CdG Monocle Hinoki is mildly terpenic, peppery cypress, stiff black waxy leather, and that creepy sterile electrical spark ozone-y aroma that you smell on the jet bridge gangway when you’re waiting in line to board an airplane. This is overall a deeply anxiety-inducing fragrance, conjuring imaginary but highly plausible scenarios wherein I have a connecting flight in Atlanta and that I have only 13 minutes to make it to the gate and the gate is all the way at the other end of the terminal. I don't need this stress in my life!

Do you want to smell like a queer feminist dark academia anime fairy tale with dangerous duels, creepy cryptic Greek chorus shadowpuppets, trippy plot details, gorgeous imagery, and bombastic symbolism? With notes of lush rambling rose, zesty, herbaceous lemon verbena, and luminous white tea leaves, Alkemia Perfume’s The Lover Tells of the Rose will scratch this highly specific itch for you. Which is to say: the weirdos who get it, get it. And those who don’t, don’t.

Imagine the acrid smoke and smolder of a peaty whiskey and the antiseptic minty chlorinated burn of an off-brand mouthwash. Now stir up those stinging, eye-watering fumes with a half-melted lime freezy pop. Gosh. This is bafflingly terrible.

I would love to see the movie that inspired Dolls, but I am having a hard time getting my hands on it, so I can’t say whether or not this fragrance in any way conjures the essence or spirit of the film, its characters, or its story. Dolls is vaguely sweet, in a stovetop simple syrup made with water and white sugar kind of way, somewhat powdery in a dusty violet candy way, and gently floral, as in the floral notes that come in the form of blossoms from a flowering tree sort of way. Combine the delicacy and fleeting characteristics of these mild, mellow elements with ylang ylang’s rubbery musk and you do get a bit of a plastic doll head scent. Although I don’t know if the avant-garde film inspiration even had any dolls in it, so I could be reaching there.

I will tell you that I was wearing this scent while reading Catriona Ward’s new book Sundial and Dolls makes me think of one of the book's main characters, Rob, a suburban housewife who is just trying to make a normal life for her two daughters. Rob senses with growing horror a chilling and evolving darkness and in her eldest daughter, Callie. Desperate for a solution for this child with whom she struggles to connect and doesn't actually even like very much, Rob journeys with Callie to her childhood home, Sundial, in the middle of the Mojave desert. Shocking secrets are revealed gradually, nothing here is as it seems or as you expect, and once you think you've got the story straight, your expectations are subverted and turned upside down and inside out. This is an intensely brilliant, brutal, breathless tale that kept me guessing right up until the end. So this ended up more of a book review than a perfume review but Dolls is a scent of someone going to drastic measures while maintaining a facade of normalcy, and you can almost smell how heartless they are going to need to be in the realization that this scent is all window dressing with no heart or soul inside.

DS & Durga’s Bowmakers is lovely and weird and I want to bathe in it. Bowmakers is all cool, peculiar woods, maybe cypress and cedar, a fleeting leatheriness, and what feels to me like the synthetic woody cozy ambery muskiness of ISO E super. This is how I imagine the scent of a Scandinavian minimalist YouTube lifestyle vlogger’s cozy 400 square foot apartment in wintertime. Specifically chosen sandalwood candles in amber apothecary jars, a very aesthetically pleasing and strategically placed tube sweet almond and musk hand cream, hundred-year-old but well-cared aromatic hard-wood floors. A tiny capsule wardrobe displayed prominently on a coat rack, where a thrifted leather jacket in excellent condition hangs for guests to admire, the fragrance of which mingles with a chilled early morning breeze gusting from the open windows while they’re airing out their bedroom as part of their 5 AM morning routine that they are currently filming for their subscribers.

