What do a marshmallow pipecleaner Tuxedo Mask, Darkman the Lepidopterist, a cobalt devil girl from Mars with her in-utero cannibalized twin emerging at the wrist, and a molten gold icon with a sword stabbed through its heart but still looking fabulous, all have in common?
Aside from all stalking the runway at Robert Wun S/S26, they’re also visions only this designer could have brought to life. And at the very heart of this show is staying true to your vision, no matter how strange or impossible. No matter how hard the world works to convince you it’s pointless, to question its purpose, to reduce it to product.
Robert Wun orchestrated his Spring 2026 couture collection as three acts of a designer’s reckoning. Library gave us black and white restraint, precise forms of grandiose ideas delicately rendered from his student sketchbooks. Luxury confronted us with the uncomfortable truth about value, when pure ideals meet crass commerce—crystal masks obscuring the face, gowns tailored like high-jewelry display stands. And finally, Valor: mythology and metallic armor, swords piercing through the body, a celestial ballgown holding the entire cosmos.
Against the tumult and chaos of a digital thunderstorm, he revealed the importance of dreaming when dreams seem impossible, of holding onto what made you want to create in the first place when the world pressures you to compromise, of fighting for art in a world that questions whether art matters at all.
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Kolomon Moser, plate from “Die Quelle” portfolio. 1900
Arielle Shoshana x Michelle Visage Wednesday Helena Blavatsky on a wilderness retreat, divining the eternal mysteries through campfire ash with a spindly stalk of celery. Occult celery, theosophical vegetable. Investigating unexplained laws of Nature, the truth within the bitter ribs. Humble soup stock vegetation as messenger between worlds. Smoky pinewood/cedary outdoor incense curling around paradoxical aqueous/empyreumatic heart, enrobed in sweet, camphorous honey, cinched with crisp herbaceous green strings. Smoked offerings minus the charred flesh, channeling divine wisdom through fibrous green wands. Finding eternal essence in a produce bin bonfire, whether we call it God or Nature or High Priestess of Camp Celery. An extremely peculiar and exceedingly perfect conduit of otherworldly revelations and one of the most unique things I have ever added to my perfume collection.
Maison Crivelli Iris Malikhân The opening from the sprayer releases something akin to a decrepit lightning bolt locked in a dusty crypt. Sharp, electric decay, musty current, moth-eaten voltage. Then…a bit of shadowy aromatic lycanthropy, and it’s again what I thought I loved. A phantasmagoric zoetrope, a being resembling a Maria Germanova-type, shapeshifting through theatrical roles, a noble lady draped in jewels, a swaggering pirate, a beggar woman cloaked in rags, an avant-garde fairy in Stanislavski’s embodiment of The Blue Bird by Maurice Maeterlinck. Ghostly photographs, the specters haunting antique cartes de visite. At turns, powdery, leathery, metallic, vegetal, austere, sophisticated. Moscow Art Theatre witch-queen caught mid-transformation, glamorous and gloomy, enigmatic and a bit unsettling.
Obvious Parfums Un Musc Haruka Tenou energy, chilly sporty musk. Willowy sapphic athletics. Crisp androgynous elegance in fluttering white tennis shorts. Ginger brightness competing against vetiver earthiness, canceling each other out, whittling down to dank earthworm glow. A weakened Sailor Uranus attack – Minor Phosphorescent Subterranean Flicker! or Weakened Subsoil Incandescence Rustle! or something like that! Muted radiance, cool, composed, understated power…or not even power exactly. Powered up, but on a dimmer switch. (Somewhat similar to my thoughts on Glossier You, but more singularly Uranus – no Neptune softness here, just that elegant solo energy.)
EPC Velvet IncenseThe melted-down essence of an entire perfume collection in a cauldron – harmonized, reduced, cohesive. Waterhouse’s The Magic Circle, that vaporous pillar of smoke rising from glowing depths, flames crackling with magic and power. In my book The Art of Fantasy, I admired this work, noting the conspiracy of ravens looking on with menacing curiosity from beyond the symbolic ring, the landscape glowering claustrophobically with ominous intent – but inside the circle, equilibrium. Ambery cedar exhaling cool, crisp pepperiness – not “spiced” heat but sharp, bright, almost mentholated edge cutting through resinous warmth. Muted, velveteen ambery-sandalwoody sweetness, thick and plush, wrapping around that cedar spine like soft fabric pulled taut. Everything finding its place in the spell. My perfume cabinet already smells like this … which means I don’t need this fragrance… but also means I absolutely understand its appeal.
Arquiste NocturnalityA canned neon energy drink cocktail crushed under the heel of a Jeffrey Campbell boot circa 2013, slick neoprene shine and sculptural platform weight, sticky fluorescent syrup pooling underneath. A stiff pleather jacket draped nearby, late 90s cheap-chic sheen, rubbery and glossy and fruity, an early-evening synthetic glamour. Fluorescent shimmer catching light. Acidic citrus bruised against latex. Chemical gleam mixing with something vaguely floral, a sharp luminosity, its glow all edges. The fruity bits abandon ship, no goodbye, just gone home, shimmied up trellises and through cracked suburban windows, meanwhile, the real party starts. What remains is animalic and feral, musks and patchouli sprawling like they own the place, earthy and musky and undeniably alive, and a little undead in that unsettling way that makes you unsure whether you’re smelling something or becoming something. It smells like Dead and Beautiful, a 2021 Chinese vampire film about five gorgeous, obscenely wealthy friends so jaded by excess that they embark on increasingly extravagant and dangerous expeditions just to feel something. After a disorienting encounter with a shaman deep in the jungle, they awaken transformed, vampires…or perhaps the spell merely reveals what was already festering beneath the Valentino and the cheekbones. Cedar grounding the animalic chaos, cool and austere, against the earthy, confrontational patchouli. Something resinous underneath, a smoky, slightly ritualistic quality, like witnessing something you shouldn’t in the dark, and then pretending you haven’t been changed by it. The aromatic evidence of what happens when beautiful people do beautiful, terrible things. By the end, it’s all leather-bound mysteries and the ghost of neon bleeding through, that downtown after-hours underbelly where the loss of self in intoxication becomes indistinguishable from revelation, clinging to skin like a confession or a curse.
