In Venice Rococco, the wedding party dissolves into wolves, but their powdered costumes and countenances still hang in the air – rice-white, chalk-soft, cloud-thick, falling like snow in a fairy tale gone corrupt and perverse. Powder piles in drifts against the walls, powder floats in sheets through candlelight, powder settles like ash on abandoned masks, powder dusts every surface until the mirrors suffocate in white. The scent floats between reality and nightmare, each breath drawing in more sweet, choking powder. Underneath all those layers of white lies something wild – teeth behind the powder puff, claws stirring up fresh clouds with every step. This is what's left at the banquet table after the cursed aristocrats' lycanthropic transformations, their abandoned feast drowning in drifts of violet-white dust, confections and silverware scattered like bones beneath a blanket of perfumed snow.

I had previously tried one from Rook Perfumes--Undergrowth--which I didn’t love, but I held out hope because their offerings just seemed to evoke a sort the quiet drama and weird theatricality that I am very into. And so I think I found my gateway into their world with Thurible. I don’t smell the swinging sacramental censer of aromatic embers and worshipful smoke, but rather an abbess in her holy house working with the incense ingredients in their raw forms. Moss gathered from the lee of a stone, the earthy herbaceous poetry of crushed sage, the gunpowder floral of black pepper that dances frenzied confetti fragments of dark matter under a sturdy stone pestle’s grinding, all bound in the sticky shadows of leathery labdanum and musky amber honey. I don’t know if you light this for ritual descent into the twilight of the underworld or if you smear a fingerful across your tongue at night before navigating the dark corridors of dreams, but whatever its use it feels of disruptive eeriness and unreality where you learn of the things behind the things.

Hiram Green’s Arbolé is not what I expected from the verdant liquid pictured in the bottle. This is a woody anise, a waxy vanilla, a sweet, powdery heliotrope. A lot of reviewers describe this as luxe and cozy and elegant and I think I get that, but there’s something skin-crawling and unsettling that lies beneath. It’s the unreliable narrator in the best-selling domestic-noir thriller; she’s posh, privileged, possibly lives in a Parisian apartment or a luxury flat in London. She’s either in a troubled marriage or she’s grieving her dead husband and/or child, she’s isolated, she’s probably self-medicating and not always terribly lucid, she’s paranoid or is she being gaslit, she’s spying on the neighbors, she’s playing detective, she’s too smart for her own good but too late to figure out she’s been trusting the wrong person. She backs herself into a corner and rarely comes full circle, or even out on the other side of things. The scent of fear and anxiety exuded by these women as they make their way through the twists and turns of these stories? It is the fragrance of Arbolé’s queasy, uneasy prettiness.

I can’t tell you anything about No. 32 Blue Oud by Cognoscenti that makes any amount of sense. Remember Smarties, those small, sweet pale, chalky disks of nostalgia, stacked in rolls, wrapped in crinkly cellophane, and which probably made up the bulk of your Halloween haul when you were a kid? Ok, well, imagine a confection along those lines, crafted by enterprising small business owner witch Pepper Dupree of the Whispering Hills (patent pending) and flavored with proprietary woodland essences of violet and bluebells and meadow rue, brambleberries, cypress and fern and a fuzzy snippet of flowering lichen that only blooms in the shimmering light of a blue moon. The candies are painted the intense velvety shade of midwinter nights, deep resolve, and slow truths, and emblazoned with silvery scenes of celestial significance. She was inspired by Zeus, the blind, starry-eyed screech owl that she saw on Boing Boing, and wanted to create a tiny treat that evoked for the user what Zeus awoke in her: a brief moment of universality, of wholeness within oneself and one’s connection with everything. As you can imagine, such visions, however exquisite or fleeting, come at a steep price–but Pepper Dupree now accepts Afterpay and Klarna.

