I was traveling for most of the month, so I didn’t have much time or energy to try things, but here are my musings on five fragrances I sampled this past May…!
Witch NY Basil-ica A not-nearly-long-enough playlist on a Sunday morning, Haley Heynderickx and Cosmo Sheldrake trading sweet, playful verse in a sunlit patch of floor. The tardigrade in its shrubbery, with its little dappled patch of moss, the bug collector scooping the centipede out the window, carefully easing the praying mantis priest into a jam jar. A small disturbance of anise, sharp and green and dark, and then the green rushes in through the window, tangy lemon balm and the acrid green resin of unripe fruit leaves and clean, crisp cedar, a breeze of honeyed effervescence gone flat, warm and golden and slightly sleepy. The sound a fern makes when it uncurls, a soft incantation for rainy windowsills, a potion brewed in a thimble, a love letter from the slug to the fruiting vine.
Heretic Queen Of The Night Honeyed night blooms open pale against absolute black, a luminous vanilla moment, sweet and strange and fleeting the way a face emerges from darkness before the darkness rushes in. Vetiver, dry and dusky and gritty, the black sand of dreams. The mortuary scent of jasmine, a bitter shiver of arsenical wallpapers. The scent of the thing that presides over the voice that whispered your name, and there was no one there, which is worse than if there had been someone. The road that looks different on the way back because something has shifted that you cannot name or locate or defend against. The cat that peers into the shadows and sees what you cannot. The hour between 3 and 4am. The goddess of objectless dread.
Pearfat Parfum Sister Hildegard Thin cold air and clover and wildflower sweetness, morning dew on stone, the sort of bright bright, expansive, anything-is-possible morning that makes you want to set out with everything you own in a small bundle on a stick. A small figure against a large landscape, stepping off into something with no idea what that something is. Then: a door in the meadow, and beyond it woodsmoke and char and animal warmth, pine resin and ash, the dark beyond the firelight pressing in close. The flames a waystation, the meadow a small window just behind you in the distance… but you are not the same person who left it, you’ll never be that young or that bright or that foolish again. But you’ve learned you can light this fire of glow and illumination for every version of yourself you encounter along the journey.
Flâner Yakisugi Wood Incense in a cypress enclosure, herbal smokiness that is not now-smoke but then-smoke, absorbed into the walls over many generations. Resinous and pencil-dark and cool, a bitter astringency, dusty-dried to a husk of itself, the aromatics of a space long tended. The knowing of which wood to burn and when and why, a knowing internal and undemanding, unhurried, uncommodified. Then the world got very loud and very fast, and people forgot how silence felt, and the how in the feeling was a healing, and someone noticed the forgetting and put a price on it, because people were so harried and hollowed out they would pay anything to remember what standing still felt like. Two hundred and sixty-nine dollars, and it doesn’t even include a sound bath or a breathwork session or an adaptogen bar, just a metaphorical cedar door wrapped in a mountain fog of the then-smoke, which became a now-amenity.
Syd Botanica Butterfly TamerA History of British Butterflies, Morris, The Reverend Francis Orpen, 1864; forest green cloth binding, gilt-stamped butterflies on the spine, hand-colored plates behind tissue guards, the smell of a volume that has been handled with reverence and also with muddy field boots, airy and ozone-tinged, the mineral shiver of pre-rain shrouding delicate papery grasses and flowering herbs, pale gold at the tips, cool green at the root, something floral but not quite flower, the honeyed dust of dried chamomile, the ghost of a garden in late summer. The slightly breathless Victorian naturalist earnestness of a parson who looked closely at small winged things, who catalogued every county and date and friend who once glimpsed one in some hedgerow, who recorded with equal gravity the testimony of Mr. H. Sims, certain he saw one Silver-washed Fritillary near Norwich on the 24th of August 1810, who struck at it with a forceps and missed, and the testimony of J. C. Dale, Esq., certain he saw one Purple Emperor settled on some rushes in Cambridgeshire in July 1818, wings half-expanded toward the sun, and the diary entry of a Miss Eulalia Cramm of Shropshire, who recorded with great excitement the appearance of a Velvet Obscura on her windowsill, though she could not be entirely certain it was not a very large moth.
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?
