Unquiet
Things

There’s a special kind of joy in writing about things you love. But let’s be honest: there’s an even deeper, more visceral satisfaction in absolutely demolishing something you hate. And when it comes to perfume, the stinkers provide far juicier material than the stunners.

Welcome to the omnibus edition of “Stinkers & Duds” – a monumental collection of over 25 fragrances that have assaulted my nostrils over the years. This isn’t just a recent roundup; it’s a grand anthology of olfactory offenders!

Why dedicate so much time and nose space to perfumes I can’t stand? Maybe it’s the catharsis of venting frustrations in an industry drowning in hype. Perhaps it’s the thrill of puncturing overinflated reputations or the solidarity of shared disdain. Or it could be as simple as this: good perfume is nice, but bad perfume is a story. It sparks conversation, ignites debate, and lets us revel in the shared experience of collective disgust. There’s a perverse thrill in describing just how a scent went wrong – was it a cacophony of mismatched notes, or a single accord so vile it dominates everything else? Think about it. You don’t call your friends over to smell something pleasant. But something truly heinous? That’s an experience you’ve got to share. “Oh my god, smell this. It’s like a crime scene in a bottle.”

This isn’t about being mean for the sake of it. It’s about honesty in an industry that often feels like it’s choking on its own marketing fumes. It’s about calling out the emperor’s new clothes when they smell like a dumpster fire wrapped in gas station plastic-wrapped fake roses. In this extensive compilation, you’ll find everything from overhyped designer launches, to niche creations that should have remained a fever dream. We’ve got reformulations that butchered beloved classics, and avant-garde experiments that prove not all innovation is progress.

So settle in for a long, wild ride through a putrid hall of shame. Whether you’re here to commiserate, looking for warnings, or just enjoy a bit of schadenfreude, prepare for an olfactory odyssey of the damned. Because while a good perfume might make you smell nice, there is nothing quite so much fun as sniffing out the truly awful ones …and raising a bit of a stink.

Vietnamese Coffee | d’Annam: I really wanted to love this fragrance; I was so intrigued by the idea. But the reality of it is that it smells like sour coffee-breathed admonishments and secondhand smoke from your cranky mother when you’re wearing too much fruity-floral Ex’cla-ma’tion eau de toilette and several greasy layers of cotton candy Lip Smackers before heading off for your first day of junior high circa 1989. As it dries down, the scent morphs into something eerily reminiscent of days-old espresso shots forgotten and sloshing in the bottom of a pink Caboodles organizer.

Invite Only Amber | 23 Kayali Fragrances: Invite Only Amber smells like spotting wonky, off-brand Spirit Halloween costumes in July. As in they attempted to capture the unparalleled autumnal opulence of Hermès Ambre Narguile, and put an orange spray tan on a white gourd and said, “ok, this is good enough, let’s call it Luxe Hookah Honeycomb or Fancy Tobacco Haze or maybe something really dumb, like Invite Only Amber.” It’s like a honeyed saffron cotton candy miasma, a saccharine amber simulacrum from a seedy midsummer carnival that leaves you longing for the rich, resinous depths of October’s golden hour.

Ôponé | Diptyque: Ôponé is a fragrance so revolting you’d think someone was joking, that it couldn’t possibly be real. But it is real, and I have a sample of it. It’s a vile cocktail of the following: a freshly-opened bottle of goopy, boozy-but-not-nearly-enough booze bitter berry Robitussin Maximum Strength Cough and Chest Congestion (possibly the one with Dextromethorphan and Guaifenesin), the most repellent, unpalatable artificial fruity-sour energy drink on the shelf with the most outrageously obnoxious packaging, the one so disgusting and foul that even the people you think might be into it would never buy, and the saddest long-stemmed fake rose wrapped in dusty crinkly plastic at the gas station. Nobody wants any part of this. Throw it in the trash immediately.

Tóor Tóor | Régime des Fleurs: Tonight I am sampling Tóor Tóor by Régime des Fleurs, and usually, it’s a bit fraught with this brand; it’s always an “oh, PLEASE, don’t be good!” ordeal because they are usually too good and TOO expensive. But. I needn’t have worried this time. My immediate and initial thoughts are that it’s like a vampire with a bizarre sweet tooth stumbled into a Precious Moment gift shop and drained all the sugary charm out of a figurine, leaving behind this twee, creepy, bloodless husk at the bottom of the trash bin, slowly dissolving in a puddle of garbage juice. The predominant notes of this unfortunate incident are of anemic citrus and a wan, powdery floral, and the strange cloying rot, spoiled nectar, and sour candied sewage of something that might have been cute, once? Like the undead remains of a Sanrio character, maybe? I don’t know, but it’s not good! Seems like my wallet is safe from you this time, Régime des Fleurs.