FZOTIC Ummagumma Have you ever been eating chocolate, maybe some single-origin, maybe Ecuadorian chocolate, so intensely dark and aromatically bitter with like zero percent cocoa butter and no sugar? It really doesn’t even taste like chocolate anymore, it’s a bit punitive actually (but in an okay way?) And you thought, hey, you know what this chocolate needs is a few grinds, twenty or so, from the teakwood pepper grinder, spicy and textured and gritty. A handful of cedar shavings, bright and dry and papery. A new pair of high-quality, stiff leather boots. I certainly never thought that either, so I guess that makes two of us, and shame on us for our profound lack of vision. Because this is both rich and austere, intense and accessible, and there’s an additional salty balsamic smokiness that makes it really, really interesting.
Aphrodite’s Breakfast Creamy French toast from inside a lilac fairytale, cardamom-spiced, lost in the raspberry wood, a flask of green tea on your belt, astringent and clarifying.
Weighted Blanket A tiny creature hollowing out a plump, moist, sticky date and lining it with vanilla-scented cottony spider webs. Cozy but insular. Intimate and contained. A cocoon of richly spiced-sweetness.
Comfort What is the collective noun for a movement of moth wings? A tremor? A pulse? A dusting of something precious catching the light, an herbal sarsparilla coolness, a shimmer of vanilla powder, a half-remembered breath of spice from the threadcount of dreams.
Dolce Far Niente POV: You are the brittle cookie, strange-spiced-sweet and chocolate-laced, inside the silver house-shaped tin. Parting the embossed curtains, against the glass panes of an aluminum row house, you watch a middle-aged person creak cross-legged under the tree, bathed in 80s Christmas bulbs, electric sharp, plastic-bright. The lights catch the tin’s edges, refract the nostalgia and crystalize to crumbs. a mass-produced sweetness that tastes like wonder and sugar and joy.
Glimmers Overgrown satyr sauna, shadows of warmth in wintry desolation. Cloven hooves in the dust. Dry spicy kindling, feral musk lingering in the cold air. Pine needles scattered across the floor, cedar beams dark and skeletal. A phantom fire burning long ago.
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…As one grew bright as is the sun, So coal black grew the elder one…
In Schiaparelli’s Spring 2026 couture, Daniel Roseberry presents The Scorpion Sisters. One might imagine a murder ballad threaded through it—the bright one in transparent chiffon, a bustier where the scorpion tail is embroidered in delicate bas-relief, almost childlike, held festooned with an innocence of posies. The dark one draped in black crin and chantilly, predatory, silver needles bristling, white lace ruffles like innocence cloaking something venomous.
What jealousy lives between them? Which one drowns the other—the one who learned to sting, or the one who learned to shine? Roseberry doesn’t tell us. He just places them side by side on the runway. Daydream and nightmare, the poison and the cure.
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We’re having our annual (though not always guaranteed) spate of cold weather – some nights dipping into the 20s – and I am luxuriating in the opportunity for coziness. Florida doesn’t give us much chance for proper bundling, for heavy blankets and hot baths that steam up the bathroom, for the kind of evenings where you sink into soft clothes and don’t emerge until morning. I will say, though, that Jacksonville (being a little further north than where we were previously near Daytona) seems to provide a few more chilly days? But anyway, when the cold arrives, I seize it completely.
Here are five things making these chilly nights perfect.
BED LINENS
I finally curated the perfect combination of colors and textures for my bed, and climbing into it every night feels deeply satisfying. Earthy pastels – sage and plum and slate, colors I don’t have a proper name for but that feel grounded and calm without being boring.
The linen sheets have that particular weight and coolness that only gets better with washing, the kind that makes you want to slip between them even in summer. The quilt has pick stitching, tiny running stitches creating geometric patterns across the surface, texture you can feel when you run your hand over it. I’d been looking for something with a sashiko vibe, and this is…kinda it? Another blanket, because I am a bit extra: a paisley handblock-print cotton quilt. and the gauzy duvet on top, light but warm, slightly wrinkled in that French country-house way.
Without trying to sound dramatic, or like I’ve cured cancer or something, it took years to get here, trying different combinations, replacing things one piece at a time until everything coordinated without looking coordinated. Now, when I pull back the covers at night, the whole setup looks exactly right and feels even better, substantial without being heavy, soft without being precious.
LIGHTING
These plug into the wall and look like little candle sconces, flickering LED flames that cast warm shadows up the wall. They’re not just for night; I leave them on during gray afternoons too, that gentle glow making everything feel softer around the edges.
I also have a diffuser/dehumidifier (seen in the featured image for this blog post, on my nightstand) that I’ve pretty much totally repurposed. I never use it for humidity or essential oils; instead, I run the white noise function, a droning, celestial chanting sound that my brain finds deeply soothing, and keep the changing color mood lighting on all day. It cycles through soft glows, lavender fading into pale blue into soft amber, shifting the room’s atmosphere without being too bright or wild.
The sconces give just enough light to move around at night without jarring you awake, and together with the diffuser’s slowly changing colors, the rooms feel like they’re breathing.
COLORING BOOKS
It took me a long time to get into coloring. The idea of it made me stupidly anxious, all that pressure to stay in the lines, to make good color choices, to not mess it up. But I kind of get it now, the appeal of structured creativity where you don’t have to generate ideas from nothing. The Flower Year by Leila Duly is such a treat for the eyes, full of intricate Victorian-style etchings of flowers and birds and butterflies, each page different enough that it never feels repetitive. There are full-page illustrations and double-page spreads, little collections of single flowers with their botanical names, quotes about the seasons scattered throughout.
I work on it in the evenings, a few pages at a time, and it quiets my brain in ways that reading sometimes doesn’t. Although funny enough, I listen to horror novel audiobooks while I am doing it, hehehe!
