juicy aspect, but without any hint of fruit pulp or sourness or even vaguely tart. It’s like a sweet, fresh guest soap and warm towels
• Lea from Calypso St. Barth’s is a, pretty, pillowy perfume of vanilla, musk and almond; it’s not overpowering and as a matter of fact, it’s fairly delicate. Think a simple, unfrosted angel food cake. Wearing a your favorite cozy, worn-in cardigan. This stuff is hard to find and until recently, rumor has it that you could apparently get it from Montaigne Market, but they have closed their online shop. However, I hear whispers if you message them on Instagram you could purchase it in that way.
• Fleur Cachée from Anatole Lebreton is celery and shadows and green seeds and spice pods crushed on cool marble, desiccated bouquets more dust than bloom, and the skeletal, crumbling remains of frosted confections covered in cobwebs. It’s the deeply melancholic Miss Havisham of vanillas
• Tokyo Milk Arsenic has got vanilla salt listed in the notes, which enhances the more interesting aspect of the scent, something unique and green that reminfds me of fresh marjoram with slightly piney, citrusy, and vaguely musty aspects. All of this in turn reminds me of Avon potpourri Christmas ornaments from when I was young, so it feels very nostalgic. This is another one that’s hard to find, but it looks like you may be able to grab a bottle from Flutter PDX.
• Vanille Noire du Mexique is vanilla of dark, moody florals and balsamic resins that smells like the platonic ideal of a hot chocolate but there’s something a bit off-kilter about it like you’re enjoying it in a claustrophobic room with creeping yellow wallpaper, with a friend who has a mysterious green ribbon tied around her throat.
• Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s Snake Oil is a luxuriant molasses-y, musky deeply sugared vanilla incense, blended with dark spices more sacred than culinary. This is a scent that lends to a sense of danger and power, and not for the faint of heart–but rather for a heart-pricked thrice under a full moon right before you take a big dripping bite of it to seal the spell in flesh and blood and death. You’re the dangerous, powerful creature in this scenario and you gotta commit if you’re going to wear this gorgeously potent thing. It looks like Snake Oil is out of stick right now, but this is one of their best-selling scents so I have to imagine it will be back sooner or later. In the meantime, peek in on their site for seasonal releases where they sometimes include Snake Oil variants!
categories: death and dying
A gathering of death-related links that I have encountered in the past month 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.
Previously: August 2020 | August 2019 | August 2018 | August 2017 | August 2016
💀 The Oral History of “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper”
💀 Autism and Grief: What to Do and How to Prepare
💀 Your Pandemic Sadness Is Called ‘Ambiguous Loss’
💀 Refusal to Mourn: In lieu of flowers, send him back
💀 The Best Books to Help You Cope With Death and Dying
💀 In Malibu, a Large Hole Is Being Dug to Contain Your Grief
💀 “It’s Your Funeral!” So Throw Yourself the Best Going-Away Party Ever
💀 Traumatologist on coping with tragedy: Let children feel how they feel
💀 What Is Thanatophobia? Understanding prolonged, excessive fear of death
💀 We Need To Talk About The Starling With Melissa McCarthy On Netflix
💀 Unexpected Influences: Loren Rhoad talks about her new memoir, “This Morbid Life”
categories: unquiet things
Is every second of your last day of vacation an existential slog where you can’t enjoy anything and everything feels pointless, or are you normal?
Just kidding, I know everyone feels like this. (Right? Please tell me I’m not alone!)
Last night I stayed up until 2am finishing a shawl. It’s my third time knitting this pattern and because I love it so much, I wanted an extra special version to keep just for myself. I started watching Brand New Cherry Flavor on Netflix and aside from the name which really grosses me out (it makes me think of gum and/or energy drinks, and the thought of either makes me want to barf) holy wowzers & weirdness, this is an exceptionally fun show. Writer/creatives and dreadful secrets and ooogly body horror and seedy LA magics (a genre unto itself, and one which I adore—I blame Weetzie Bat) and Catherine Keener as the most delicious witchly villain.