Vallense Source A nocturnal glamour-cryptid, cloaked in its own velvety wings, its vast buggy eyes like antique opera glasses. It lives in cultivated dark, manicured parks behind concert halls, the shadowed side of a fountain, topiaries at midnight. It has a taste for finer things and knows where to find them. You didn’t know it was on the guest list, but here you both are! Mossy and ambery and peppery, with a resinous sweetness that reads less like dessert than like the filling of some abstract turnover made with dry grasses and syrupy saps, ground and sweetened acorns bound together in something dark and flaking. Rich and musky-dry, slithery, a lurker. It unfolds slowly next to you on the bench, vast wings spreading, obscuring the moon, eyes enormous and unblinking. It means you no harm. It is simply drawn to the same things you are. It will have what you’re having.
Premiere Peau Doppel DancersThe shadow of something pale and cold against silk, light gathering at the edges, overcast. A duel with its back turned, a frozen moment of stillness, each gazing outward, away, the recognition of what lies between dissipating as each follows its gaze inward. Powdery and rooted and chilled, somber as cut stems left too long in cold water, as roots pulled halfway from dark soil, neither fully of the earth nor free of it. The same flower meeting itself from opposite sides of the membrane. Each one a version of the same thing: two that are one, neither fully one thing nor the other, caught in that charged space between. At the back, a molassesy brown sugar darkness, fungal and sweet, the earth already in quiet conversation with what stands above it. Something close to the work of an artist of constructed selves, of thresholds, of becoming and unbecoming: the white mask held to the blank sky, the foliage climbing the legs inch by inch, the landscape making its slow, patient claim on a body that moves through it. A ghost caught between breaths, already deep in tender negotiation with what waits beneath the soil, a surrender so private and so deliberate it feels indecent to witness. The presentiment of something not yet arrived but already, somehow, complete.
Rahasya Chai Addiction This is a fleeting review, much like its gorgeous but utterly fleeting top notes of ginger and cardamom. Delicate, ephemeral, and in one nostril and immediately out the other. Not even a slow fading spicy goodbye, but a chaste, wispy vanishing. After this near-instantaneous disappearing act, is almost straight-up, 100% the creamy/cozy white musk, sweet grasses and hay, and warm, breezy sandalwood of Coty Vanilla Fields… with the teensiest-tiniest inclusion of a bit of milky black tea (all latte, no tannins though). I love Vanilla Fields! So that’s not really a problem. But, that is a thing that exists at a much lower price point! However, if someone wanted to gift me a bottle of Chai Addiction, I would be super excited to receive it, and I would wear the heck out of it. I have a birthday coming up next month. Hint hint hint.
By/Rosie Jane Matilda opens with passionfruit that is almost too much, funky and warm and slightly sour. A little creamy. A wet dog and her pup cup. There’s something about the scent that translates to me as a fuggy pink, road-dusted, rained-on toe bean. Or maybe Gertrude Abercrombie’s snail shell on dark sand under a crescent moon, a woman’s torso emerging from the spiral of it, dreamy and shadowed and smudged, a little begrimed? The artist’s feral cats, watching from their litter box just outside the frame. “Would you still love me if I was a worm?” energy, whimsy, sweet and alive, rolling around in something a little rank.
Escentric Molecules Molecule 01 + Champaca Heady and luminous, steamy and silky, velvety and floating, kaleidoscopic and shadowed…all of these things seem quite the opposite of one another, and yet these are all of the sensations and impressions arising from just a scant few minutes with Escentric Molecules Molecule 01 + Champaca. An opulent, intoxicating spray of creamy orange blossoms encased in glowing citrine, cloaked in dusk and shade, illuminated by a breathless summer evening’s first moonbeam. It’s stunning.
Bad Hare Day: A heavy-handed sprinkle of brown sugar crystals, golden amber molasses-lite funk, over a pillowy cloud of full-fat whipped cream, almond wisps soft and musky. A clinging cottony fluff, like a small, warm creature has just vacated the spot beside you.
Moon Rabbit: Almost-jasmine, almost-cherry, honeyed and drifting, wilting softly in the steam from a cup of green tea, grassy, restrained, a soft ellipsis of bitterness. A dewy footprint in the soil after a night of sleepwalking through the cold silver fields, frost-pale leaves.