COMFY EVENING CLOTHES
The softest greige hoodie from the Asheville Botanical Garden, heavy Adidas sweatpants that are two sizes too big, and my favorite socks in the world: the Girlfriend Socks from Le Bon Shoppe. They’re thick and cozy, crew length, perfect for padding around the house, and I think I have every color they sell.
This is not a pretty, glamorous, or sexy evening getup, but I truly do not give a shit. When the temperature drops, I want to disappear into soft fabric and not think about how I look.
HOT BATHS
I wrote about this recently, how I became a bath person seemingly overnight, how the scalding water makes me think of that Russian plumber’s observation about women preparing for Hell. The ritual of it has become essential to my evenings. Candles, magnesium flakes, onsen essential oils, bath milk, water as hot as I can stand it. I emerge red as a lobster, steaming, and immediately into those oversized sweatpants.
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Most nights around 11 p.m., I’m watching a stranger’s scalp get massaged in extreme close-up. Fingers working through wet hair, nails scratching patterns across skin, the soft scrape of a wooden comb. Or I’m watching someone’s spine getting adjusted, the therapist’s hands finding each vertebra, that moment of pressure before the crack, the satisfying pop of joints realigning. Or a woman named WhispersRed is tucking an invisible person (me) into bed, smoothing imaginary blankets with deliberate strokes, whispering that everything’s going to be okay while fabric rustles and pillows get fluffed.
Sometimes it’s ear cleaning videos where tiny tools scrape and tap inside silicone ears. Sometimes it’s someone slowly brushing their hair for thirty minutes, each stroke amplified to an almost obscene degree. I cycle through my favorites, zenheads, tokyo asmr massage, mondragon chiropractic, itsblitzz’s gentle massage work, asmr twix, little me carmie. I guess I’m hunting for the off-switch my brain doesn’t have, and these videos are the closest thing I’ve found.
I’ve been doing this for years now. ASMR videos, those autonomous sensory meridian response tingles that start at your scalp and travel down your spine when you hear certain sounds.
A lot of ASMR is someone tapping their fingernails on objects for twenty minutes straight, or whispering directly into a microphone in a dark room. That doesn’t work for me. I need the sounds to be part of something, incorporated into an activity. The click of scissors trimming hair. The squelch of shampoo being worked into a lather. The snap of a fresh towel being unfolded. The rhythmic scrape of a pumice stone on a heel. Sounds that happen because someone is doing something – usually care or grooming related – not just performing sounds for their own sake (which I’ll agree here with the haters, this is actually kinda annoying and obnoxious.)
Then, a few months ago, I stumbled across a clip from John Waters’ Serial Mom while scrolling late at night. I am pretty sure you know the scene: Beverly Sutphin is watching her son’s friend’s family through their window, eating a roast chicken dinner. The camera zooms in on wet mouths tearing at greasy meat, lips smacking, tongues working over chicken skin, throats swallowing audibly. Sounds designed to be absolutely revolting.
And I thought: …wait. I’m kind of into this?
That’s when things started to click, and all the lightbulbs went on, all at once. A cascade of realization!
Those Serial Mom sounds were the same ones putting me into a trance every night. And then: oh god, how many horror movie sounds had I been responding to this way my entire life? Freddy’s finger knives scraping metal railings. Michael Myers’ breathing behind his mask. Shower curtain rings sliding. The rhythmic tick of a clock in an empty house. Every creaking floorboard in every haunted house.
Horror had been doing ASMR before ASMR had a name.
Once I saw the connection, I couldn’t unsee it. I started making mental lists of horror sounds that gave me tingles and began to wonder if other horror fans experienced this too… or if I was just weird and freaky? I started thinking about how horror directors have been manipulating intimate audio space for decades, long before YouTube ASMRtists figured out the same trick. And that’s when I knew I had an article for Rue Morgue!
P.S. The header image for this post is from a 2018 video I wish I had stumbled across when I was doing research for the piece – Lucy Hale (Aria from Pretty Little Liars, though if you already recognized her I probably didn’t need to tell you that) doing ASMR recreations of horror movie sounds to promote Truth or Dare. She stabs a pumpkin for Halloween, types “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” on a typewriter for The Shining, rubs lotion on her hands for Silence of the Lambs. PLL AND ASMR! Total dream come true! Someone at W Magazine understood the connection between horror and ASMR way before I did. Dangit!
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I have put together a truly elite, like God-tier (some kind of god, anyway)-level marinade this month. Occult, arcane, infernal. Incense and resins out the wazoo. A bit of celery and moss. A lot of shadow and dark, dark poetry. All the good things.
When I was writing The Art of the Occult, I wanted to balance the inherited iconography and established visual language of Western esotericism with work that felt genuinely outside that vocabulary. Alison Blickle was one of those voices.
Cloak, Alison Blickle
The Visitor, Alison Blickle
What struck me immediately was a sumptuous fashion editorial sensibility threading through ritual and ceremony. Women in carefully composed spaces, draped in patterned garments, surrounded by carved faces and vessels, and sculptural forms. Gold, jewel tones, intricate patterns catching light. Textile with actual weight and drape.
Her rendering gives you access to their consciousness. You read them as thinking, feeling beings, not as symbols or poses. These rituals carry the visual richness usually reserved for haute couture or classical painting. The paintings hold actual movement, light, shifting bodies, gestures between the women, something being passed or witnessed. Something shifting.
I’ve been watching her work shift ever since.
Medusa about to turn all of the men on the internet to stone, Alison Blickle
Stone Phone, Alison Blickle
Attack, Alison Blickle
Slaying, Alison Blickle
In the years that followed, her work deepened into that mythology, but something shifted in the temperature. The rituals became aggressive. The women gathered not just in ceremony, but in violence—explicit, visceral. Time’s Up shows a man with a razor at his throat, women surrounding him, their hands on him, documenting it. Not metaphorical or ambiguous. The violence is right there on the canvas.
