Ebene Fume with its incandescent glowing cacophony of sunset woods majesty, spider-pronged and prickly tines of moody-fiery black pepper, and the mystical ambiguity of palo santo’s piney/licorice/camphor vibe is a brazenly beautiful scent, perilously intense, and all consuming. Smoky, regal, and fearsome, a tiger queen who set her kingdom on fire rather than see it fall, the incense burned on an altar of protection, invoking darksome saints with flaming swords. Desperate, dangerous prayers granted in gorgeous and terrible ways.

Spirit Lamp by DS& Durga Spirit Lamp is a fragrance that evokes a forgotten corner of a botanical garden next to the highway, where a spirit of untamed wilderness thrives, unchecked and unexpectedly in a slick puddle of illicitly dumped motor oil. The initial impression is a thick, oily green of some swampy primordial reed, the smell of an extinct past that’s closer than we often care to think, its roots tangled in the earth, its leaves exuding an unctuous herbal musk. This greenness isn't fresh and invigorating; it's greasy, thick, almost suffocating. As the scent unfolds, a metallic tang emerges, the scent of rust or singed copper, an aggressively hotwired Dodge Charger counterpoint to the glossy, verdant heart. It's a scent that evokes anachronistic images of forgotten rituals and arcane practices, real prehistoric Fast & Furious living your life one-quarter mile at a time shit, a potent concoction brewed in the junkyard-slash-abandoned car lot cauldron of nature's darkest recesses.

While the notes listed for Apocalypstick, violet, rose, mint, (I thought I saw macadamia listed somewhere?) sound like a pleasant enough combination, what the perfume smells like to me is a village of small children infected with a vast malevolence of pure evil. This cloying candied floral doesn’t just tiptoe on the precipice of sweetness and decay; it’s not just a playful saccharine innocence masking a sinister undercurrent of rot. It is an immediate and overwhelming assault of viciously poisoned sugarplums stuffed with razorblades served to you by sticky fingers and pale faces with sharp teeth. It lingers, sickening on the skin like a toxic premonition, like a perpetual stain, an indelible mark of repulsion.

“THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.” What perfume were they wearing? Kurt Vonnegut Jr. never really got into that in his satirical dystopian science-fiction short story “Harrison Bergeron,” but I suspect it was Them, by Neandertal, a fragrance distilled to its most minimal, stripped-down DNA. A radical exercise in simplicity, a deliberate erasure of complexity. It’s very essence, a complete and total absence. A void, a vacuum, a nothingness. Olfactory egalitarianism in a bottle, where no note dominates, not a single note is even discernable. Wear it not to make a statement, but to embrace the scent of unadorned equilibrium—a radical olfactory utopia where no note rises above the others, and every aromatic expression is rendered equally silent.

Tell Me About The Forest (You Once Called Home)is fir and spruce and juniper and is an immediate love. I have a huge fondness for fairy-tale forest fragrances, but so many of them are sticky, a fairy forest syrup that you measure a bar spoon into for some sort of Hansel and Gretel cocktail. This doesn’t have that treacly quality; it’s…dryer? Maybe a bit bitter. I feel like it’s a bit of a hermit-ascetic with an acerbic wit and a love of irony. It reminds me of dense, darkened thickets in the midnight woodland art of Tin Can Forest.

Dirty Amber is a warrior queen's anthem, a grit-kissed growl of bergamot and juniper, teeth bared against the dawn. Geranium, wild and bruised, clings to cracked leather armor, frankincense, a smoldering altar to forgotten gods, hangs heavy, the acrid bite of cassia bark a whispered curse upon her foes. Tonka's honeyed siren song of stolen pleasures is cloaked by a bitter, swirling fog of labdanum and myrrh. Cypress and patchouli, the musk of untamed forests, bind her to the earth, roots digging deep into forgotten bones of empires. And then, the heart of the storm erupts: fossilized amber, a guttural roar, a scourge of scorched starlight trapped in the golden opulence of sun-baked tears. The fragrance of a lineage steeped in fire, a war cry echoing through ages, of monsters fallen and kingdoms claimed. Dirty Amber is the scent of a Frazetta heroine, eyes blazing with the wild light of a thousand moons, a blade poised at the throat of destiny. This is beauty that bleeds, stains your skin, marks your bones, and etches its story into the air you breathe.

Not all observatories are built of steel and glass. Some are carved from ancient wood and wisdom, where mechanical planets trace their paths through the perpetual twilight of desert mysteries. Here in the thin mountain air, elevation sharpens the senses: first the bright bite of altitude, then the way spices catch in the throat like distant light. Time dissolves in the dark. What begins as calculation—the precise geometry of pepper's gentle ignition and austere cedarwood gears—softens into something warmer, more profound. Each celestial model points inward, finding its own true north in bitter cocoa and burnished amber. Brass orbits wheel overhead at the angle of eternity while censers trace their own paths below, drawing cosmic dust and incense into the undertow of old magics. In the smoke and spice of these shadowed alignments, the machinery of night turns ever inward.

With Oriza Legrand’s Relique d’Amour, I experienced one of my favorite facets of being a writer: encountering unexpected connections and surprise synchronicities with regard to a thing I’m attempting to write. If, say, I am outlining a book review, and I happen to watch a movie exploring similar things. Or if I am piecing together an essay and I hear a new song echoing my inner monologue. As someone for whom translating ideas into words is such a vital aspect of my identity, these snippets of magic from the universe are so special for me. Anyhow, I unearthed a sample of Oriza Legrand’s Relique d’Amour from behind a bookshelf, and while pondering its mysteries I happened upon a March 2022 Vogue Hong Kong editorial with a beautiful Joan of Arc vibe, and these images are the perfect visual representation of this fragrance. Relique d’Amour is lofty, diaphanous incense, ghost particles of lemony woody myrrh, preserved in a reliquary of bitter, brittle quartz. A pale white lily springs impossibly from its crystalline depths, its delicate dewy spice in eerie contrast to the earthy oaken moss which cushions its base. This is a scent evoking visions of the divine, of the ineffable solace of faith, and of knowing to the core of your very soul that you are not afraid. You were born to do this.

Rue St Honore from Ouai is giving me some real idyllic springtime wisteria-draped cottagecore Crabtree & Evelyn Gunne Sax tradwife YouTube influencer exploited by their alt-right faschy podcaster husband for their perceived domesticity, femininity and purity vibes. Is this a field of violets and daisies and gingham picnic daydream or an escapist nostalgia-trap weaponized by Neo-Nazis? Maybe I am overthinking it, but there is something about this quaint floral garden fragrance that feels wildly wrong and deeply uncomfortable and makes me desperately itchy to stage an intervention for someone.

Vanilla Vibes, you had one job. For a fragrance with vanilla right there in the name, there is a shocking lack of it in the execution. Instead, it is a humdrum aquatic, with a sour, salty marine aspect and the barest whisper of sandy musk. I hate to use the word “boring” because that’s more of a judgment than a description, but I think in this case it’s perfectly warranted. I mean if this were a person, it wouldn’t even have a face. As a matter of fact, this is that same faceless person in a 50-year-old mermaid suit at Weeki Watchee barely submerged underwater and doing a terrible job entertaining children, and they’re actually so bored themselves they are texting on their phones instead of swimming and if you look closely you can see their toes poking through one of their fins. And you know what else? They smell nothing like vanilla at a