Shangri La Edition 2022 | Hiram Green: How do I say this without being unkind? Shangri-La from Hiram Green is less lush and harmonious utopian promised land and more a Hieronymus Bosch-envisioned hellish menagerie, blighted and bedeviled, doomed and damned–all the horror and grandeur and unbridled madness of the cosmos, distilled into one raspingly chaotic scent. The initial blast of overripe, fermented peaches and citrus fruit frizzles acridly at us, trumpeted straight out of a bizarre monster’s glossy pink backside; jasmine’s balmy decay wraps us in a fuzzy, fevered winding-sheet of a golden-throned man-eating bird, to remind us that all is vanity and the pleasures of the flesh are fleeting, and the strangely spiced kisses of a porcine nun linger on your skin like a grotesque memento from a carnival of depravity. In what twisted mind is this a Shangri-La? I think Hiram Green is having one over on us.

Apocalypstick | Mad et Len: While the notes listed for Apocalypstick, violet, rose, mint, (I thought I saw macadamia listed somewhere?) sound like a pleasant enough combination, what the perfume smells like to me is a village of small children infected with a vast malevolence of pure evil. This cloying candied floral doesn’t just tiptoe on the precipice of sweetness and decay; it’s not just a playful saccharine innocence masking a sinister undercurrent of rot. It is an immediate and overwhelming assault of viciously poisoned sugarplums stuffed with razorblades served to you by sticky fingers and pale faces with sharp teeth. It lingers, sickening on the skin like a toxic premonition, like a perpetual stain, an indelible mark of repulsion.

Fraaagola Saalaaata | Hilde Soliani: Fraaagola Salaaata is fun for a split second, it smells like strawberry Jello-scented lipgloss or a tiny bottle of effervescent berry eau de toilette that was sold alongside Angel Face Barbie in the 80s. Very sweet, with no nuance or complexity (though I do think that’s sort of the point of a perfume like this.) But then it becomes this monstrous vision of a wild strawberry-kiwi-ice-breeze-whatever vape pen shoved up a half-melted red gummy bear’s butt, and even more horrifying still, a plume of vape juice smoke billows out of its squished little vape bro mouth, and oh my god I am gagging and you don’t even want to see the face I am making just now.

Good Girl Gone Bad | By Kilian: If you have ever entered a hotel room immediately after the cleaning service has come and gone, then you are familiar with the scent of Juliette Has a Gun’s Good Girl Gone Bad. It is the powerful chemical cleaning agent miasma of grotty carpet and suspect duvets that have been freshly Febrezed, the delightfully noxious fumes of Scrubbing Bubbles, and the abrasive surfactants and solvents of industrial glass cleaner. If this Good Girl has Gone Bad, I suspect it’s because she kidnapped someone, concocted for them a toxic cocktail of these ingredients, toasted to their health in that shady hotel room while tossing her own drink over her shoulder, and skipped town while the evidence lay convulsing on the floor. Maybe they deserved it. I don’t judge these things. And I would also neither drink –nor wear– this fragrance.

Salt | Ellis Brooklyn: What even is the point of this? It’s the “live laugh love” of fragrance.

L’Interdit Eau de Parfum | Givenchy:  Givenchy L’Interdit is…oof. It makes my hips ache and my knees creak. It makes me feel like a fucking fossil. This is a candied fruity floral, like crushed shards of every flavor Jolly Rancher forming the vague shape of a flower but I think anyone who smells it will agree it is no flower found in nature. Do you know who smelled it and loved it and thought it was “bomb” and “fire” and “literally everything,” though? A quartet of college girls who robbed a fast-food restaurant and stole a car to fund their spring break plans and who then got bailed out of jail by a skeezy clown of drug dealer/rapper/arms dealer named Alien who looks just like James Franco. I’m pretty sure they are all about this bikini bacchanalia neon candy Harmony Korine girls gone wild hedonist hell of a scent, and man, they can have it. I’m too old for this shit.