Then Medusa. The aggression continues, but the weapon changes. A phone. Women arranged around the figure holding it, their presence itself becoming the instrument. The image becomes what dismantles. There’s a momentum building through these works, ritualistic, violent, mediated, destruction through curation. And somewhere in that accumulation, it felt like something was reaching its limit. A saturation of sorts. Like the conversation had said what it needed to say.
And then the work changed again.
Day Trip, Alison Blickle
Hilltop Meadow Experience, Alison Blickle
Blickle now imagines a world where nature has gone extinct. Beautiful, metallic-clad figures, uncanny robo-ladies and virtual reality Franken-people step into artificial digital landscapes. They’ve never encountered the natural world, and perhaps they’re even constructed in a way that prevents them from fully accessing or experiencing it, real or not.
Are the glittery tears because they are totally overcome with the everythingness of it, or do they fall because the longing for transcendence is unsatisfied, in the presence of what they’ve been seeking, yet estranged from it? Here is the possibility of a whole different kind of world, a whole different relation to it. But is that even possible for them?
Ladies Night, Alison Blickle
Night Lake, Alison Blickle
Snow Hike, Alison Blickle
If my thoughts sound scattered here, contradictory, jumping between different observations, it’s because Blickle’s work doesn’t summarize neatly for me. With some artists I can feel the vision immediately and explain it in a few sentences. But hers keeps moving. Each phase offers something different. The rituals, the violence, the estrangement. The same impulse appears throughout: transformation, reaching toward something. But the vision changes so radically that you can’t just say what it “is.”
And maybe that’s kinda the point. The whole thing, the making, the looking, the living with art. Real work moves, it lives. Being alive, it changes. Not exactly the work itself, but the fact that following an artist through real transformation means you’re always catching up. Never quite pinning it down.
To make the same work over and over, the work that was working, that work that people understood…I think perhaps that’s how your vision begins to die. Not dramatically or with great fanfare; it just gets smaller and smaller until there’s nothing alive in it anymore. Blickle doesn’t allow for that to happen. She moves on. Releases what she’s done with after she’s given voice to it, wrung the truth from it, explored it to its limits.
Because the alternative is a slow suffocation, a fossilization, a turning to stone. There’s no staying still. That’s what Blickle’s work insists on. That’s what she’s made me see. Evolve or die. Make some goddamn art about it.
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When I was planning the final page layouts for The Art of Fantasy, I had a specific vision in mind. The chapter in question (and I thought the perfect one to end with) is titled How To Save The World, and I imagined it full of heroes, those paragons and protectors, carrying out their dynamic deeds and performing extraordinary feats.
Whether via the gravitas of a work of classical art, a fate fixed immovably in the sculpt of a stone, or in the contemporary mythology of the pages of a comic book, we identify with characters and archetypes that strive for greatness, we grow as they grow, and through them we see the potential for change in ourselves and the world around us. The fact that practically every culture has stories of heroes is very telling about the collective mindset of us humans as a whole – that the hope for and existence of a hero satisfies something deeply held within us.
The emergence of these champions, how they evolve and grow and inspire us along the way, the completion of their story – and the belief that it could be our story too, we could be heroes! – fulfills an emotional need that everyone of us clings to.
Under the Gaze of the Glorious, Andy Kehoe
The mainstays and conventional heroes are all there. What interested me most, though, was exploring visuals that challenged the familiar narrative of what heroism looks like.
On the second-to-last page, Tino Rodriguez answered that call with color and growth, with flowers blooming from blood, with transformation and healing made visible. His answer was jubilant.
But on the opposite page, on the final page, is Andy Kehoe.
The Art of Fantasy (interior) L: Tino Rodriguez // R: Andy Kehoe Art
Together Through The Shifting Tides, Andy Kehoe
Andy Kehoe’s forests are a different world. Darker and stranger. His creatures inhabit midnight landscapes rendered in deep blues and purples, shadows that are not empty but full of presence. And woven through that darkness: kaleidoscopic color. Feverish sunsets and neon black-light eclipses. Moss-green rocks and plum velvet hilltops and periwinkle mists.
Luminous skies of swirling celestial pageantry, heralding impending destruction, creation, revelation! The beauty is eerie, unsettling, living alongside the darkness. Those sunsets are radiant and infinite, but the forests are still haunted.
His figures are small, impossibly small, against this grandeur. Sometimes alone. Sometimes in pairs, two figures standing together in the face of something vast and unknowable, witnessing together what neither could face alone.
Under The Glow Of Anomaly, Andy Kehoe
Kehoe builds a persistent forest-world across his pieces, a mythology hushed and wild, that grows and deepens. You encounter recurring motifs and figures across canvases, as if you’ve wandered into a world with complete lives beyond the frame. It’s not illustrating a fixed story. It’s creating a space where you could emotionally live, where you recognize yourself in their smallness and solitude.
The tension between the creature’s gentle rendering and the emotional gravity of what they’re experiencing—I believe that’s where the essence of the work lives. Between sorrow and terror and wonder, occupying the same moment.
The Approach, Andy Kehoe
If you do a bit of digging on the internet, you can learn the conventional details of Kehoe’s life and studies. But I prefer his version. According to him, he was raised by iguanas on the Galapagos Islands after his merchant father was killed by pirates. He was a forest demon in Romania with a beloved beetle farm. A horse brigand in Dublin. The stories we tell about ourselves shape the worlds we inhabit. And so his paintings are real in the same way his origin story is real: emotionally true, spiritually resonant, more authentic than fact.
Lost Revery, Andy Kehoe
“Prismatic Goth,” he calls himself. When you look at his paintings, you see what he means. The midnight forests glow. Shadows are full and luminous. A cosmic sky breaks into infinite color, illuminating landscapes both devastating and wondrous.
You enter these forests seeking something you couldn’t name, but have always hoped in your heart, and you find it there: recognition that others have inhabited this same space, standing in the light and the darkness simultaneously, holding both. And this recognition matters profoundly because it assures something true about what it means to exist, to witness, to stand present to both the beautiful and the desolate without flinching.