As a long-time anime and manga fan, I was of course never not going to be drawn in by the reference to Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell, a stylish and strange cyberpunk neo-noir in which exists a world wherein people merge with machines, and boasts an iconic storyline that asks consciousness-expanding questions and examines what makes us fundamentally human. Notions of philosophical inquiry aside, The Ghost in the Shell from Etat Libre d’Orangeis a confused, chaotic concoction that makes you think someone fed a bunch of molecules to an AI and tasked it with creating a perfume. There’s a head-scratchingly metallic green floral note, a synthetic fruit that winks in and out of existence–a sort of speculative lactonic peach– and a plastic, prosthetic musk alongside a pungent, bittersweet note that veers between cumin’s weird, woody funk and a rotten belly button infection. And sure you can be grossed out by that, but we’ve all got human bodies and they all occasionally do stinky human things, so simmer down. Lazy people who have ever gotten their navel pierced are intimately familiar with this aroma. The funny thing is, it’s possible that I like Ghost in the Shell and its reality-warping, neon city, mechanical-limbed artificial absurdity. When it works, it’s a really playful and unique skin scent. When it doesn’t, it’s a cyborg with digitized BO. But I’m not sure I’d take my chances with the purchase of a full bottle, let alone a bespoke upload of it directly to my olfactory cortex.

I cannot possibly sing the praises of Zara's Bohemian Oud highly enough. I don’t think ten choirs of angels could do it. But let’s just say you took a pillowy bit of the marshmallow fluff those angels were floating around on and stirred it into the lightest, fluffiest chocolate mousse you can imagine, served it in a hand-carved bowl made from some sort of resinous holy wood, and topped it with the incendiary floral of a dusting of gently toasted black pepper, then you might have an inkling of what we’re all singing about. Bohemian Oud is a splendid delight made that much more fantastic because at less than $30, it is a freaking steal. Buy a bottle. Buy 12. This stuff is marvelous.

Libertine Sweet Grass is a scent that ticks all my boxes and tickles all my fancies and I am not trying to sound like some sort of horny perverse gremlin about it, but those are the phrases that best describe how perfect I find this particular combination of notes. It’s a dusty honey, dried tobacco, and a sort of balsamic oakmossy ambery situation that all smells very much like something glamorous trying to play it lowkey. Like Sofia Loren in a farmgirl apron napping in a hayloft in the heat of a late summer afternoon. Sure, that’s a threadbare gingham dress she's wearing and there’s chicken feed in her hair but come on, you can’t pretend that’s not Sofia Loren. And that’s a bit how this fragrance makes me feel, both uncomplicated and easy-breezy, but utterly beguiling and drop-dead gorgeous at once. And actually…now that I think about it, shouldn’t that be the criteria we use when looking for a fragrance? Something that feels so simple to slip into and yet yields an incredible wow factor? That’s what Sweet Grass does for me.

Milky gossamer wings, the effervescent glimmering frost and fizz of stardust, and the pearly aura of Glinda the Good Witch mingle gigglingly in this opalescent, sparkling Venusian fairy-spa water fragrance.

I tell you what, for the longest time, for years, I was like no, no sweets or gourmands for me, thanks, not my thing! And now it’s weird, it’s basically all I want. And yet…I don’t actually want to smell like literal cake. Like a baked good. Yes, the smell of glaze drizzled atop freshly fried hot doughnuts is mouthwatering, but I just don’t want that to be the scent that clings to my clothes or that precedes my bod with I walk into a room. I don’t want the smell of leavening agents or the chemistry of eggs and flour and sugar, or really even, a sweet, fluffy crumb. Simply put, I don’t want to smell like food. I want the artistic rendering of cake, a cake run through the filters of someone’s imagination and maybe in the end it’s not really cake at all, but still... you know it when you smell it. Annabel’s Birthday Cake is a bit like this. This is the fragrance from the elusive flowering cake vine, a rare species of flora that only blooms once a year on the date of one’s birth, pearly pink petals that exude the scent of rich, fruity vanilla bean and heliotrope frosting and closes after a brief 12-hour window with a soft, powdery breath of white chocolate musk.