Sunny Bunny: Somewhere on the sands underneath a striped umbrella where it is perpetually 1965, Gidget is doing the watusi at the edge of the surf, and hot dogs are a nickel, there is a beach bunny who left for spring break and is still looking to catch the perfect wave. Salt-crusted whiskers, sun-fluffed fur, a tiny dab of coconut sunscreen on its twitchy pink nose. Spring break was supposed to end and somewhere there is a fable about this.
Brown Bunny: Soft and creamy, cold and sweet, a peach that’s been syruped and jammed and ice-creamed, and is also possibly wearing a fleecy lavender bunny onesie.
400 Rabbits: A lime Peep, soft and rounded, the citrus baked into a dense, faintly powdery, sugary chew, the lime and the marshmallow fully merged into one slightly artificial, deeply satisfying thing, sitting next to the other weird novelty offerings, like the deviled egg and glazed ham Jones Cola on the Easter dinner table.
Sir Hopsalot: A glazed sweet bun served on a craquelured ceramic bunny plate, the thin crackling sheen of the pastry mirroring the aged glaze of the dish beneath it, both of them faintly dusted with musty bergamot, tea that has been sitting a little too long in a very nice cup. There is a childhood habit of ascribing inner lives to the objects in one’s house, the lamp with sassy opinions, the armchair with a dignified sadness, the sugar bowl that is simply beside itself with joy to be of service. The plate would like you to know it is pleased to make your acquaintance!
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?
Lupercalia is Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s annual love letter to desire in all its forms, and I have tried a dozen from this year’s collection. Here are my notes on grave soil and honey, grapefruit tassels at full tilt, a lumberjack of indeterminate personhood with very good biceps and an armpit of blueberry porridge (this is an extremely good thing, btw), and one carb-loading bear. And more!
Drowsy Voyeur(plum-soaked black patchouli, indigo musk, poppy absolute, guava pulp, black tea, and tobacco) A friend tells me this afterward. She and a date snuck into the empty apartment in the corner of the building, the one with the perpetually broken lock and revolving door of tenants. The space smelled strange, she said. Overripe stone fruit and the dark ink watercolors of night air and the void and emptiness of a place between people. The wallpaper was intricate, spiraling, mediumistic, automatic linework, a Madge Gill drawing duplicated perfectly if Madge Gill had papered a bedroom in a building like this. In the dim light, mid-coitus, it resolved into eyes, dozens of them, staring, swiveling, seething, a shadowy shifting panopticon, humid and pulsing with fleshy plum pulp. Ma’am, this is a Wendy’s, I said.
White Chocolate, Date Paste & Lime Zest I want this to be a bar cookie-like dessert, so I can nibble on it. I want it to be a gorgeously quaffable cocktail, so I can imbibe. I want this to be a fragrance, so I can — oh, wait. This one we can do. I hate to use the literal notes of a perfume when I try to describe the experience of wearing it (it seems lazy to me as a writer! I want to use the words that describe its aspects and qualities and spirit and essence, and not just that, but I want to use the most ridiculously beautiful words available to me! And tell a speculative alternate timeline diary entry, a surrealist fairytale dream about it! But as a reviewer, I get it. You just want to know if you can smell the dates and the limes. Well, yes, you can! You can smell the sugary-tobacco-y dates and the cool, slithery lime and the creamy cocoa butter white chocolate, but it smells better than any single one of those things on its own. This is rich and chewy and opulent, a serving of Lime-Kissed Sticky Date Blondies with White Chocolate Drizzle and a Date Night: dark rum, white chocolate liqueur, fresh lime, date syrup float.
By Candlelight (beeswax, wildflower honey, copal resin, vanilla bean, balsam, and frankincense) Hot beeswax and honey pooling on warm, musky skin, sticky and languid and lacquered and frothed with cream. Bodies handled like precious objects, anointed and presented and arranged, elaborate ceremonies. I can imagine this is the fragrance Anne Rice had in mind when she wrote the Beauty series.
Bakyâ Perfume Oil (polished santol wood warmed by sun, the faint sweetness of coconut husk and rice powder, crushed sampaguita blossoms, pandan leaf, and a touch of palm sugar, oud, and chocolate suman) The paradox of recognition without origin. I know this smell, except I don’t, except I do; something in the olfactory memory reaches for it and comes back empty-handed, certain it was there but wouldn’t recognize it if it was. A confectionary Saturday morning something, cottony and fruity and starchy-soft, heady-waxy florals. Turkish delight by way of circus peanuts, both and neither, made of lychee and guava, rolled in coconut powder. This smells like someone’s childhood, somewhere. Not mine. But somehow I feel the loss of it regardless.