Not conquering or overcoming or winning. Just this: I’m here. I see you. I’m standing beside you, tiny and trembling, in the face of the annihilating…and that it’s the being here that matters.
Inherent Tranquility, Andy Kehoe
This is what drew me to place his work on that final page. The creatures in his forests are heroes not because they overcome anything, but because they remain present to both the light and the darkness, to their own vulnerability and the vastness surrounding them. They see and are seen. They persist in a world that’s beautiful and indifferent. And they do it without armor, without pretense, just with the quiet awareness of their own small existence in something much larger.
Together In The Maelstrom, Andy Kehoe
What does heroism look like when you strip away spectacle? What does it mean to save a world when saving involves simply bearing witness, standing present?
I keep coming back to one of my favorite quotes in cinema: “I’m glad to be with you, Samwise Gamgee. Here, at the end of all things.”
Kehoe’s paintings conjure this for me—creatures carrying the weight of loss and darkness, standing in light they didn’t create and can’t control, present to it anyway. Small, brave acts of witness that you are glad to be part of.
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I had such a good time with this year’s Yule collection. These scents gave me everything: spectral encounters, Wes Anderson scripts, Thomas Dambo trolls, haunted dolls, and at least two occult coffee shop romances. To share some of that joy, I’m hosting an Instagram giveaway for every single scent reviewed here. Head over to my Instagram for details on how to enter.
One Has To Be Careful (toasted oats and clover honey, crushed lemon verbena, wild carrot leaf, and white tea poured with exacting care. A dab of condensed milk on a clean spoon, a faint rustle of vetiver) You’re having a peaceful morning, enjoying your elevenses, minding your own business, and living quietly as one does when you glance out the window and there’s your weirdo neighbor again. Full setup this time: gimbal rig, ring light positioned to catch the morning sun, lavalier mic clipped to their embroidered waistcoat. They’ve arranged a tableau on their hobbit-hole’s front step – bowl of heritage grain toasted oats, bunches of fresh carrot greens still dirt-speckled, pot of fresh, lemony verbena tea steaming invitingly. “Good morning, Shire fam! Welcome back to my channel. Today we’re doing my cozy morning routine – very clean hobbit aesthetic, very second-breakfast-core.” Take after take, adjusting the angle, moving the honey pot three centimeters left. “This heritage oat situation has been such a game-changer for my wellness journey, link to the mill in my description, don’t gatekeep!” The whole scene smells genuinely wholesome despite the production: toasty grains, fresh-pulled vegetables, proper tea poured with care. They grew those carrots themselves. The oats are from their own stores. They might be ridiculously mugging for the camera, but you can’t fake roots that deep. You smile ruefully and help yourself to another slice of seed cake. Maybe a barley scone too. It’s a long time til afternoon tea!
The Woodland So Wild (vanilla bourbon, cream peony, and white carnation enveloped in a warm, protective fortress of tonka, white cedar, orris root, red amber, and leather) A memory you can’t explain the significance of, where nothing happened but everything felt inevitable and true. Late afternoon, winter, pulled over on some rural highway to watch the sunset. Purple streaking through grey, the sky bruised and soft, every shade of twilight from plum to dove, from amethyst to ash. A cardboard cup from a small-town artsy café, steamed milk infused with flowers, vanilla syrup frothed and foaming. A scarf that smells faintly of perfume, worn three days ago when the trip began. The woods beyond the guardrail are bare, sanded smooth by wind and cold, no angles or edges. Breathing winter air through cabled wool stitches, once dense and taut, now relaxed and shaped to our skin. For reasons you’ll never articulate, this moment brands itself into your soul as important. Years later, you’ll catch this scent and be back on that shoulder, cup warming your hands, light failing, everything soft and rounded and impossibly tender. Impossible that it ever happened at all.
Gloomily, Gloomily (soft grey musk, pink thistle, lavender ash, tea leaves, pale iris, grey lilac, and rain-soaked moss) “3 AM/awakened by a sweet summer rain/ Distant howling /of a passing /southbound coal train.” Jim White’s low, laconic narration, Aimee Mann’s sweet echoing lullaby. “Was I dreaming, or was there someone just lying here/ Beside me in this bed?” Lavender’s herbal whisper, threaded with cool grassy thistle. Clean linen, powdery soap, freshly laundered pillowcases, cotton worn thin and shaped to a body that doesn’t feel like yours anymore, it hasn’t in a while. Hiss and hum, signal loss between stations, the fuzzy half-awake feeling where you can’t tell what’s real and what’s dreamed. Every certainty you built your life on dissolves into white noise and snow. The quiet crisis of middle age, waking in the dark and realizing all your convictions were just incomplete pictures, inadequate attempts to understand. Everything you think you know is just static on the radio.
The Donkey’s Tail gift with purchase of Gloomily, Gloomily (a beribboned strip of French lavender, bourbon vanilla, silver thistle, grey musk, pink silk, and well-loved grey cotton) I don’t want to write a review for this, I only want to tell you this smells like an extremely fuckin’ haunted doll and also that I want twenty bottles of it. But that’s not fair, and it is also a bit lazy. So:
You dream of someone crying. soft and persistent as rain on wool.
At the antique stall, “Mourning keepsake,” the card said. “Unknown provenance.”
Her head, porcelain. Her dress, pewter silk and blush-faded ribbons, lavender stems worked through cotton.
Someone loved her into being. Someone, heart-rent,
hands shaking with grief.
Heavier than she looked. Inside, something whispered and later, the seam gave way.
Funeral roses. Brown now, petals ground to dust, packed tight into her body like prayers into a throat.
Tell me— when you wake from the dream of her crying, what do you do with all this sadness
this grief that isn’t yours?
