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. M…

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 s…

Ellen Hutter sits on the bench at the edge of the grey sea, waiting, and out on the horizon, where her husband should be, where Nosferatu's shadow should be gathering ... there is Fozzy Bear. Frothy salt mist and soft warm musk, woolly and faintly ridiculous and ridiculously sincere. Ginger and turmeric filtered throug…

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 o…

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, b…

A hooded figure watching from beyond the shadows, but shadows of what, and why in a place no shadow should be? The insidious intrusion, the confounding juxtaposition, the thing found in the wrong place. The stirring of things best left unstirred. Resinous orchid musk, feral balmy, rotting-earthed humidity. Milky murk,…

Ramshackle wooden pier, salt-bleached planks sea wrack rot, shifting scrim of slate sky. Miss Akranes contest, bright bunting wilting in salt spray and sea mist, dripping gown and cracked rubber boots. Icy rain of butter and brine, each drop a tiny oyster on the tongue. Fishing nets of pearl grey silk tangled with kelp…

A rose I immediately enjoy is a rare creature indeed, and this one conjures the fierce tenderness of Yosano Akiko's verse. I don't know how this extraordinary poet would feel about this fragrance, but I am channeling her spirit for these impressions.

Ancient wood smoke drifts between scattered fog. Morning bell echoes…

Peak pixie dream girl Peter-Pan collared Zooey Deschanel ModCloth dress, honey-apricot-jasmine preciousness, infantile heliotrope Alice & Olivia floral babydoll cast-offs set alight, smoldering in the gutter. It wasn't a cleansing fire, not a redemptive flame. Sort of like a nasty garbage bin blaze, destroying evidence…

Cold, coiled, calculating. A soupçon of weaponized sweetness. Wilhelmina Slate corner office with floor-to-ceiling glass walls, fashion dungeon once her interior decorator works their dark magic. Absinthe-laced champagne vanilla, green and subtly herbaceous, aromatic poison in crystal stemware. Dusty-woody-musky shadow…