Sal y Pimienta (salty skin musk dusted with pink pepper) A white sheet ghost of your most aspirational self. The day you did everything right, you woke up early, exercised, kept every appointment, every promise, did right by everything, and took care of yourself, too. Clean sweat and goodwill and hard-earned dopamine pride, imprinted onto freshly laundered cotton and stored in a hermetically sealed chamber for the day you wake up feeling like a big loser pile of shit. Throw the good ghost sheet over your head and take a deep breath.
Honey Dust, Patchouli, and Orris Absolute Barry Keoghan, post-Saltburn grave-humping scene, Emerald Fennell’s most deranged gift to cinema. A cheeky sprinkle of improv sweetness, speckled and spattered across freshly turned earth, loamy and dark, coffee grounds worked into the burial mound. Somewhere, twenty miles away, a pale iris sits in a funeral bouquet on a windowsill.
Rose Quartz Phallus(rose cognac, sugared pink grapefruit, iced strawberries, and creamy sandalwood warmed by skin musk, vanilla bourbon, and glowing pink amber) conjures delightful visions of a grapefruit Haribo candy burlesque performance, pearled sugar pasties, bright pinky-coral musky-soapy citrus wig. A jiggling, jellied, bouncy, exuberant, tassel-twirling, sass-and-wink-and-shimmy extravaganza.
Isis and Osiris (blue lotus incense and kyphi resin dancing in a dusk-shadowed temple, black loam of the Nile and green papyrus crushed beneath bare feet, myrrh and cassia steeped in date honey, a glimmer of lapis and gold leaf pressed into linen, and a surge of floodwater returning to parched earth) I am not sure how I am supposed to write a review that even compares to this poetic list of notes, so I can only say is that it smells like when someone who knows better murmurs, “the soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis.” Incense like a drifting tide of stone and honey, heavy and dripping with craggy grief and stoic matter-of-factivism.
Blueberry Chai Truffle (jammy blueberries folded into creamy chocolate and dusted with cardamom, cinnamon, black tea, and warm milk). There is a lumberjack in the backwoods mountains somewhere. I don’t know if they are a man, a woman, genderfluid, nonbinary, cryptid, or what. Doesn’t matter. They look good in a flannel and a beanie, and they have a kind heart and exquisite biceps, and sometimes in winter, with their big, strong hands, they feed you spoonfuls of blueberry porridge they kept tucked up under their armpit to keep it warm for you. Syrupy bláberjagrautur, warm grainy oats, a gorgeous bit of musk.
Mangetsu(white musk, green mandarin, moonflower, oolong tea, crushed grass, ume blossom, and green amber) Eco-poet-author Robert Macfarlane writes about daylighting, the process of bringing buried rivers back to the surface, re-exposing them to sun and air and the communities who had been living unknowingly above them. And when it comes back, everything around it comes back too. Mangetsu smells like that recovered green space. The sharp green bite of new grass pushing through loosened soil. Unripe citrus, a cool, punchy idea with as of yet no focus. A powdery floral haze, waxy, something blooming in cool air for the first time in a long time, all that new growth over warming earth, something skin-close and alive underneath it all.
The Scholar’s Indiscretion (Japanese wineberries, ti leaf, osmanthus, and a dribble of plum wine) Fruity-zingy-almost-fizzy-definitely-giddy, this is a chaos of golden retriever puppies, a whole pile of them, all of them tumbling over each other, absolutely delighted with everything, no agenda beyond maximum joy and maximum destruction…translated into a very-berry-forward scent.
Nanggigigil Ako Sayo (ube candyfloss and rice paper-wrapped red bean custard candy) The ube and red bean listed in the notes are there in spirit if not in letter; what actually shows up for me is baked and grainy, the sweetness of pop tart crust and cake donut and olive oil cake, and maybe even bran muffins, baked up relentlessly wholesome, radiating warmth and carbohydrates, stacked high…and a cozy determination to snorf it all down. Lazy, nap-loving Rilakkuma in his motivated era, powerloading for Fat Bear Week!