You Or Someone Like You | Etat Libre d’Orange: ELdO You Or Someone Like You is the screechy confrontational performance art of a person having a freaky public meltdown, a full-out adult tantrum, taking place midafternoon in a popular coffee chain or a ubiquitous lingerie store in the mall, and which is probably being recorded by spectators for millions of future views on YouTube even as the melodrama is unfolding. It’s the synthetic aroma of an indoor public space filled with too many people breathing at once and poorly circulated air, the awkward musk of distressed and embarrassed onlookers, the cool mineralic concrete of silent complicity, the acrid, antiseptic arrogance of entitlement and the tang of weaponized tears and performative victimhood of someone who felt personally attacked by Victoria’s Secret’s return policy regarding thong panties or the fact that Starbucks was out of oat milk for their ridiculous latte order. You or Someone like you is the fragrance of someone making a massively upsetting stink in front of a crowd and feeling absolutely no shame or remorse because they have a right to everything, they deserve everything, merely because they exist.

Accident À La Vanille – Almond Cake Limited Edition | Jousset Parfums  Almond Cake is so nightmarishly awful that I was inspired to write a haiku for it…

A Robitussin
and playdough and almond milk
frathouse haze: DRINK, DRINK!

Pear Inc | Juliette Has A Gun: Rotting clumps of sour milk, canned fruit that’s been forgotten in a bunker for 35 years, and the slutty Egyptian musk that a zombie stripper demon might wear while giving you a wildly uncomfortable lap dance. My god. I just want to hurl this sample straight into the sun.

Eye of Seven Hills | Alghabra Parfums: Pink grapefruit sour gummies and …whiskey…? This is what happens when you let a 4-year-old play bartender. Learn to mix a drink, kid!

Poets of Berlin | Vilhelm Parfumerie: Poets of Berlin from Vilhelm Parfumerie is a vile bioluminescent mutant blueberry thing. A blueberry subjected to a sketchy, underfunded experiment in a prototype telepod but there was also a particle of lemon-aloe-bamboo Glade air freshener in the chamber before it was hermetically sealed as well as a smashed bedazzle gem that fell off of an intern’s acrylic nail, unnoticed. Torn apart atom by atom, the small jammy fruit merged with the glinting shards of sugary bling and a blisteringly caustic glow-in-the-dark citrus-lily. I don’t think David Bowie ever wrote a song about this monster but there was a movie adaptation with Jeff Goldblum.

Si Giorgio | Armani: There exist a handful of black currant and rose scents that are very lovely and unique. Armani Si is not one of them and frankly, it feels crass and vulgar and quite common in comparison. It’s a candied floral musk that sours to an offputting fruity cocktail, something with strawberries and cheap sparkling wine and I feel like this is a themed drink served as part of your book club’s annual romance pick, and god why can’t they ever let you pick the smutty selections? There’d be way more explosive body horror and horny devils and raving madwomen in the attic. None of this secret sexy neighbor or coworker enemies-to-friends or surprise baby basic bullshit. So yeah Si is your book club’s most boring member’s spicy pick. It’s probably called Billionaire Daddy or Tempting the Boss or something.

Rue St Honore | OUAI: Rue St Honore from Ouai is giving me some real idyllic springtime wisteria-draped cottagecore Crabtree & Evelyn Gunne Sax tradwife YouTube influencer exploited by their alt-right faschy podcaster husband for their perceived domesticity, femininity and purity vibes. Is this a field of violets and daisies and gingham picnic daydream or an escapist nostalgia-trap weaponized by Neo-Nazis? Maybe I am overthinking it, but there is something about this quaint floral garden fragrance that feels wildly wrong and deeply uncomfortable and makes me desperately itchy to stage an intervention for someone.

Decadence | Marc Jacobs: Imagine you won a contest run by your local radio station, you know the one with the obnoxious sexist pig morning show duo, generically called something like “Big Dude Bro and the Little Vermin.” Yeah, so you–lucky you!–entered this contest where the prize was the privilege of getting to spend the night in a local spot purported to be haunted. Great, right?! Well, turns out it’s just a sketchy vape shop and the “ghost” is like, how someone saw Jesus’s face in a baked potato or something. And that actually happened next door in the crusty diner. The moment you walk in the door you are assaulted by the sickening aroma of maple syrup vape juice, a cloying waft from an empty rum raisin ice cream container crawling with many-legged insects, and the dusty fumes of your meanest ancestor’s cherry pipe tobacco. Was it a haunting or was it Marc Jacobs Decadence? You conclude that while you did not experience anything in the slightest bit supernatural, this vile combination of notes will certainly haunt you for the rest of your days.

Jasmin Rouge | Tom Ford: Tom Ford’s Jasmine Rouge is a screechy white floral hairspray worn by a Real Housewife as she’s drunkenly throwing her mimosa in your face right before she pees herself in the middle of the restaurant. Check please!