Anyway, I figure I’ve got 12 hours left on the countdown clock and I could either sit here in a catatonic state of anxiety or I could pin this shawl out, a task I will curse soundly all the while and detest every second of. But afterward, when I see these saffron strands of stitches stretching in the sun, I know I will be so glad did it.
Later: Okay maybe it actually only took 20 minutes to do this…!
I’ve learned that if there’s something I’m not looking forward to doing, I ask myself, “how can I make this more enjoyable?” So I poured a goblet of something icy and fizzy, I lit a cone of sandalwood incense, and while Lana serenaded me about chemtrails over the country clubs I crawled around and stuck pins in things.
The real MVP here is Diet Coke, if I’m being honest. Imagine a commercial with a brawny construction worker, wiping their sweaty brow with a chilled can of Diet Coke, except it’s creaky, moon-shaped me, and I’m not drinking from a can because I have a weird thing about that. I can’t drink from a bottle, either. I must have a glass, with ice!
Anyway, the rest of my day is now free for whatever and to keep my mind off of going back to work I’m going to write a perfume review about a fragrance I don’t like and I’m going to try not to be mean about it but I might not try very hard.
How do you power through tasks that you’d rather not be doing? What are your preferred ways of taking your mind off of the fact that you must shortly return to the real world after you’ve been on a break? Please share in the comments, if you feel so inclined!
categories: unquiet things
A list of pleasing things stitching the weekend hours together, a lá OG blogger and poet Sei Shōnagun, and inspired by a recent post from poet and word witch Lisa Marie Basile. It’s been a while since I thought about these lists (my last version was 5 years ago!) and it’s always nice to take a moment and reflect on these things.
• reading flowers referred to as: “little sex-crazed jewel boxes”
• coming up with a really toothsome essay idea while eating a sandwich
• a whole day of puttering; doing half a thing here; starting something there; finishing nothing
• frequent visits to the spicy African basil bush beneath the lacy fluff of crepe myrtle, where bumblebees levitate and sing.
• the smell of cardamom, the taste of pearled sugar
• a dream about an octopus caper (?)
• edging closer to the end of a project and drawing out the final pieces to savor that feeling of anticipatory contentment
• little synchronicity magics in books, via friends, a snippet of lyrics
• new whiskey glasses
• aloeswood and cedar incense
• a clap of thunder so loud it rattles the windows terribly and makes the hair on the back of my neck all wiggledy
How to wear an incredibly close approximation of a thing* I wear nearly every single day even when it’s close to 100 degrees outside and my soul feels it’s like dying after a six-month-long August inferno. But seriously, this is my favorite outfit ever. And I love gold jewelry now? Huh!
Tales from the Crypt tee from librastyle // Bondi Born wide leg linen trousers // Black Organic bralette & undershorts from Hopeless Lingerie // Prada hair slide // Dagger cat eye glasses from Valley Eye Wear // Fly London Bani sandals // Frye Lily crossbody bag // The Snake & Moon Ring, Cece Jewellery // Jamie Joseph Indicolite Tourmaline ring // Bittersweets NYC Beyond All Is Abyss ring // What One Was Chain Bracelet from Pyrrha // Monica Vinader Deia hoop earrings // Orly Retrograde nail polish // Rituel de Fille Celestial Sphere Eye Soot in Serpens // Flower Porn from Heretic Parfum
*ok I don’t wear Prada in my hair, but I couldn’t find any version of my Gudetama barrettes to link to! Just imagine they’re there, ok?
Yup. Nailed it. Except pretty much everything I actually have is something slightly different. You get the point!
categories: unquiet things
Hello friends! I hope you’ve enjoyed a lovely summer and even if your vacation plans haven’t gone as you’d liked or maybe if you’ve not even been able to leave the house much at all, I hope you have at least been able to read a good book or two.
As we reach mid-August, I have come to the realization that I’ve still got a lot of summer reading left to get through and not a lot of time before the leap to chilly, spooky autumnal titles, so I thought I might share my reading plans and priorities for over the next month or so over on YouTube.
Here’s a list of the books I’ll be discussing if you are one of those people who likes to look at the menu ahead of time (me too, I’m those people!)