Need more Lupercalia scents? Have a peep at my Lupers reviews from 2025, 2024 and 2023 and 2022 and 2021 and 2020. Looks like I skipped a few years but we’ve also got 2017 and 2016 reviews as well!
…PSSSST! Did you know I have collected all of my BPAL reviews into one spot? I’m about two years behind 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?
An addition to my monthly reviews of new or new-to-me perfumes is that I will be sharing a fragrance that I included in my monthly marinade that I’ve been particularly reaching for throughout the month. In case you’re new to the idea of my “monthly marinade,” it’s a practice wherein I’ll grab a handful of neglected bottles from the back of my cupboard and arrange them nicely on a tray every month, so I am more likely to reach for them and wear them!
This month is Spell 125 from Papillon Artisan Perfumesis a scent entwined and imbued with deep magic, history, and ancient mystery. If I understand correctly, it is a fragrance inspired by the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the ritual and ceremony pertaining to the weighing the deceased’s heart against a feather, wherein if one passes this trial, they reach the eternal paradise of the Field of Reeds. If not, well then too bad, I guess. They probably get eaten by a monster or something. Shoulda behaved better, not taken milk from the mouths of babes or festival loaves from the gods and whatnot. I believe this is meant to be a very atmospheric scent, and while it is, I don’t know that I’m getting what the perfumer intended from it. But who’s to say whether that’s a good or bad thing if one enjoys the result? From Spell 125, I get a strange vanilla salt that’s somehow sweet and savory, bright and dusky, earthy and airy at once, evoking both terrestrial concerns and something lighter and loftier. A sweetly green herbaceous melange conjures imagery of cool aromatic, woodsy marjoram incense, an offering to household gods (I can envision clearly the canvas painting by John William Waterhouse) lit for the afternoon, the smoke cleaning and clearing the domestic spaces, and left to smolder and disperse with the windows open, on a cloudless day in early autumn. This is a fragrance which conjures the loveliest peace of mind and sense of well-being, and although I don’t yet know otherwise, I’ll hazard a guess and say it’s splendid to experience such a thing while you’re still above ground.
…and here are all of the new things I smelled in March!
Nopalera Dulce de Cuerpo smells like the night sky over water, which sounds like nothing but is actually everything, a balmy darkness that has cooled just enough, where you find yourself tilting your head back and registering, not for the first time and not without a small interior lurch, how vast and indifferent all of it is. There’s something agave-bright and boozy in here, a kind of milky agave-adjacent liqueur that has a celebrity’s name attached to it, something that comes in a bottle shaped like a ruffled stiletto or a lacy skull, that you wouldn’t seek out but that works perfectly in this moment because this whole moment is a little outside your life. You walked past the lurid neon dregs of a party a half mile down the beach to get here. You’re wearing a sample of a fragrance you wouldn’t normally reach for. The drink in your hand was whatever they were featuring at the bar. None of it is quite yours, and all of it is exactly right, somehow, for this time and space, a little bit outside time and space. Underneath, the fragrance is vanilla and resin and something softly earthy and powdery, but it’s all filtered through the mist of the night tide, through salt and dark water and the musk of warm air that has been swirling over the ocean. Thoughts arrive and pass by like clouds over the moon. The sky, enormous. You, small and warm and human, all of your human grievances and desires and sadness and mania and wonder, which is fine, which is everything, which is all there is. Which is all you get.
Meo Fuscuni Last Season smells like what lives a bit deeper underneath the forest floor, the private teeming dark where mycelium threads wind through soil and small creatures conduct their business and pleasure and what-have-you under stones. Turn over a log, and there is a damp organic exhale, a little sneezy-shocking, a little sweet, something that was quietly happening without you and will resume the moment you put the log back. There is almost a campfire quality to it, not fire exactly, not the flame or the heat, but rather the ash settling back into earth, smoke absorbed into whorled bark and cool moss, and the soft bodies of things. This is the world Rien Poortvliet painted with such weird, goodnatured curious devotion, gnome lore, the integration of decay and domesticity, a hearth fragrant with leaf rot and good dark earth, a home where the worms are neighbors and the beetles are confidants and the mold on the rafters has been there longer than anyone can remember and belongs there, it practically holds the place together! This particular gnome has a tender heart and a melancholy streak and knows all the words to all the Cavetown and Haley Heynderickx songs and probably writes poetry about the smell of rain in autumn, the tremulous silhouette of a lone, dandelion on a late summer evening.