Dismembered Noggin Bouquet(wild pansies, white honey, and frothy cream) Roses preserved in amber resin, petals crystallized to honeyed bronze. Estate sale jewelry boxes lined with yellowed velvet, gilt-edged brooches oxidized to a dusky patina. Caramelized corsage, barley sugar twists and horehound drops, unctuous burnt-sugar varnish. Your grandmother’s nosegay pressed between the pages of a 1950s etiquette book, ribbons still faintly fragrant with Helene Curtis Spray and the face powder she wore to Wednesday night bridge club, way back when getting dressed up called for gloves and a little hat, even if you were only going three blocks over to Maureen’s house for that undrinkable coffee everyone politely finished because that’s just how you did.
The Erl King’s Pale Daughter (moonlit mist clinging to skin the color of ghost lilies, pearlescent and cold, a spectral musk possessing the sheen of river water at night) There’s no cardamom listed in this scent, and there’s no cardamom here, not really. But this is what cardamom might smell like, absent its bitter spice: green eucalyptus sharpness, citrus-wood undertones, cool and aquatic, faintly aromatic. Ghostly flowers float on inky waters, musk of a moon moth, sweet and clear as a bell. This is a being who exists on a frequency you’ll never tune into. She operates in a reality parallel to yours. She has never been human. She will never be human. The concept of humanity might not register as something worth knowing. She also does not know what cardamom is. Who? She asks, eyes insectile and lunar. Glassy, unblinking, and strange.
Old Books & A Flat White (dust-soft vellum, cracked leather, and yellowed pages exhaling their ghost of vanillin, a triple shot of espresso, and a deft swirl of warm, velvety microfoam)
TRIPLE SHOT AT LOVE: GROUNDS FOR SUSPICION #1 in Rare Book Romance (CW: dangerous manuscripts, competitive bidding, caffeine as foreplay)
When rival rare book dealers Sebastian and Margot both find themselves at Café Arcana hunting the same impossible alchemical manuscript rumored to transform gold into the perfect cup, they agree to a temporary truce. The barista, fair Ophelia, has been counting on exactly this. The moment they trust each other, they’re hers. She serves them a dark demonic brew roasted at temperatures summoned from the ninth circle of hell, and they settle in among brittle manuscripts and ravaged bindings reeking of forbidden knowledge and dust older than empires. As ancient pages whisper their mysteries and Ophelia’s brews grow dangerously, addictively potent, they realize she isn’t just making coffee. She IS the manuscript. She’s been waiting 300 years for the right combination: two rivals stupid enough to think they could possess her, arrogant enough to deserve what’s coming, and desperate enough to stop competing and start copulating. I mean collaborating.
“Finally, a love triangle where everyone WINS and also maybe loses their SOULS” (Occult Romance Weekly) “The chemistry is UNREAL and so is the coffee and I haven’t slept in 48 hours” (#BookTok)
The Crumpet-Fanlight Expedition (austere polar musk, vegan ambergris, and white tea combine to make a genteel, frigid perfume as bright and sharp as the first crack of glacial ice) A lime on an ice floe, wearing sunglasses. Pale juice, cold-zapped. Sun on snow, blinding white. The lime casts no shadow but casts a circle in salt. The lime is simultaneously freezing and thawing, bright. Sharp. Frozen, broken things having a good time at the end of the world.
Eviscerated With No. 7 Crochet Hook (delicate antique lace, with a hint of powdered violet, plum brandy, and gleaming aldehydes) Violet wallpaper in the hallway, plum velvet drapes in the parlor, lavender silk sheets on the bed. Lilac gloves laid out beside the mauve hatbox. An amethyst brooch pinned to her orchid-colored blouse. She arranges the iris-patterned teacups just so, checks her reflection in the mirror framed in wisteria wood. The aubergine carpet muffles her footsteps. In the kitchen, eggplant preserves gleam in glass jars on a pristine countertop Her tools rest in a mulberry-lined case: the No. 7 crochet hook polished to a shine, sharp as surgical steel but delicate as the hyacinth lace she crocheted last winter. She does beautiful work. Precise. You can barely see the hole hooked into the throat of the corpse on the floor. When she’s finished, she washes up with thistle-scented soap, changes into her indigo dressing gown, and sits down to crochet something new. Maybe a shroud.
SPECIMEN CLASSIFICATION: CRYSTALLUS SINGULARIS Observed December 21st, 1927, Miskatonic ValleyProfessor Elias Wentworth, Department of Crystallography
Upon first observation, the specimen presented geometries of such singular and cyclopean complexity as to defy conventional Euclidean classification. The primary hexagonal structure, while superficially conforming to known ice crystal morphology, revealed upon closer examination a fractal recursion of nameless intricacy, each branching arm subdividing into ever-smaller iterations of impossible precision. The coloration proved equally anomalous: not the expected translucent white, but rather a frosted sage of spectral luminescence, shot through with veins of glacial verdure and gelid chlorophyll that seemed to shift and multiply when viewed through the kaleidoscopic lens. The effect was not unlike peering into dimensions of space hitherto unknown to mortal science—angles that should not exist, proportions that violated natural law, yet arranged with such terrible beauty as to inspire equal measures of awe and incomprehension. Most disturbing: the specimen exhibits a menacing quality I cannot adequately describe. Fresh. Chilly. Herbal citrus notes emanating from its crystalline surface.
Further study req—
[ARCHIVAL NOTE: The above entry represents Professor Wentworth’s final coherent observation. He was discovered three hours later in his laboratory, having etched hexagonal patterns into the laboratory walls, floors, and his own flesh. He remains under care at Arkham Sanitarium, where he continues to mutter about “the geometry” and refuses to look at snow. The specimen in question melted without incident. —Dr. H. Armitage, University Librarian, 1928]
Christmas Lustre (amber-illuminated roasted chestnut, cardamom, caramel, and allspice) Thomas Dambo’s wooden trolls spend their days in the elements, rain-soaked, moss-creeping up their knuckles, lichen settling into the grain. By nightfall, they’re sodden all the way through, rotting slowly like any forgotten sculpture left to the weather. But they have a place to go when darkness falls, a sanctuary no one else knows about. Inside, the air is warm and impossibly dry. Cured wood, glossily lacquered, polished and gleaming. Spices whisk and whirl—cardamom and allspice, toasted and bronzed and blistered. A warmth that draws the damp, straight through to heartwood. They settle in, creaking and groaning, and feel a glow kindling in their hollow chests, the feeling inside when you’re finally, finally home.
