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.

This version of Burberry Hero begins with the fleeting season of apricots and musing on how easily they bruise, how you’ll never again know the childhood euphoria of that pretty smocked easter dress the color of rice powder and coconut with ruffles and lace and three pearly buttons but you will never forget the unabashed joyful flavor of a mouth crammed full of jelly beans. What Hero where and who is it that smells like the sour cream powdered sugar sweetness of picnic ambrosia salad, all pools of Cool Whip, and marshmallows soaked in the juice of tiny mandarin oranges and pineapple syrup, but not that really–rather the phantom of that atomic summer fruit confection, the faint lingering fragrance of it, at the bottom of a polished cedar bowl.

There is a lovely painting by Gaston Bussiere of a pair of frolicsome nymphs bathing in a pool of purple iris. If you could bottle that scene and its cool, playful atmosphere of ephemeral spring florals, the greenest violet leaf, and some sort of woody-musky-powdery mystical fairy soap flakes, you'd have L'Iris.

A long time ago I wrote a review in which I referred to Aquolina’s Pink Sugar as the bark of the cotton candy tree. Well, that was a confectionary botanical specimen in its sapling stage. A Whiff of Waffle cone is that tree a millennia later, after the rise and fall of civilization, the obsolescence of any number of gods, and you know, after it's seen some shit. It’s still rich and redolent of carmelized burnt sugar and toasted marshmallow, along with a luscious velvety smoked vanilla custard and something like marzipan syrup incense…but imagine all of that with a jaded attitude and wearing a beautiful old leather jacket and puffing away on a pipe with warm nuances of dried sweet grass and balsamic woods in the chamber. Why is this tree smoking? Man, it’s a million years old, it can do whatever it wants. It’s earned that right.

Though I've had this bottle of Niki de Saint Phalle for years, I've been avoiding pinning down my thoughts on this one. I am not sure how much the woman had to do with the creation of the perfume, but Niki de Saint Phalle was a French-American artist and filmmaker renowned for her distinctive sculptures of voluptuous vividly colored, giant, joyously conquering women. The perfume was launched in 1982 but it smells like my imaginings of the early 70s It's a delicately spicy, mossy green-leafed potion, with notes of wormwood, carnation, leather, peach, and soft aldehydes. It's complex, yet eerily balanced and I can't get a handle on any one note. It makes me think of a meandering, plotless arthaus film that you loved for the visuals and the atmosphere and the score, and even though you didn't understand a thing that was going on, you're still daydreaming about it decades later.

Imaginary Authors Fox in the Flowerbed is all fluttering spring petals, light feathery wings on a playful breeze, and unsettlingly intimate musks. Even the honeyed jasmine, usually so heavy, heralding summer's muggy fug, feels like a gossamer dream on a cool, April evening. In a philosophical sense, it makes me think of that poet from antiquity musing on whether he is a butterfly dreaming he is a man, or a man dreaming he is a butterfly. In a more carnal sense, however, it is a perfume that conjures the beautifully tender, kinky lepidopteran weirdness of The Duke of Burgundy's bizarre love story. I know a fragrance inspired by the film already exists, but somehow Fox in the Flowerbed does a more proper and true job of it.