Always Time for Tea Beatrix Potter by way of folk art — a gingham potholder, a pot of something plum dark and berry-stained sitting on top of it, the arrangement a little crooked and entirely loved. Bramble and black tea deeply overbrewed, rambunctious and purple, the berry bleeding into the cloth, into the warmth. A wolf in a housedress who has made her peace with the housedress and also with being a wolf, surrounded by the good clutter of a life fully lived, none of it matching.
Bookish Warm vanilla between old dry leather, softened just enough by something sweetly human, a breath, a margin note, the soft powdery dark of a thought had once and never retrieved. Something that was alive in another century and left its mark between the pages. The library that is also a labyrinth that is also a storied digestive system, paper as skin, marginalia as scar tissue, every life ever lived inside it still faintly present, still warm, still giving off the slow elegiac sweetness of things that have been deeply, thoroughly read.
Library Ghost A marshmallow that exists the way the TARDIS exists mid-arrival, flickering in and out of solidity, present and then not, sweet and then just the memory of sweet. Whatever warmth it had was used up in trying to be seen; what remains is powdery and faintly mineral, cool as a waxen moon melting at the edges, the sugared impression of something soft that may or may not still be there if you turn around quickly enough. Still going about its business. Still almost there.
Myself Invisible Cool green and soapy-powdery in the way violets are soapy-powdery, which is the way the inside of a great aunt’s compact is soapy-powdery, which is the way a pressed flower found in a book you didn’t know you owned is soapy-powdery, but the green underneath is damp and dark, ferns through floorboards, moss reclaiming carved stone. A handful of violets held by something just out of view, a door in a hedge, the back of a wardrobe that is just coats and cold and someone else’s life pressed into wool, not Narnia, just the dark and the waiting and the green coming up through everything anyway, patient as a blackbird’s shadow frozen in the morning’s snow.
Through Dangers Untold Carnation bright and clove-sharp, almost brash with it, dragonblood resinous and red underneath, smoke and old earth and something that has been burning a long time. Bold and a little sunburned, the smell of someone who rides toward things rather than away, who has a sword and knows the name of every horse she has ever loved.
Yet to be Written Cold air with something abstract and sweet underneath that keeps not quite becoming itself, smoke from a fire not yet lit, an unfilled space that is also somehow full — a small sharp thing, a comic-tragic sting in the tail of sentiment. A future that was promised and hasn’t arrived, which is different from a future that was never promised at all. A door that was supposed to open. The inside of a chestnut before it opens. November as a feeling, a lifestyle, a graveyard where the ground hasn’t yet been broken.
Hilde Soliani GolosissimoA massive cocoa-dusted angel food cake, the kind of cake that served as a ballgown skirt for the cheap plastic doll jammed down the center of it (do they still do those kind of cakes for little girls birthdays? I loved them so much ) whose layers are stuffed with thick-almost-chewy chocolate mousse, aggressively strides up to you, slaps you in the face, breathlessly makes out with you, and steals your wallet. (Luckily for my wallet I had a 15% coupon for scentsplit.)
Sharon Doubiago wrote, “My mother is a poem I’ll never be able to write, though everything I write is a poem to my mother.”
Elaine gave me this: the love of beautiful things and gorgeous scents, the obsessive appreciation for art and baubles, and because we never spent time together obsessing over these things, I often feel like every perfume review I write is another poem for her. Mother’s Milk is the kind of fragrance I would have brought to her. Challenging and charming, like she was.
Milk bread soaked in rosewater, shokupan-soft and faintly floral. Something salty and slightly sour underneath, skin and dust on a windowsill in afternoon light. The rose absorbed into the milk, bready and close, and a vanilla that’s less sweet than earthy and buttery, sebaceous almost, warm and not exactly feral, but rather a soft purr. A muffled softness with an unresolved, swift bright electric thing reaching through it, grasping something, anything, everything, and never having it. Elaine is in that elusive thing.
Elaine was a depressive, manic, recovering alcoholic, twenty years sober when she died, an animal hoarder, a woman who somehow held down a job and paid rent (I will forever scratch my head at this, because she just never seemed like an “adult” to me), and charmed everyone she met while remaining a complete mystery to me. People were drawn to her. I was traumatized by her craziness and chaos. But I loved her and all the mystery of her, and I am haunted by the question of why she was the way she was, which I will never get to ask her now.
