On first application, Les Nuits d'Hadrien smelled a bit like musty celery, but after sniffing my wrist repeatedly over the course of the next hour or so, the weird thing is...I liked it. (The boyfriend thought it smelled like soy sauce). It didn't change much over the course of the evening, except that maybe it became softer and ever so slightly sweeter. For me, it seems very much like a skin scent, and maybe something for those unexpectedly grey, rainy summer days.

Sitting by an open window on a rainy morning, curtains fluttering in the damp breeze, a single rose in a vase before you. Its crimson blooms, a vivid velvet contrast to the early glooms, offer their dawn song to the ghostly morning light. Beneath it, a misty musk mingles with barely-there spices, like steam rising from wet earth. The fragrance undulates like those curtains – whispering past, then drawn back, never still, never quite solid.

Jorum Studio's Gorseland is a convergence of many paths of light blazing through the borderlands between cultivated and wild, where neon-bright blooms stun with their electric intensity. While I spend my days mostly indoors, I've traveled countless wild paths through spellbinding nature writer Robert MacFarlane's writing, where his luminous prose captures the poetry of wild places, showing how ancient ways and old growth persist alongside us, part of our daily world rather than separate from it. This scent unfolds like one of these vicarious journeys: sharp-edged and biting in the high places, then deepening to a piercing sourness in the shadows of valley-bottom herbs. The shock of fluorescent petals never quite settles as you climb higher, maintaining their strange luminosity even as shoots twist upward with their raw, cutting brightness. Eventually, softer notes emerge - the apple-sweet fluff of chamomile and grassy vanilla whispers of woodruff - like finding an unexpected meadow after a steep climb. In this scent, the air crackles with the voltage of growing things, refusing our attempts at categorization - too bright, too fierce, too alive to be contained.

Dune from Christian Dior is a misty, windswept shore of lonely paths lined with bracken, gorse, and heather leading to treacherous cliffs, where there lurches a corrupt and crumbling old inn. The sort of lodgings preferred by smugglers and murderers-- a place where dead men tell no tales. Perfume critic Luca Turin believes that true menacing darkness is found in this fragrance and that it's a strong contender for the “bleakest beauty in all perfumery.” My creepy goblin heart is dreadfully influenced by this sort of hyperbole and after reading that over a decade ago… I had purchased a bottle within milliseconds.

This is one of those fragrances that immediately conjures an image in my mind; one of my late father’s Heavy Metal magazines from the 1980s featuring a metallic beauty on the cover, all gleaming chrome and curves, stark lines, and a strange, throbbing sense of mystery. Hajime Sorayama’s art for Heavy Metal magazine perfectly captured his signature style of future-noir and sci-fi eroticism for the machine age, and it certainly captured my attention when I first saw it at the tender age of 11. I don’t typically dissect fragrances through the lens of sexiness and sex appeal because, frankly, it feels inelegant and reductive. Perfumes can be so much more. But in this instance, it feels strangely fitting. Oh My Deer is a scent of bitter, aldehydic metallic musks, perversely both mineralic and animalic, and the olfactive dissonance of peppers that are warming and resinous but also act as a cooling, electric current. It’s a scent that also feels gritty and grungy, somehow, which brings it all back to a very personal place for me. Gritty and grungy is exactly how I felt when I first flipped through that back catalog of Heavy Metal magazines; they terrified and exhilarated me in equal measure, and those dark, techno-apocalyptic narratives may have been the catalyst for the first bit of… stirrings… in my weird little bod. Hey, we’ve all got our origin stories. Oh My Deer triggers a fascinating internal dialogue, pulling me back to those thrillingly strange magazines. It’s not what most would consider sexy, and for me personally, it isn’t either. But it’s undeniably weird, a quality I find endlessly intriguing. More importantly, it’s a scent I genuinely enjoy wearing.