Amber Incense & Honey Cakes There’s a sticky corner table at the back of a small pub in a smaller village, perpetually tacky with spilled beer and the grease from fried dough glazed with honey. The locals know not to sit there. Behind it, a door no one mentions, wood so dark it disappears into the paneling. You notice it only because you’re looking for the toilets, and when you push it open (it shouldn’t open, it’s locked, surely it’s locked) stone steps spiral down and down. The air changes. What was beery and yeasty above becomes something else as you descend, deeply jeweled amber, glassy and glossy and translucent, resinous incense burning in cones. You’ve stumbled into ceremonies held for gods older than the village, older than the church that tried to bury them. The fried dough smell follows you down, mingles with the sacred smoke. Someone’s brought crullers as an offering. Someone always does. Hands place a crown on your head, syrupy, sacred, dripping with golden light. The cruller king of winter. The village keeps its bargains. The gods collect their debts. Tomorrow they’ll find crumbs where you stood.
Christmasween(candied orange peel, mulled cider, smoked myrrh twirling through a cranberry garland, balsam resin and amber-drizzled pumpkin, smoldering hearthwood, and the soft honeyed glow of dripping beeswax) A lost Wes Anderson screenplay wherein Little Red carries the remnants of her Halloween candy to grandmother’s house for Christmas. The contents: six tangerine-orange circus peanuts (slightly stale), twelve lemon sherbets wrapped in yellow cellophane, three jammy strawberry boiled sweets the color of fresh arterial blood, and one spiced pumpkin confection shaped like a small gourd. She encounters the wolf at precisely 2:47 PM, seventeen meters past the old balsam grove where the snow is deepest and wettest and most tactically advantageous.
Act I: The Decoy. The basket drops in slow motion. Candy scatters across white snow in a perfect radius—citrus orange, sherbet yellow, strawberry red, pumpkin amber. The wolf’s pupils dilate, furry nostrils flare. He has, Red notes with satisfaction, a documented weakness for sugar. This was always part of the plan.
Chapter Two: Infrastructure and Positioning. While he inhales the scent of lemon sherbet (his favorite), Red moves through the balsam with the efficiency of someone who attended Camp Hemlock, Summer 2019, Wilderness Survival Track. Her supplies: three beeswax candles (ivory, hand-dipped), one ball of cranberry garland (crimson, 6.5 meters), hearthwood kindling, and a small tin of smoked myrrh resin she’s been saving for exactly this scenario. The tripwire is string between two symmetrical trees. The kindling arranges itself into a small, controlled pyre.
Part III: The Immolation. The wolf collects circus peanuts in his mouth like a child. He doesn’t notice the garland at ankle height, stretched taut and gleaming. The fall is spectacular—all four legs, perfect cartoon arc. He lands directly in Red’s carefully constructed fire pit, which ignites on impact. The smoked myrrh makes it ceremonial. The beeswax makes it beautiful. The spiced pumpkin treat, crushed beneath him, makes it smell like Halloween and Christmas happened simultaneously in the same terrible instant.
Grandmother receives her Christmas candles at 4:32 PM. Most of them, anyway. Red keeps one as a souvenir, amber-drizzled and slightly singed.
Need more Yule scents? Have a peep at my Yule reviews from 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021, and a single review for 2019, though I could swear I have several years’ worth of BPAL Yule reviews floating around out there. And I know this because…
…PSSSST! Did you know I have collected all of my BPAL reviews into one spot? I’m about a year behind (maybe two? le whoopsie) with adding new stuff to the document, but as it stands, there are over 60 PAGES of my thoughts and rambles on various limited-edition scents from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab over the years: BPAL REVIEWS BY S. ELIZABETH (PDF download)
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
This year, I worked on challenging the monkey’s face. I did good. I lost 30 lbs. I did not do this with drugs, although I kinda wish I had the option, because I am sure it would have been less agonizing. I lowered my cholesterol, kept myself off blood pressure medication, and can actually squat again. This is very big, as I haven’t really been able to squat in a decade. I became someone who fills their day with movement. I began incorporating “mobility exercises.” I ate chia pudding. It felt like a gullet full of tadoles. Still, I think I can do it again. Amazingly, I became, without even trying, someone who loves an evening bath. Maybe related to the tadpoles? Unclear.
I wrote a book this year. I became a (print!) magazine columnist! I stopped using TikTok altogether. I stopped ordering out for dinner so often. Seriously, we have only ordered out twice this year, or at most three times, and once was when I was sick, so I am not even sure that counts. I cook dinner every night, whether I want to or not. A lot of this involves having made a bunch of beans, or soup, or curries, or some such earlier in the week, so the work was already done for me…but you know, sometimes it’s not even about the work, right? Sometimes you just don’t want beans or curries or soup or what you already have on hand. I ate the beans anyway.
And somewhere between the beans and the baths and books (I only wrote one, but I read 150 of them!) I also acquired things. And rediscovered some things! This is my annual accounting of those objects: practical things that became rituals, frivolous things that became essential, all the small, material anchors of another trip around the sun with me and my magpie brain, forever seeking the next perfect weird thing.
WEARABLE DELIGHTS
This year’s clothing acquisitions fall into two distinct categories: comfort and declaration. Soft pants for cooking dinner and lounging at home; t-shirts and sweaters that announce exactly where my interests lie. There’s no middle ground here, no versatile pieces that could go either way. I’m either prioritizing the body I’m actively maintaining or wearing my obsessions literally on my sleeve. The Beginning of the End sweater gets maybe two weeks of wearable weather in Florida, but I bought it anyway because sometimes a thing is too perfect to be practical about.
