I am finally sampling Frederic Malle En Passant and I'm a little ashamed to say that as long as I've been enthusing about fragrance, 20 years at least, this is the first time I have ever smelled this one. I believe it is meant to be some kind of contemporary classic, so better later than never.

With notes of lilac, cucumber, cedar, and white musk, I am still trying to put into words what a beautiful creation this is. All I can say is that it's like the gauzy childhood memory of a gentle, misty spring day, cool tendrils of fog lifting as the sun shifts through the clouds and warms the skin...but that's not quite right.

As a child, I wouldn't have had the language for the ghostly sense of nostalgic melancholia En Passant evokes. It's more like looking at the source of this memory through a hazy window pane as an adult, the present as it unfolds moment to moment, and becomes memory as fast as the moment unfurls. And knowing how fleeting it all is. And the sadness for the passage of time, and the joy for the child who doesn't feel that yet. It's that. It's all of that.

Philoskyos from Diptyque is a scent I don't wear very often because I am not quite sure what to make of it...and I don't know how to pronounce it, either. It is meant to be a perfumed ode to the fig tree in its entirety, the wood, the leaves and the fruit, but to be transparent here, I have never eaten a fresh fig, and even worse I sometimes get confused about dried figs and dried dates, so I'm already at a loss. What I do experience from this scent is the milky sap from a broken twig and the fragrance of spring greenery, damp from a morning rain. Despite that, it still comes off as dry, and I would expect it to also be fresh and light, but somehow it's strangely musty. I wear this on days when I know I've got a lot to think about, to remind myself that it's okay to not know everything, and maybe never reach a conclusion.

Yum Pistachio Gelato, aside from being a name that I am embarrassed to type out, is pretty embarrassingly basic for as much as a commotion perfumetok made about it when it was released. Not being all that plugged into perfume community drama, I wasn’t sure why, but I thought it had something to do with how influencers were talking or not talking about it, or maybe some people were butthurt about not receiving PR boxes? I don’t know, but I was curious as to whether the scent itself was in any way worth getting your nose out of joint about. It is not. This is a commonplace vanilla skin musk with the addition of what I think of as a sort of rancid shea butter sour baby puke element, something soft and creamy that’s gone all clotted and curdled. It’s not the worst thing I ever smelled, but if you didn’t receive a PR box about it, you no doubt lived through the ordeal of it and went on to smell better things.

Black Opium smells like someone squeezed Strawberry Shortcake’s sweet freckled face until the top of her plastic molded head popped off and they smeared the cloying, syrupy ichor that dribbled out all over their body, and then they rolled around in a heap of rotting jasmine that reached the point in the flower's lifespan where the blooms stop smelling beautiful and immediately start to smell like a cracked bucket of pee-stained underwear. Thus adorned in a doll’s blood-jam and sticky toilet flowers, the individual boldly assures themselves they are sexy as hell and heads out to the club. Oh, to have the confidence of a person wearing one of the world’s shittiest perfumes.

Everyone seems quite taken within Mon Guerlain, which I'd never tried, so I thought I'd take advantage of a Sephora sale and grab a bottle of the eau de parfum. I gotta be honest. It's pretty gross. If you need a scent for impressing your peers after pledging yourself to Jesus as a pre-teen holy roller and you were going to hang with all of them at a rager of an overnight church lockin? This would be what you'd reach for. But listen, I'm not knocking smelling good for your lord and savior, but I think even the begotten only son of God has zero tolerance for this cloying fruity-floral bargain bin Koolaid flavor of a scent. Where's the more interesting aspects of lavender and bergamot that people are wild for? This is just watered down CapriSun that no one even spiked. I'm flummoxed. And now I'm out $80. Dammit.

Poets of Berlin from Vilhelm Parfumerie is a vile bioluminescent mutant blueberry thing. A blueberry subjected to a sketchy, underfunded experiment in a prototype telepod but there was also a particle of lemon-aloe-bamboo Glade air freshener in the chamber before it was hermetically sealed as well as a smashed bedazzle gem that fell off of an intern’s acrylic nail, unnoticed. Torn apart atom by atom, the small jammy fruit merged with the glinting shards of sugary bling and a blisteringly caustic glow-in-the-dark citrus-lily. I don’t think David Bowie ever wrote a song about this monster but there was a movie adaptation with Jeff Goldblum.

Initially, Coromandel is nose-prickling, aldehydes, bright and sharp and sour, like a bitter citrus slice of moon on a night when winter is sparingly giving way to spring. It's also brimming with curious camphorous woods and strange subterranean echoes when the first spritz settles on your skin. Soon though, it is inexplicably a dark, floral sprinkle of black pepper atop a mug of palest milky cocoa, smooth and rich and creamy on the tongue, but tinged with that underlying musty bitterness. The strange interplay between those primordial notes and that velvety decadence offers dueling impressions of opulence and austerity; imagine enjoying a delectably elegant beverage…on the damp, cold floor of a mossy limestone cave.

I’ll be honest here, I’m just as surprised as anyone that I really like this scent. There’s not much to say about it. It’s a marshmallow skin scent, a sort of floofy vanilla, a low-key magical-realism, everyday-fabulism, quotidian-fairytale scent…with an elusive hint of sour, canned pears. That’s a weird element that shows up very rarely, but I can’t pretend I didn’t smell it.

Dusty vanilla, powdery sassafrass, and sandalwood, honeyed amaretto liqueur, and musky jasmine. Memories upon memories upon memories. I wore this fragrance exclusively in my mid-20s, it is a scent redolent of bad decisions and vicious, venomously abusive relationships but also of embracing incredible connections and embarking on marvelous discoveries. For me, Hypnotic Poison is a scent very much of a specific space and time in my life, and though can't place blame on the scent am happy to leave it in the past.

Herbal, dusty bittersweet, dreamlike and shivery green musk. The sorrows of strange lullabies lilted in gentle whispers, fairytales of snow-blooming trees, borne from bones. A fragile, longing, shimmering bell. A fleeting dew, a pale mist drifting low in a meadow, vanishing into an empty sky. A melancholy elegy for the whimsy of childhood. A deathbed poem at dawn.