Be Scared of Everything by Peter Counter
A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric Larocca
In That Endlessness, Our End by Gemma Files
Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear by Margee Kerr
Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung
The Scent of Lemon & Rosemary: Working Domestic Magick with Hestia by Raechel Henderson
Sensor by Juni Ito
Can I be real and vulnerable (and maybe a little whingey and cringey and needy and annoying) with you all for a minute here? It’s weird and sad how the things that I put so much work into—blog posts, articles, interviews, videos—get almost nothing in the way of likes or shares or engagement on social media. But then I post something tremendously dumb, that takes zero effort, some silly meme (frogs and night soup, for example) and it blows up. I don’t mean to sound whiny or critical, but…that kinda sucks. For me and everyone who creates something and puts it out there! I can’t be the only one who experiences this?
Those of you who do peek in on my efforts—I thank you from the bottom of my heart. And of course, if you have no interest in my writings, this isn’t meant to guilt you or force you to do something you don’t want to do! But likes and comments and feedback (it doesn’t even have to be glowing!) can be so helpful and supportive and I’d really appreciate it. If you could head over to YouTube and maybe give it a thumbs up, and leave a little comment, that would be so nice! I have been blogging and writing online forever and I’ve quite used to the feeling of shouting into the void but every once in a while I guess I start feeling a little…lonely? Not seen? I don’t know. It’s a mortifying feeling to sit with and to talk about.
To be honest, I’m really embarrassed to have written that. I hate that I’m bothered by it! But…I am. For a long, long time now. My middle sister says “Try not to hate your feelings, if you can help it. Allow yourself to experience them, And move on from them when it feels like it’s time.” So…that’s what I am doing, I guess. Thanks for having read this, if you read this. I appreciate you!
categories: scents & sensibility, unquiet things
A collection of the fragrances I’ve been thinking about and writing about and TikToking about over the past month….
Civet from Zoologist initially smells exactly a creepy fox stole that belong to my late and equally creepy grandmother on my father’s side and which my sisters and I were horrified of when we came across it playing dress-up in her old clothes. There’s a feral mustiness that evokes the dust and musk of clothing that belongs to other people, things they packed up and haven’t worn for a long time. They’re not dirty, but they definitely of someone else’s skin. A balsamic cherry tobacco aspect with notes also reminiscent of artisanal coffee beans described by their copy as “fruity” becomes gradually apparent and what I’m smelling now is not just someone’s old blazer or cardigan, but rather an entire space dedicated to the afterlife of unwanted old clothing. It’s not just skin musk, and moth husks but whiffs of someone else’s perfume from last season, last decade, maybe much further back in time. Civet is a carefully curated thrift store of a scent and while I think I was expecting more of an immersive natural history museum’s earthy, funkiness, it’s still pretty nice. Is it for me? No. But then again, I’ve never had much luck with thrift shops.
Coqui Coqui Coco Coco is probably the most interesting coconut fragrance I have ever encountered. I don’t get suntan oil or pina coladas, which on one hand is refreshing, but on the other hand…I don’t know if I really care for what I do get from it. There’s an acrid camphorous greenness, florals in the form of an oily tuberose, a tea-like champaca flower, and a strange salty, rubbery aspect, that brings to mind slathering yourself in coconut oil on a sweaty summer day and hopping in an inner tube to float down the lazy river in a particularly unhygienic waterpark. This could be a summer scent for someone, I guess? Maybe people who make a stink about their freedoms being impeded when they are asked to vaccinate or wear a mask, and who bring their bratty brood to Adventure Lagoon in the middle of a pandemic and spend the next 12 hours screaming and spitting and peeing on everything. Ok, now that I have said that I have decided that this is the scent of the weirdly scented air freshener at the funeral home where these people’s corpses end up. Wow, this went to a dark place. Wear your masks. Get vaccinated when you have the opportunity. Don’t be the reason your local funeral home smells creepier and more crowded than it actually does. [Note: this is a review very reflective of the time during which it was written, being in August of 2021. It is my dearest wish that in a few short years, no one even knows what I am talking about.]
