While I ultimately love LUSH’s Shade, wow… it has the absolute ugliest opening of any fragrance I have ever tried. Mineralic and greasy, like rancid petrichor, like a stick of butter studded with rusty nickels and stubbed-out cigarette butts, melting on wet concrete after a scalding July sunshower in central Florida. But then it does something miraculous. The oppressive atmosphere lifts and turns into a completely different perfume, softly sugared and clean-woody-resinous, like the sacred soapy sap of the mystical marzipan tree. It’s so good, too good. Maybe even too-good-to-be-true good. It almost smells like something about which I would say: “I love this, but it’s not for me.” Because, in some way or another, it doesn’t feel like me. Too unstudied and unbothered and carefree, I guess. I’m too neurotic to pull this off! BUT somewhere in the vast multiverse, there exists the chillest, coolest, most untryhard version of me, and this is what they smell like. And when I wear this perfume, I am channeling that person…and it feels really, really good.