Three pendants acquired within months of each other, all from small makers whose work leans toward the symbolic and strange. A mandrake root, the eyes of a martyred saint, Hermes’ staff – symbols of knowledge, perception, and protection. I layer them together or wear them singly depending on mood and neckline. They’re talismans in the most practical sense: I’m a writer who traffics in the weird and macabre, so I might as well have some backup from the symbolic realm.
My desk has always been a place I want to sit because I’ve made it that way. This year’s additions include scented highlighters for marginalia, the loveliest smoothest writing pens, and some Liberty print journals for perfume notes, book quotes, and writing ideas. The Mariage Frères incense is a rediscovery from years ago; the lotus burner is new, a gift. Simple upgrades for reading and writing, nothing fancy. (Except also some very fancy antique and candles!)
Remember being 20 and running out of things, not knowing if you could afford more? A four-pack of toilet paper, a bag of rice, whatever small necessity you’d miscalculated? This year I leaned into the unglamorous pleasure of abundance: buying coffee and pumpkin seeds and chickpeas in bulk, stocking a case of frozen dumplings because they’re hard to find. It’s boring to be excited about having backup provisions in the cabinet, but the security matters. Also here: recipes I made repeatedly – practical weeknight solutions, pure indulgences, and little things that elevate an ordinary weekday afternoon.
…and having actual Icelanders from Iceland telling me that my Hjónabandssæla is absolute perfection. (Note, I added strawberry jam in addition to rhubarb most recently and it was even better!)
BEAUTY RITUALS
This is the year I became more embodied. I really tried hard to treat myself as a body that needs tending rather than just a vehicle for my brain. The evening baths turned into ritual. Extensive skincare for face, hands, body. No makeup though; that’s still a bridge too far, ha! I bought fewer perfumes this year but more intentionally: the most expensive bottle I’ve ever owned, a dupe of something almost equally unattainable (but which I would never purchase the original anyway) and something that dethroned my 20-year favorite despite having backup bottles in reserve. All deliberate choices, nothing impulsive or collected just to collect.
I stopped using TikTok this year and replaced it with slower, more deliberate content. Vinyl-only music mixes curated by someone with impeccable taste. Scalp-scratching ASMR when I needed to turn my brain off completely. Japanese lifestyle channels documenting quiet domesticity – one following a couple’s elaborate seasonal cooking, another tracking a solitary woman’s routines in what looks like a Tokyo apartment. All of these feel like watching someone else live intentionally, which somehow made my own attempts at intentional living feel less arduous.
Small household objects that make daily life slightly better, that make breakfast feel special, that turn coming home into cozy magic, something that makes Florida summers bearable, nice even. Nothing here cost much, but each one solved a small problem or added pleasure to routine tasks.
I save most of my horror viewing for October, which means belated discoveries from the 80s and 90s alongside newer finds. Body horror that’s both gross and audacious, atmospheric European folk tales, crime dramas about broken people investigating cold cases and small-town secrets, a new series about isolation versus hive mind. I wonder if there’s a through-line here – people trying to maintain their sense of self while investigating what corrupts or destroys others? Detectives working through their own trauma, unlikely partnerships under impossible circumstances, what it costs to remain human.
Pluribus (I have only watched 1.5 episodes of this so far!)
LITERARY OBSESSIONS
I read a lot of books this year. Southern Gothic swamps and sentient blobs. Medieval nuns and teenage witches. Academic satire and existential dread. Mysterious pregnancies and identity crises. Body horror and emotional isolation. Suburban ennui and uncanny transformations. Catastrophic friendships and women who are their own worst enemies. These are the ones I’m still thinking about (or more accurately, that I actually remember.)
I don’t even need to mention Florence – she’s on everyone’s list. Mine too, of course. This year’s listening spanned Japanese folk inspired by bioluminescent creatures and carnivalesque electro-disco, Swedish goth songcraft with church organ and avant-garde saxophone, experimental ambient soundscapes and dungeon synth. Nothing here sounds like anything else here.
This section circles back to the challenge of the monkey’s face. Small changes that accumulated into something larger, new routines and rituals opening up in ways that used to feel impossible. Reaching toward others, realizing I need connection and community, even when it’s not my first instinct. Some of these are already habits, others are still just possibilities waiting for me to be ready. Change is hard, and my resistance to it makes it harder, but this year proved I’m capable.
-Instagram’s algorithm kept serving me fitness content I didn’t ask for (overstuffed gym guys, ab-obsessed former dancers, Ozempic-faced mommy bloggers turned supplement-shilling wellness coaches, I hate all of them with a passion) – so I cherry-picked exercises out of spite and built my own little programs, scattered throughout my day, building strength and moving my bod between other tasks. I especially like the idea of doing 5-10 squats every time you use the bathroom (I pee A LOT!)
-Tuesday and Friday nights alone with my thoughts, a small glass of whiskey, and Alice Coltrane while Ývan plays D&D with the lads.
-Weekends spent entirely in the kitchen – bread rising, vegetables chopped for the week ahead, jars of pickles lined up on the counter, nothing to do but cook and prep and let the hours disappear.
…alternately, Saturdays with friends, binging Eurovision and Andor with one, crafts and cocktails with another, or just catching up in each other’s company, letting the afternoon disappear.
-Monthly catch-up chats with a peer who writes in the same niche space. Someone who gets the weird obsessions, the struggle to articulate why a thing matters. If you know how hard IRL calls are for me, you get how big a step this is, and I am very glad and grateful for it.
-My sisters and I moved our Facebook chat to another platform, and suddenly we’re talking much more, daily check-ins, random thoughts, the kind of constant low-level contact that’s good for the heart.
…So what’s the thread connecting gnome doormats and afternoon tea and Swedish goth and sentient blobs and evening magnesium baths and an obsession with Japanese stationery? I guess it’s just…me?
What about you, then! What made your year? What are the weird little objects sitting on your desk or shelf right now that you reach for without thinking? The albums you kept coming back to, the recipes you made on repeat, the books you’re still thinking about? Tell me what you collected this year, what made ordinary days feel less ordinary, what small thing brought you unexpected pleasure when you needed it most.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
