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.

Gris Charnel from BDK Parfums is a scent that I find confusing and disappointing. Mostly, I think I am disappointed in myself, for not having read the perfumer’s inspiration for the fragrance. Some dribble about two tourists whose glances cross paths, they dance until dawn and then slip away for an intimate encounter. Yawn. I got bored and checked out several times just now while trying to sum that up. Now if they slid through a portal into an Edward Allan Poe story while they were making out in a dark alley, then I could forgive myself for getting thrillingly suckered in by the copy (and to a lesser extent, the darkly poetic name, which I feel somehow tricked me into thinking it was something that it was not.) It must have been the notes I was excited for then, which mention black tea, fig, and cardamom essence. That sounds really lovely. But I’ve tried this several times and I don’t sense any of that loveliness. Instead, it’s a bit like a low-end tea sampler that includes selections with various unspecified “fruit flavors” but in reality, no matter which one you brew up, all they taste like hot Kool-Aid water. And there’s a weird, acrid smoky element that hovers unpleasantly, like charcoal heated air...so imagine smoking hot Kool-Aid water in your hookah. Even if I pretend an olde-timey goth poet was smoking that hookah, it's still a bit of a dud.

I really do not have the words for how beautiful this is. It’s rich and luxurious without being …decadent…or heavy, yet it’s definitely not a “light” scent either. Really quite intoxicating. It smells foreign and familiar all at once; maybe if your idea of "exotic" is from the sumptuous illustrations in a well-worn book of fables from a far-away land. It's all lofty sandalwood, honeyed musks, and and liquid amber tea on me, and it makes me feel like a desert queen in a strange, dusty tale.

In Musc Ravageur there’s a strange, sullen plastic note wrapped around a dark, animalic vanilla that doesn't care what anyone thinks and laughs at its own jokes and sometimes it laughs so hard it pees itself a little, and yeah, you can actually smell that aspect of Musc Ravageur too, in the form of an almost fermented amber note. It’s both rich and sour in an offbeat way that borders on off-putting...but for all that, it’s not a terribly complicated scent. I think we might consider this a perfume that is hard to get to know, but easy to love. Do I relate to this scent a little too deeply? You could say that, sure.

Dark Season is a smoky woods/rich, dusty amber scent that smells of the dramatic tenebrism of all those old, spooky gothic novels and musty 19th-century weird fiction, of ancient landscapes and loam, the soot of pine logs, ghostly smoke and sifting snow in a strangely lit field, a somber ochre, an umbral amber, frost-rimmed branches scraping a scrim of leaden sky, footprints vanishing in freshly fallen snow, the creak of the wind whistling around standing stones, something terrible let loose in the dark, something that eventually fades until it's nothing more than an unquiet feeling or a cold shiver on a warm day.