fragrances
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My Signature
307 reviews
Where pools of clearest water catch the light, seek the violet that blooms beneath no soil. Bright as amethyst, suspended in golden amber, yet flowing like honey through crystal streams. Each ripple reveals its secret - a flower preserved in liquid that cannot wet, a sweetness that flows yet never moves. Beneath it all, warm amber holds these fragments, a fleeting eternity captured in impossible depths.
I still believe this is the perfect musk; it lacks that overwhelming, sneeze-triggering intensity I've come to associate with Egyptian musk, while maintaining just the right hint of skankiness and an underlying bittersweet note that elevates what could have been just another warm, clean scent beyond the realm of the bland and ordinary. Kiehl's musk captures exactly what I imagine 1974 smelled like: sun-bronzed astrology enthusiasts in their flowing, hand-embroidered caftans, silver bangles jingling as they shuffle tarot cards between Tupperware parties, their living rooms heavy with incense and macramé plant hangers. The women wore turquoise rings on every finger and kept copies of Linda Goodman's "Sun Signs" on their coffee tables, while their children played with wooden toys on shag carpeting. Though I wasn't born until a couple of years later, I'm convinced this fragrance somehow bottled the essence of my early childhood – the lingering trace of patchouli and possibility that hung in the air as the Age of Aquarius gave way to the more practical concerns of the late 70s.
10 Corso Como is all dry, lofty sandalwood, smoky desert resins, and earthy, weirdly off-kilter - almost alien or at least otherworldy- florals. It calls to mind a mysterious, aromatic wooden chest, unearthed by a strange sandstorm. At once both sensual and spiritual, and without a doubt a very, very handsome scent, I find myself frequently craving it and nothing else will do.
This is the unsettlingly mysterious woman in the film noir who is instantly pegged as the murderer because she’s beautiful and slightly “off”. You later find out she is hiding a terrible secret that has nothing to do with the murder, maybe her twin sister drowned in Monte Carlo and she has stolen her identity in order to escape a lecherous suitor or something like that. It smells of some sort of enigmatic green flower whose essence has been preserved to deepen and darken before it is crushed with a handful of strange, sweet herbs and left in an antique potpourri dish in a dusty lady’s boudoir. A beautifully strange and enigmatic scent, for lipsticked and rouged facades masking dark, dramatic pasts.
Strong, fiery ginger steeped in sticky, honeyed amber, wound with wisps of smoky lapsong souchang. Yet for all this deep, dusky luxuriance, it is surprisingly sheer...as if a silken scarf had been dipped in this concoction, and hung in a sunlit window to dry. The scent clings to the fabric and is lightly released as one knots and folds it about ones throat.
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.
