DSH Perfumes Manhattan is firelight through a vintage lens – all warmth and no flame, the way old films captured hearths in silver-screen shadows. The glow feels richer than memory, grounded in something earthy and lush, a cherry left at the bottom of a glass, soaked in honeyed spirits, plummy with promise. A bitter note cuts through the sweetness, a tiny nibble under the gazes of those who love you, a warmth so enveloping and tender it breaks your heart just a little and brings tears to your eyes. You recognize it instantly: that feeling of safety and love that you can only experience now through the lens of nostalgia because you’ll never be that young or small or loved that way again.

The scent wraps around you like a childhood memory that softens into sadness when held too long. It’s the kind of velvet golden haze that catches in your throat now, because you know such perfect shelter can’t exist outside of memory, outside these few precious frames of black and white film where the firelight always burns just right, and everyone you’ve ever loved is still young and beautiful and waiting in the next room. This is a softly devastating scent, and one that requires emotional steadiness to wear – it has a way of dissolving the present and opening rooms in the memory where beloved ghosts forever wait patiently for you with open arms, where the little heart you long outgrew is forever full.

I first learned of Hanae Mori on a blog that I was pretty obsessed with, back in the early 2000s. This person wasn’t a perfume enthusiast or fashionista, or even a popular blogger as far as I could tell...she seemed to be a gentle quiet weirdo, like me. She had a goth Betty Page bob and she did something in tech and updated sporadically about her little Seattle apartment. I thought she was the coolest. When I began to really delve into fragrances a few years later, I recall her mentioning this one in passing, and so sought out a sample. I was disappointed at how ordinary it seemed. Twenty years later I quite disagree with past me! Hanae Mori is a perfectly lovely woody vanilla and creamy, milky musk with hints of dusty dried grass and the airy green tang of blackberry leaves. A lot of reviewers mention fruit, but I don’t get any of that at all. If you enjoy the sweet comfort and nostalgic 90's whispers of Vanilla Fields or the bitter Miss Havisham melancholia of Fleur Cachee, I’d say this scent falls squarely in the middle and I am surprisingly obsessed with it.

Someone mentioned that I should try M from Mariah Carey because it smells like marshmallow incense, and though I love marshmallows and incense, I didn’t have high hopes because I think most celebrity fragrances are either boring or kind of awful. But how could I doubt the performer who sings what can only be spoken of as the most splendid and fabulous Christmas song of all time? Mariah’s version of All I Want For Christmas Is You is perfect and excellent and I am taking no questions on that point. These are *cereal marshmallows* perfumed with lush, night-blooming flowers, sweetened with rich amber rock sugar, all gone soft and creamy in a bowl of milk. And then left on an altar to smolder lazily in a dish combined with dragon’s blood and pomegranate. Not a summoning. But an offering of thanks. She doesn’t want a lot for Christmas. Because she’s a giver. And she gave us the best holiday-themed song to ever exist in this world or any other. All hail Mariah, the vocal acrobatics of All Want For Christmas Is You, and to a lesser extent... this perfume which is actually pretty ok

I have had to reframe and rescript all of my internal dialogue about Lady Vengeance from Juliette has a Gun. It is an entirely different creature today than it was when I first tried it. Almost a Jekyll and Hyde performance, if the good doctor was a sociopath and his alter ego was actually a hapless hero. Let me explain. Initially this was a fragrance of soft, cedary woods and ambery musks, a combination which I tend to love... but it was missing something. It was like observing someone with a human mask on, going through the motions of what humans do, but behind their dead, black eyes there was no light, or spark, or soul. Today this scent is the most theatrical, scenery-chewing rose; a rose that sweeps in to save the day with roses embroidered on its cape and a rose between its teeth and some sort of rose-related catchphrase-- in case you, you know, forgot it was a rose. On one hand, it’s too little, and on the other, it’s Very A Lot and between the two, this lady has forgotten about whatever she wanted vengeance for in the first place.