Angel Nova | Mugler: This is a very horny perfume. But a sort of sad, lonely, horniness. It’s the drunk middle-aged lady at a concert or local gig, or festival, stumble-dancing alone. (I am middle-aged now, but in my memory, every incarnation of this woman always seems older than I will ever be.) It smells like what both partners might wear when they pack for their hedonism cruise in a last-ditch effort to save their relationship and they’re on the prowl for their unicorn. It’s a bit desperate and hopeless, like that last radiant burst of manic energy that you put into a thing that’s doomed to fail, so what the hell and why not. As to the actual fragrance, it’s a sticky stain on your sheets that if you dare get close enough to sniff, it smells of overripe raspberries, lychee syrup drizzled shaved ice, and a sickly sweet cola drink spiked with peppery patchouli bitters. Instead of spending your money on Angel Nova, I think it wise you invest in an extra session with your therapist.

Fancy | Jessica Simpson: When I was young, my mother didn’t drive, so my grandmother tootled us around with her on errands and took us where ever we needed to go. Her purse was a bottomless supply of Dum Dum lollipops and if we were well-behaved, we got one as a treat. This was a massive thrill when I was 4, but some arbitrary switch flipped when I was 5 and suddenly I found them utterly vile. No thanks, grandma! Imagine shaking sticky shards of fruit punch, cherry, and butterscotch flavored candies out of your best Belk’s church purse, and… that’s basically Fancy. It is Dum Dum dust. Interpret that however you like. You might say, well, oh, Sarah, it’s not made for you. Ok, I get that. But tell me… who is it made for? And do they keep their toy lipsticks on a hot pink plastic vanity and cook with an EZ bake oven?

Intense | Cafe Montale: I first sampled Montale’s Cafe Intense years ago when I was initially getting into fragrance and perfumes. I guess I was feeling a little nostalgic for that sample a kind MUA-er sent me way back when! My recollection was that it was meant to be a coffee-forward scent, but…it is not. My partner observed that it smells like a teenage girl who typically wore a lot of candied, sugary scents and who wanted to level up with fancy florals and didn’t quite hit the mark. She tried, I guess, was his conclusion. My thoughts are more specific. This is a cloying fruity-floral that smells exactly like Rose Jam from LUSH, which I bitterly loathe because that smells just like those gaggy sweet Jolly Ranchers hard candies that all the popular kids were always eating in 6th grade. Which in turn makes me think of the MOST popular girl, we’ll call her Mary Lesa H., who broke off and ATE part of my sugar crystal science project that year. I hate science projects and I have never forgiven Mary Lesa H., and this awful perfume can go straight to hell.

Mon Guerlain | Guerlain: Everyone seems quite taken with MonGuerlain, which I’d never tried, so I thought I’d take advantage of a Sephora sale and grab a bottle of the eau de parfum. I gotta be honest. It’s pretty gross. If you need a scent for impressing your peers after pledging yourself to Jesus as a pre-teen holy roller and you were going to hang with all of them at a rager of an overnight church lock-in? This would be what you’d reach for. And listen, I’m not knocking smelling good for your lord and savior, but I think even the begotten only son of God has zero tolerance for this cloying fruity-floral bargain bin Koolaid flavor of a scent. Where’s the more interesting aspects of lavender and bergamot that people are wild for? This is just watered down CapriSun that no one even spiked. I’m flummoxed. And now I’m out $80. Dammit.

Vanilla Vibes | Juliette Has A Gun: Vanilla Vibes, 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.

…and the one that started it all, Flowerbomb | Viktor&Rolf: Described as “an explosive bouquet of fresh and sweet notes”, I personally think it smells like a conflagration of petty spite, mean-spiritedness, and small minds. Like bigoted small-town pageant moms and the shitty popular girls in 80s movies. It simultaneously makes me want to cringe and cry.  Also, it’s an enormous lie. It smells nothing like any flower. As to what it does smell like, precisely, I cannot pinpoint. A shallow dish of sugar water with some sneezy, cloying powder mixed in. Like Kool-Aid, I guess. It smells like a celebutaunt-inspired Kool-Aid. Or…unless, of course, there is a blossom or bloom that smells like Bongo jeans and hair-sprayed bangs and the wretched duo of Jennifer W. and Amanda P. in the 7th and 8th grade. How’s it feel to be the inspiration for the world’s worst fragrance, you dumb, hateful bitches.

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