Aromatics Elixir is marketed by Clinique as an “intriguing non-conformist fragrance." Chandler Burr writes of its depth and shadows, and it's described by many reviewers as "a chypre on steroids." I find all of these things to be true, and more. It is a bitter, balsamic, menacingly astringent blend of cool, otherworldly woods and sour alien herbs, abstract florals and austere resins. Verbena and geranium, jasmine and oakmoss, bergamot and patchouli–all of the familiar notes for a classic and yet it feels out of time, wholly strange and new, as if it contains a strain of alien DNA. Like it’s been floating through the void of space in a cavernous non-Euclidean construct, the monstrous pressure and eerie whistle of the air ducts it's been hiding in slowly driving it mad as it drifts a silent path through the cold stars, utterly alone. If this being had a message for us from across that cosmic ocean of emptiness, it would surely reach us after its death. Such a transmission from that dread abyss is the scent of Aromatics Elixir.

Rotting clumps of sour milk, canned fruit that's been forgotten in a bunker for 35 years, and the slutty Egyptian musk that a zombie stripper demon might wear while giving you a wildly uncomfortable lap dance. My god. I just want to hurl this sample straight into the sun.

Akro Haze is a cool, slithery scent of aromatic and bittersweet-camphoraceous herbs, the hissing sweetness of that unexpected and uncanny resinous maple syrup note that I associate with immortelle, and a quiet, stealthy base of leathery woods and patchouli. I can’t speak to the fragrance’s supposed inspiration because I do not partake, but it certainly does have a nocturnal, narcotic energy, all languid limbs, drowsing breaths, and being hypnotized by a gorgeous creature who is actually a snake spirit or a snake goddess, or a Medusa, or a half-woman, half-cobra monster created by a mad scientist, or whatever-- what I am getting here is that Haze is a monstrously beautiful snake lady of a scent.

So, 4160 Tuesday’s The Sexiest Scent On The Planet. Ever. (IMHO). I can’t say that I don’t like it, because I really do. Is it sexy? I don’t know. I don’t really like to think about scents like that, for some reason it really grosses me out. Maybe my filthy youth–and man do I have some stories–flipped some sort of switch in my brain where now I basically want whatever the opposite of sexy is. I am not saying sexy is a young person's game, I guess I am saying I just don't care about sexy anymore. There's more to life. Anyway. So this scent is fairly simple, what I might call floral vanilla and dark woods. It’s lovely, but not overly complex. It’s perfectly fine and I would almost want a full bottle to keep around for days when I don’t know what I want to wear, only that I want to smell nice. The problem is, it smells EXACTLY like the sandalwood vanilla wallflower home scent plug-ins that Bath and Body Works used to sell. And there’s no inherent problem with that scent, either, it’s actually very pretty, but my sister has one–sometimes two–plugged into every room in her house, and before long what was once pretty is now intensely oppressive and suffocating, and now I can’t smell this particular version of vanilla and woods without feeling like I am choking on a candle. I get how this is a me-problem, not actually a product-problem, or perfumer-problem. but sometimes that’s the way it goes.

Accident a la Vanille's Almond Cake is so nightmarishly awful that I was inspired to write a haiku for it: a robitussin, and playdough and almond milk frathouse haze: DRINK, DRINK!

Copal Azur from Aedes de Venustas is a prophecy rustling on the wind, woven from copal and frankincense fumes that billow from temples guarding secrets older than gods. Meditate on these vapors of incense and antiquity, and you’ll find it’s a salty, bittersweet paradox, a wisp of sacrificial smoke laced with the unexpected sweetness of caramelized ambers. A sacred offering – a glistening, balsamic lacquered glaze burnishing a forgotten feast, a tang of something primal, both savory and sweet. A taste of eternity, a sticky fever dream forgotten ritual, clinging to your ribs long after the final swallow. The jungle itself seems to hold its breath as explorers, trespassers who believe they understand the weight of the past, navigate its sun-dappled heart toward the source of the scent. The air hangs heavy with it, a fat, golden sigh that twists through the foliage–which, wary of the intrusion, whispers not of secrets but of warnings from the dusty pages of history, hinting at unknown chapters these interlopers were never meant to be a part of. A golden condor soars overhead, its wings brushing against this intoxicating residue; it, too, is aloft on a dream of following the path of the setting sun.