There’s something about Craft from Andrea Maack that feels sleek and reflective, like the soaring chrome spires of a retrofuturistic sci-fi megastructure and its mechanized cybernetic inhabitants. It’s a cool, bloodless scent, like frost flowers on glass, and wintry chilled metal. I hadn’t read the description prior to writing down these thoughts and now I’m simultaneously pleased and peeved because I picked up on this perfume’s vibe to such an extent I’ve almost quoted the website’s copy about jet packs and robots right back at you. This is one of those instances when it seems the concept and the execution align in an almost preternaturally perfect way... like the android overlords have implanted these ideas directly into my brain!

Targhee Forest from Rogue Perfumery is the earnest, delighted musings of a daydreaming bryologist gnome who writes wistful poems of the pensive creepings of mosses, lichen, and fern. These literary herbariums are the inspiration for their side hustle, where they saponify the loamy greenery and gently mix in an essence of white musk to create charming soaps that smell of moss-covered stone basking in a beam of sunlight.

If you've ever smelled Hermès Ambre Narguille and thought, wow, this stuff is so sweet it's actually going to kill me...I think you might want to give Tartan a try. In reality, I don't know that they're all that alike, other than a rich woody tobacco-y October vibe, but while Ambre Narguille really leans into that syrupy apple compote, Tartan is balanced by acrid leather and an embossed flask of peaty, smoky whiskey. I smell a different aspect of it every time I wear it, but when I close my eyes it conjures wooly earthen moss, the molten gold of autumn, and skeins of snow geese low on the horizon.

Imagine, if you will, that Madame de la Rougierre, the exceedingly creepy and exquisitely cruel governess in Le Fanu's gothic tale Uncle Silas, was taken to task for her evil ways and, as divine punishment, was reincarnated into a brooding French bisque portrait poupée having to endure dusty shelves and grubby little hands for eternity. That is what the smolderingly honeyed orange blossom, wickedly animalic. waxily aldehydic, musty-powdery melancholy of Caron Narcisse Noir smells of. In a good way? Or...as good as it gets for our delightfully nasty Mme de la Rougierre, I guess?

Corpalium is the chilled earthen blooms of a sunless, subterranean iris, wrapped in a velvety feathered cloak of woodsy musk and honeyed, balsamic smoke. It’s a dark bird of myth, a single ebony plume plucked from flame, an unblinking amethyst eye, crystalline and plum dark under the cobweb veil of the pale winter sun’s sweetness. This is heart-stoppingly stunning, and I don’t think I have anything in my fragrance wardrobe quite like it

POV: you are a brooding pencil, prone to bouts of melancholia, that only scribbles at midnight and has only ever been used to draft architectural sketches of gargoyle-adorned gothic cathedrals and crumbling medieval monasteries and Baudelairian poetry and you listen to a lot of Cold Cave and Chelsea Wolfe.

Ebene Fume with its incandescent glowing cacophony of sunset woods majesty, spider-pronged and prickly tines of moody-fiery black pepper, and the mystical ambiguity of palo santo’s piney/licorice/camphor vibe is a brazenly beautiful scent, perilously intense, and all consuming. Smoky, regal, and fearsome, a tiger queen who set her kingdom on fire rather than see it fall, the incense burned on an altar of protection, invoking darksome saints with flaming swords. Desperate, dangerous prayers granted in gorgeous and terrible ways.

Spirit Lamp by DS& Durga Spirit Lamp is a fragrance that evokes a forgotten corner of a botanical garden next to the highway, where a spirit of untamed wilderness thrives, unchecked and unexpectedly in a slick puddle of illicitly dumped motor oil. The initial impression is a thick, oily green of some swampy primordial reed, the smell of an extinct past that’s closer than we often care to think, its roots tangled in the earth, its leaves exuding an unctuous herbal musk. This greenness isn't fresh and invigorating; it's greasy, thick, almost suffocating. As the scent unfolds, a metallic tang emerges, the scent of rust or singed copper, an aggressively hotwired Dodge Charger counterpoint to the glossy, verdant heart. It's a scent that evokes anachronistic images of forgotten rituals and arcane practices, real prehistoric Fast & Furious living your life one-quarter mile at a time shit, a potent concoction brewed in the junkyard-slash-abandoned car lot cauldron of nature's darkest recesses.

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.

“THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.” What perfume were they wearing? Kurt Vonnegut Jr. never really got into that in his satirical dystopian science-fiction short story “Harrison Bergeron,” but I suspect it was Them, by Neandertal, a fragrance distilled to its most minimal, stripped-down DNA. A radical exercise in simplicity, a deliberate erasure of complexity. It’s very essence, a complete and total absence. A void, a vacuum, a nothingness. Olfactory egalitarianism in a bottle, where no note dominates, not a single note is even discernable. Wear it not to make a statement, but to embrace the scent of unadorned equilibrium—a radical olfactory utopia where no note rises above the others, and every aromatic expression is rendered equally silent.