Moynette Paris is a gracious, creamy white floral that seems both vaguely tropical gardenia and island vanilla but also vaguely cottage garden lily of the valley, and somehow not really enough of one or the other. Despite this, its at its best in its initial stages. As it wears, while it’s still charming, in a mild “oh, you’re still there” kind of way…it becomes a little…Not dirty exactly. But rumpled? Wilted? Disheveled?It recalls for me the book To Kill A Mocking Bird, wherein Scout is talking about the oppressive summer heat in the town of Maycomb, where “Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.” There’s something of clammy skin and powderyness in Moynette that makes me think of that dumb quote about how ladies don’t sweat, they glisten. I get a little peevish if I think about that for too long, and that’s eventually how this perfume makes me feel as well.
BROOD X from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. Having spent most summers of my life in Florida, the buzzing drone of the cicadas provide the ambient murmuring score that haunts the landscape from sunrise to sunset, starting mid-May and sometimes lasting through October. Singing from birth until death, they’re said to once have been humans enchanted by the muses into singing and dancing for so long they stopped eating and sleeping and died without noticing. I think of them as local divinities and the spirits of this place and without their otherworldly thrumming chorus, summer doesn’t sound the same. BPAL’s aromatic ode to the emergence of Brood X is the wordless warble and urgent hymn of dew and roots, creamy floral sugarcane, sweet moss and grassy hay, and an earthy-nutty-musky-smutty hazelnut incense– and if there is any scent you might want to wear for a two week extravaganza of screaming, fucking, and dying, this is the perfume to go out in.
Comme des Garcons Jaisalmer is from the same incense series as Kyoto and Avignon, both of which I reviewed here previously but whereas I really adore those two and connected with them right away, this one is a bit slippery in terms of getting a handle on it. If it were a person, it would be reserved to an uncomfortable degree (and I am fairly reserved, but I think this person is ten times worse than me) and with a sense of humor so dry, no one can ever figure out if they’re joking or not. And then they disappear and you’re not even sure if they were ever in the room with you to begin with or maybe you imagined the whole thing. Jaisalmer is a tremendously peppery affair, with transparent woody notes, and a fleeting dusty cardamom aspects that’s surprisingly whimsical considering the restrained nature of this scent, but it’s also quite fleeting. As a matter of fact, overall, it’s a fragrance fairly it’s ephemeral in nature, so I would encourage one to spritz with abandon and get to know it, if it will ever allow itself to become known.
I recall that I really loved the sample of i Profumi di Firenze’s Ambre de Nepal I got 15 years ago and I decided to splurge on a full bottle last month. I tell you what: if nothing else, finally writing reviews on all the fragrances I own is an exercise in both recognizing and reconciling with myself how much my tastes have changed over the years. When I recently smelled this out of the box, I was immediately like, wow man, this is a real ice cream sandwich of a scent. As if you took an ancient chunk of bronzed, powdery amber resin and churned it up with rock salt, whole milk, fresh cream, and about 50 vanilla bean pods– which you’d probably have to take out a small loan for because those things aren’t cheap. And then you baked up some really squidgie brown sugar blondies with a hint of cardamom, cut them into uneven rectangles because precision is not your strong point and your glasses prescription is outdated, and then you piled your creamy frozen amber confection between two of those lopsided cookies. But you immediately wrapped them up in the freezer because let’s face it, you don’t really like sweets anymore, so why did you make this in the first place? Much like those imaginary ice cream sandwiches, now hidden behind a bag of frozen peas for eternity, this perfume probably won’t see the light of day for a long time.
Winter Nights from Dasein (out of stock) has long been a favorite of mine but I’ve struggled with how to talk about it. On the surface, it feels very similar to the treetop spiderwebs and seething silver sparks of the stars blinking in the vast darkness above the midnight blooming forest that I smell in Norne from Slumberhouse. It *is* similar to that, but I have to think about it and talk about it in different terms. It’s both the glitter of crushed emeralds and void of black tourmaline shards. If you’re a Magic the Gathering enthusiast, this fragrance is a green/black deck. The unbridled verdancy of monstrous plants and coniferous land cards that enter the battlefield tapped, alongside the option to bring all of your zombies and undead beast out of the graveyard. If none of that means anything to you, it’s a smoky cardamom cola with a dash of fir and hemlock bitters, that makes you feel like a witchly mixologist in a swanky speakeasy deep in the woods where even if you knock thrice and whisper tree-ish to the pine, the door might not open to you if it doesn’t sense the sylvan vining darkness in your heart.