This is a very personal and very “ma’am, this is a Wendy’s” review of this scent, but here we go. The gist of Soul of My Soul from Etat Libre d’Orange is that it’s soft and cozy sandalwood-y musks; the cocoon of your feet touching your person’s feet under a fleece blanket when you’re comfort-watching LotR for the bazillionth time. It’s a spot on your person’s chest sculpted perfectly to cradle your head at night. It’s their funny murmuring snore when you shift your body in bed, and your butts touch for a moment. It’s the secret language of two hearts who get it, and who got the chance to get it. It’s the miracle and magic safety and connection and all the green flags saying go-go-go, that it’s okay to be your weirdest, most authentic, very truest self with someone, and no matter how weird or hard things get–and they will get harder and weirder, make no mistake–you will always remain a soft, safe place for each other.

Psychelicious is a kaleidoscopic glitter cannon of a K-pop music video with at least 50 costume changes, ballgowns in rosy blushing peony with dazzling strawberry and raspberry gemstones embroidered into the silk, champagne-drizzled litchi truffles nibbled between every take.

I really hesitated to before committing to writing a review for Guerlain Mitsuoko because at this point in time…why bother? Hundreds and thousands of words have been dedicated to this timeless fragrance and what have I got to offer that’s new or different? What am I really adding to the conversation here, and how do I think about it that makes the scent feel mine when I wear it? The whole exercise felt a little pointless…but. But. There was something there.  There was something in this musty classic that weirdly got me thinking of liches, those power-hungry necromancers that did some kind of dark ritual and jammed their soul into a phylactery (autocorrect wants me to use pterodactyl and I am so tempted) and who embraced the bittersweet pang of undeath eternity to become a husk of immortality.  Mitsuoko evokes that damp mausoleum herbal mustiness, and when you’ve slid back the impossibly heavy stone door of an ancient crypt to peek inside its atmosphere thick with dust and humming with the quiet thrum of the beyond… there’s this peach there waiting for you, glowing eerily with a sickly light, just having performed its unholy Ceremony of Endless Night. Cobwebby oakmoss, aromatic and tannic, soft and sour, hangs heavy, like a mournful shroud. And maybe now you’re just trapped with it, forever. Wearing Mitsouko is to become a bit of an unearthly phantom yourself, flickering in and out of existence; to cheat oblivion, to linger at the edge of the world–and walk the veil between. Is that what people mean when they refer to this fragrance as “timeless”? It works for me.

A Drop d’Issey Eau de Parfum isn’t a mythical unicorn, but it evokes a similar feeling. It’s a minimalist masterpiece that transcends its brief and somewhat simple list of notes- a trio of lilac, orange blossom, and almond milk – to create something unexpectedly revelatory. It’s a crystalline floral that’s somehow also a little musty-musky, but it’s so well-balanced I’m not actually sure if any of those descriptors work.  It’s effortless perfection that leaves you breathless, a glimpse of something impossible made real. The problem is…ugh. The bottle is hideous. As gorgeous and as perfect as this is, I can’t have that thing sitting on my vanity.

While I ultimately love LUSH’s Shade, wow… it has the absolute ugliest opening of any fragrance I have ever tried. Mineralic and greasy, like rancid petrichor, like a stick of butter studded with rusty nickels and stubbed-out cigarette butts, melting on wet concrete after a scalding July sunshower in central Florida. But then it does something miraculous. The oppressive atmosphere lifts and turns into a completely different perfume, softly sugared and clean-woody-resinous, like the sacred soapy sap of the mystical marzipan tree. It’s so good, too good. Maybe even too-good-to-be-true good. It almost smells like something about which I would say: “I love this, but it’s not for me.” Because, in some way or another, it doesn’t feel like me. Too unstudied and unbothered and carefree, I guess. I’m too neurotic to pull this off! BUT somewhere in the vast multiverse, there exists the chillest, coolest, most untryhard version of me, and this is what they smell like. And when I wear this perfume, I am channeling that person…and it feels really, really good.