Mojave Ghost from Byredo is a wistful floral. A little milky, a little woody, a little sad. With a gently soapy violet aspect to it, more like laundry soap than handsoap. Something that you might use to clean a dusty Edwardian frock. It first calls to mind the girls in their frothy ivory dresses from the film Picnic at Hanging Rock, and their mysterious disappearances. It makes me think of ruffles and lace period, I suppose, worn by people who’ve yet to encounter loss or grief. A child who one moment has no concept of death, and then in the next second when they learn of their missing sister who will never return, or their terminally ill relative or a grandparent who died in their sleep...and then with that knowledge that none of us will be here forever and eventually we’re all going to shuffle off of this plane of existence... things are just different. Perhaps we’re not going to disappear into a massive and uncanny geological formation, possibly ushered along by unseen forces (like the Hanging Rock girls) but that our lives will one day end is a certainty. Mojave Ghost smells like the moment just after you’ve come by this information, and you know you are never again going to be as happy as you were before you knew it.

Poudre de Musc from Parfums de Nicolai is all shimmering, gossamer aldehydes and soft, musky rose, and a gorgeous arrangement of sandalwood and orange blossom that a particularly artsy florist composed. It lights up a room with scintillating conversation, it’s both lively and restrained, people would invite it to parties and no one would ever give it weird looks or call it “extra,” or say, ",man you were acting weird last night." Mothers-in-law would love it. It would never ever forget its mother-in-law's birthday, as a matter of fact, it probably calls its mother-in-law once a week to say hello. Objectively, it is beautiful. It’s perfect on paper. But it makes me feel awful about myself because those attributes are all of the things I am not.

Fleurs d’Oranger from Serge Lutens is everything lush and lovely and radiant about a little bottle of orange blossom water, right up until the time I add it to a cold drink or a confection, thinking how exquisite it will taste and then realizing, uggghh... this literally tastes like a mouthful of perfume. Fleurs d’Oranger is the extreme version of that ill-fated swallow, all syrupy narcotic, summer damp, fleshy-musked florals, balmy honeyed jasmine, and tuberose, intensified by cumin’s bitter, polarizing pungency.I adore the scent of orange blossoms and enjoy this interpretation more than most. It’s heady and heavy-lidded and hypnotic whereas many others have a lighter, somewhat “clean” aura. I’m fairly certain that the deliciously cunning and charismatic Lady Sylvia Marsh, immortal priestess to an ancient snake god in Ken Russell’s trippy 1988 horror film the Lair of the White Worm, wears this exact scent and as she goes about her days, heartily seducing and eating men, looking fabulous, and enjoying herself tremendously.

I’ve been trying my sample of Squid on and off for three years, hoping to find something different in it. It still does not wow me. But it’s not terrible, either. I’m typically really impressed with Zoologist's myriad creations and from this scent I expected something that shares a kinship with the moody, murky, and mysterious nature of this creature, or at least the slithery and inky perceptions of it? But I’m finding it overall an oddly crisp aroma, like freshly snipped sweet green herbs, coupled with a vanilla salt aspect very similar to Tokyo Milk Dark’s Arsenic, and the added subtle floral zest of pink pepper. It’s pleasant enough, but it’s not terribly interesting, and it certainly doesn’t evoke the squidly wizard vibes of the label illustration. Now if that artful cephalopod depicted, say …an executive admin who gets you to sign an office birthday card? I could have tempered my expectations appropriately. This is less marine monstrosity from the deep and more Angela from The Office.

I've been wracking my brains trying to come up with something creative or interesting to say about this scent. Usually, I love diving deep into a fragrance, weaving dreams and memories into the description, finding those strange and perfect metaphors that capture not just how something smells but how it makes you feel. Different aspects of this scent seem to appear to and appeal to different people - some are catching the nuttiness, others are picking up on the palo santo, while to me it smells exactly like a can of vanilla frosting. Yet we're all arriving at the same emotional destination: comfort. After two weeks of being ripped from my introverted little sanctuary to spend every waking moment with Yvan’s family for the holidays, I have been crabby and frazzled, and I've found myself instinctively reaching for this one. It's fluffy, cozy, creamy comfort that somehow manages to stay light and airy rather than cloying, and despite being fundamentally a vanilla scent, it never tips over into grossly tooth-aching sweetness. The longer it wears, though, I'm catching more nuances - that lush, pillowy marshmallow frosting eases into warm, ambery-woody musk the longer it wears. Is it groundbreaking? No? Have I reinvented the wheel with this review? Sadly, also no. But maybe there's value in collective experience - in many voices confirming that yes, sometimes what you need isn't a complex artistic statement, but just this simple comfort, this quiet permission to rest.