Myrrh Casati from Mona di Orio opens as a sophisticated boozy cola cocktail. And while the ubiquitous rum and coke may not ring your bell as an especially high-class libation, imagine an offbeat, extravagant artisan’s interpretation of the soft drink, a concoction created with luxury materials and stellar quality essences of cinnamon, lime, lemon, orange, coriander, vanilla and nutmeg, the citrus and spices parceled out in surprising proportions and embellished with a generous flourish of pink pepper. Resinous, peppery, and effervescent, casting a spicy shadow in an art deco champagne coupe, this may have been served at a surreal dinner party hosted by an eccentric Italian heiress greeting her guests in pearls, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a fur coat with nothing underneath. She’ll whisper to you later in the evening that the secret ingredient was a scintilla of belladonna before introducing you to her menagerie of strange pets and conducting an impromptu seance. Drugged by beauty, weirdness and also maybe actual drugs, you spend a night like no other and awake with the taste of cardamom and licorice on your tongue, a veil of incense in your hair, and a necklace of love bites at your throat.
Tom Ford Soleil Blanc is a weird one. But it’s also …not? I’m having a hard time reconciling this. Imagine if you will, Dior’s Poison. Or, at least the melancholic honey-stewed, midnight-harvested orange blossoms and jasmine flowers portion of it. This delicate decoction is imported through a complicated interdimensional shipping conglomerate to a dazzling quasi-tropical paradise resort on an alien world, possibly like that seen in Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets. As you watch a colossal cerulean sunset through your sophistical glass fishbowl breathing apparatus, you enjoy an ambrosial indulgence brought to your table by a slender, iridescent being: built on a base of the lavish honeyed florals of those sumptuous earth-imports and embellished with a citrusy pineapple cognac, drizzled with warm vanilla orchid syrup, and topped with a dollop of whipped cream infused with pistachio and heliotrope. Which feels completely extra but also… essential. So the short answer is this is a Poison and Brazilian Bum Bum cream sundae. I always appreciate a scent that feels both somewhat normal, like the kind of gift you might receive from your conservative, straight-laced Virgo mother-in-law but also a little off-kilter, like you can wear it to a meeting of your furry sci-fi satanist bookclub. Not that Soleil Blanc really conjures either of these scenarios, but I guess I just mean it’s sort of the best of both worlds. Maybe the best of all worlds. It’s a treat in any world.
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categories: unquiet things
I mostly think TikTok is a bunch of nonsense and massive amounts of fremdschämen and I will die before I ever do a stupid dance, lip-sync to a tired movie cliche, or relay an idiotic anecdote or keto recipe in a twee robot lady voice, BUT I just heard someone talk about trauma in a way that I’d never heard before and I will never forget.
How it’s not an illness but an injury, that it’s not our fault but it’s our responsibility to heal ourselves, and in this way, we hopefully do not bleed on people who didn’t cut us.
These are probably not novel concepts and the person was probably paraphrasing from something they read as opposed to sharing a personal epiphany, but whatever–I take inspiration whenever and wherever I can.
And if even one small helpful, useful, or valuable idea can be gleaned from such a cesspool of dumbness today, well, I bet there will be one tomorrow, too. Sometimes I think these sites and apps are designed to make us stupid(er) and (more) complacent, and I get such a thrill out of the people who cheat the system and do something smart with them.
And listen, I am not looking to shit on your good time. If you enjoy whatever, enjoy it. My opinion of your favorite thing means nothing. I’m just some person throwing some words into the void.
But if you’ve got some inspirational, informational, or edifying TikTok accounts that you learn from or which you find motivational or thought-provoking, please share them in the comments!