This perfume smells nothing like her, but she’s everywhere in it.
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?
The hand knows before the brain does. That’s the only explanation I have for this month’s marinade, which I didn’t consciously plan as an amber collection but absolutely is one — five fragrances that live outside of ordinary time, in the deep ceremonial dark where smoke rises and resin weeps and ancient rites are preserved in gold.
Sacred rituals, gothic romance, warrior queens, a heart on a scale and eternity in the balance, candlelit castles with terrible secrets, sweet and savage and smoldering all at once. The subconscious went looking for something and found it five times over.
I’m posting this month’s collection of fragrance reviews a little earlier than I usually do! I am headed out west for a work-related trip and won’t be back until after March 1, so I’d rather do it sooner than later. Here’s everything I sniffed and pondered upon in February, including an elusive search for a new vanilla to love…
LBTY Hera Reigns(Wherein I reimagine Hera with mean-girl main character energy at the center of a domestic thriller…) Book club is three women deep into dissecting this month’s pick: a salacious true-crime account of a podcaster’s obsession, reconstructed movements, tracked patterns, and a hunt for gruesome details. Someone’s pouring more wine. Someone else pivots to the local murder. A woman from the neighborhood (not one of us, that tacky slut with her tits always hanging out at Whole Foods, at pilates, at parent-teacher day) was found dead in the park two weeks ago. Last seen somewhere on Riverside. Then Karen mentions (almost casually, refilling her own glass for like the 3rd time, Jesus Karen) that she saw your husband’s car at the Riverside Hotel on Tuesday. The one on the highway. She wasn’t even sure it was his at first, but that dumb vanity license plate. The rosé in your own mouth pools unswallowed, sours imperceptibly. You were in the middle of mentally cataloging the rosy peonies you need, the blush ranunculus, the garden roses with that specific peachy undertone for the gala centerpieces. Your phone’s open to the florist’s website. But Karen’s words pique and prickle, a tickle, a tingle. The imaginary floral spreadsheet fades, and other, uglier thoughts rush in, unbidden, unwelcome, unspoken. Tuesday. You were at yoga. He said he was at work. That piquancy, that bright, sharply-not-sparkly effervescent quality, suddenly feels less like exuberance and more like electricity. The itchy-eerie kind that precedes the air when a storm threatens. The room keeps talking. You keep smiling. But something underneath has shifted, darkened, as if the darkness is only just now becoming aware of itself.
Haute Macabre x BPAL Light As A Feather Stiff As A Board: a lullaby sung backwards, an incantatory influorescence. Ephemeral floral and shadowed herbal, somehow both purified and unblessed, a conjuration of the unseelie court and a glory of seraphim. Cool, slightly medicinal, pale translucent blooms drifting like shawls woven of mist and moonlight, a frenzy of elf maidens at the feast, trapped in stained glass. The incense of suspended places, a liminal hush of resins, dusty echo of wood. Tarnished silver, clouded glass, filtered light, words illuminated in the margins, scattered like moths, humming and glowing.
Diptique Eau Duelle rustles like a susurrus of sighs stirring through the reeds from that exact territory Algernon Blackwood describes in his short story/novella, “The Willows.” Dry vanilla, grassy and herbaceous, maybe even rhizomatic, swaying, shifting, and restless. A humming of place, a hollow wind. Silvered marsh lights, bizarre fancies. Soft moonlight on myriad murmuring leaves. Vanilla as the uncanny antagonist of the nature trail, the weird tale the willows tell.
Pigmentarium Murmuris a perfume of Lynchian vacuum and void, the kind where silence and absence are loaded with meaning, even if you have no freaking way to articulate what that meaning is. In 1993, my sister and I cut school one day, unplanned, out of the blue. We drove around the tiny downtown of Daytona Beach (we lived locally) and browsed used bookstores and record shops. Eventually, we got brave enough to peek into Wig Villa, a shop we’d always been curious about. Disembodied plastic heads lined the walls. The silence was absolute and inexplicably dreadful. Not a soul in the store. Just us and the heads and that weird, empty air. We later arrived home to find several packages on the porch. Our mother had ordered oversized plaster statues of Jesus and Mary from Fingerhut. This day and these moments live in my memory as surreal, dreamlike, slightly nightmarish… but somehow…not bad? Just deeply, impossibly weird. Pigmentarium Murmur smells like my memories of these moments, a little freaky, a little odd, but strangely very dear to my heart. A hollow plastic note (imagine “vanilla doll head” minus the vanilla), a rose that’s pale and powdery, almost like makeup dust on porcelain, muted and earnest and lurking but endearing rather than sinister, and a sandalwood that’s soft and creaky like old wood, dreamy and worn. All existing together, but also separately, dreamlit portraits at suspended intervals, vacant vignettes, in that teeming emptiness.
A variety of vanillas I have been testing throughout the month to find the ultimate vanilla…
Fugazzi Vanilla Haze: A plastic doll head full of ozone, like a Barbie farted canned air, disorienting, unpleasant, and deeply hollow.
Indult Tihota: A throwback to the mid-to-late 2000s MUA fragrance board obsession, and since I don’t remember it from the tiny sample I had at that time, I am trying it again. A weak cocktail of whipped cream vodka topped with a scant scattering of expired confectioners’ sugar and garnished with a few strands of scorched, frizzled hair. I feel the need to time-travel and interrogate all the Tihota fangirls because I do not get it.
Tauer Vanilla Absolue: Why is there rose in this one??? I mostly loathe rose, and for a scent literally called Vanilla Absolue, finding a prominent rose facet feels like a profound betrayal!
Arte Profumi Sucre Noir This is a sweetened condensed milk/wispy cotton candy/crispy-turned-soggy cereal marshmallow/Pink Sugar-esque little thing, and I would like it to be way more noir-er.
Parfum d’Empire Madagasgar le Baume Vanille …now this is interesting. A bit musty, a bit woolly, a bit vegetal. A sort of syrupy herbal liqueur-novelty-lozenge. Linty, fuzzy, stuck in a moth-eaten pocket. A powdered snow-vanilla bean phantom at the back end. Weird and unexpected, but this is not the vanilla I am looking for, either.
Shaman Bourbon Vanilla is a bit cool and medicinal; balsam and anise are listed in the notes, so it makes sense it would come across this way to me. The longer it wears, the more I am reminded of Myrrhe Ardente from Annick Goutal, so I will just give you the review I wrote for that one: At first, it is decidedly medicinal… like an antique herbal expectorant one might procure at the local apothecary run by an unlicensed homeopathic pharmacist. It might cure you, it might kill you. It soon becomes whispery smoke and mysterious veils and soft, powdery incense made from mystical dream-tree resins. I am pretty sure Myrrhe Ardente is discontinued, but if you ever wanted to try it, Shaman Bourbon Vanilla is basically the same thing!
Arquiste Architects Club is a sophisticated vanilla chypre with salt-spray Atlantic air crispness at the back end, which makes me think of an upper-crust aristocratic party on board a yacht in international waters, posh people drinking gin and tonics. Maybe a woman in cabin 10 fell overboard. Maybe there’s a mystery. Maybe not; maybe it ends as a very intimate vanilla-skin scent.
Il Profumo Vanilla Bourbon is vanilla extract dribbled straight out of the bottle. Not store brand, more like the good stuff from Penzey’s, with a filigreed sweetened floral honey threading through it like gilding on fancy notecards. Not super basic…but also not far off from basic.
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?
Meet the Stinker Spotlight, where I’m chatting with one of my Patreon supporters each month. I’ve never been particularly good at building community on Patreon—I’m not a Discord person, I don’t encourage people to mingle—so I thought this might be a way to actually get to know each other.
Kicking things off with Heather Vee, a fellow magpie whose interests span historical romance, darkwave, occult studies, color theory, and perfume. We talk first perfume memories, current obsessions (Heated Rivalry, anyone?), and the scent she’d conjure into existence.
Are you a supporter of my Midnight Stinks Patreon? You’re here for a reason; perfume, yes, but also something else… and I want to know what that is! Your stories, your obsessions, the way you move through the world. I want to sit with your strange and specific loves and the corners of culture you’ve made your own. I want to share your story with all the other Stinkers here, and I’d love to feature you next! Hit me up via DM, Instagram, or email.
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.
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?
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.
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?
