Arquiste Architects Club is a sophisticated vanilla chypre with salt-spray Atlantic air crispness at the back end, which makes me think of an upper-crust aristocratic party on board a yacht in international waters, posh people drinking gin and tonics. Maybe a woman in cabin 10 fell overboard. Maybe there's a mystery. Maybe not; maybe it ends as a very intimate vanilla-skin scent.

Last Season smells like what lives a bit deeper underneath the forest floor, the private teeming dark where mycelium threads wind through soil and small creatures conduct their business and pleasure and what-have-you under stones. Turn over a log, and there is a damp organic exhale, a little sneezy-shocking, a little sweet, something that was quietly happening without you and will resume the moment you put the log back. There is almost a campfire quality to it, not fire exactly, not the flame or the heat, but rather the ash settling back into earth, smoke absorbed into whorled bark and cool moss, and the soft bodies of things. This is the world Rien Poortvliet painted with such weird, goodnatured curious devotion, gnome lore, the integration of decay and domesticity, a hearth fragrant with leaf rot and good dark earth, a home where the worms are neighbors and the beetles are confidants and the mold on the rafters has been there longer than anyone can remember and belongs there, it practically holds the place together! This particular gnome has a tender heart and a melancholy streak and knows all the words to all the Cavetown and Haley Heynderickx songs and probably writes poetry about the smell of rain in autumn, the silhouette of a lone, tremulous dandelion on a late summer evening.

Ellen Hutter sits on the bench at the edge of the grey sea, waiting, and out on the horizon, where her husband should be, where Nosferatu's shadow should be gathering ... there is Fozzy Bear. Frothy salt mist and soft warm musk, woolly and faintly ridiculous and ridiculously sincere. Ginger and turmeric filtered through static, the way a signal travels over water on a small television in a dim room, present but softened into grain. The scene is melancholy. The ocean is grey. Fozzy is way out there, doing his best.

A nocturnal glamour-cryptid, cloaked in its own velvety wings, its vast buggy eyes like antique opera glasses. It lives in cultivated dark, manicured parks behind concert halls, the shadowed side of a fountain, topiaries at midnight. It has a taste for finer things and knows where to find them. You didn't know it was on the guest list, but here you both are!

Mossy and ambery and peppery, with a resinous sweetness that reads less like dessert than like the filling of some abstract turnover made with dry grasses and syrupy saps, ground and sweetened acorns bound together in something dark and flaking. Rich and musky-dry, slithery, a lurker. It unfolds slowly next to you on the bench, vast wings spreading, obscuring the moon, eyes enormous and unblinking. It means you no harm. It is simply drawn to the same things you are. It will have what you're having.

Eau Duelle rustles like a susurrus of sighs stirring through the reeds from that exact territory Algernon Blackwood describes in his short story/novella, "The Willows." Dry vanilla, grassy and herbaceous, maybe even rhizomatic, swaying, shifting, and restless. A humming of place, a hollow wind. Silvered marsh lights, bizarre fancies. Soft moonlight on myriad murmuring leaves. Vanilla as the uncanny antagonist of the nature trail, the weird tale the willows tell.

A hooded figure watching from beyond the shadows, but shadows of what, and why in a place no shadow should be? The insidious intrusion, the confounding juxtaposition, the thing found in the wrong place. The stirring of things best left unstirred. Resinous orchid musk, feral balmy, rotting-earthed humidity. Milky murk, like looking through the eyes of the dead. Honeyed spices part buried, cinnamon-cardamom-disinterment deferred, the ground is wrong, a terror in the terroir. The boundless and hideous unknown, a carnal effluvium of the eerie and the weird, reinterpreted as a not-too-bad fragrance. Actually, kinda lovely.

Ramshackle wooden pier, salt-bleached planks sea wrack rot, shifting scrim of slate sky. Miss Akranes contest, bright bunting wilting in salt spray and sea mist, dripping gown and cracked rubber boots. Icy rain of butter and brine, each drop a tiny oyster on the tongue. Fishing nets of pearl grey silk tangled with kelp and hollow percussions of fish bones; the iodine tang of seaweed rotting in tide pools where lobster traps rust and seashell sibilance gurgles, whispers, salted and cured. Sea glass teeth, crowns of crab shell, scepter of driftwood and whalebone. Something ancient stirs beneath the harbor, pageantry for drowned gods. What the tide brings in, the mayor photographs for the brochure. What it takes away, no one admits to their children. Velkomin til Akranes. Sjórinn heilsar þér svanglega.

A rose I immediately enjoy is a rare creature indeed, and this one conjures the fierce tenderness of Yosano Akiko's verse. I don't know how this extraordinary poet would feel about this fragrance, but I am channeling her spirit for these impressions.

Ancient wood smoke drifts between scattered fog. Morning bell echoes— I taste metal on my tongue, spring's sharp, necessary cut.

Green leaf floating in the temple's shallow puddle reflects my true face. A mantis waves its thin arms in mock benediction.

Thorn-pricked finger traces rose oil, crimson poems on sleep-soft limbs, bitter sutras cannot wash this sweetness from memory.

Peak pixie dream girl Peter-Pan collared Zooey Deschanel ModCloth dress, honey-apricot-jasmine preciousness, infantile heliotrope Alice & Olivia floral babydoll cast-offs set alight, smoldering in the gutter. It wasn't a cleansing fire, not a redemptive flame. Sort of like a nasty garbage bin blaze, destroying evidence of your cutesy, kitchsy crimes. Embezzling from a cupcake boutique, or stealing someone's vintage typewriter collection, or you did an identity theft or two to afford your overpriced mason jar cocktail with artisan bitters obsession. Some real twee shit. A burnt-out, acrid sweetness "like ew gross" scratch-n-sniff sticker layered atop already barfy one, something bad compounding something worse.

Cold, coiled, calculating. A soupçon of weaponized sweetness. Wilhelmina Slate corner office with floor-to-ceiling glass walls, fashion dungeon once her interior decorator works their dark magic. Absinthe-laced champagne vanilla, green and subtly herbaceous, aromatic poison in crystal stemware. Dusty-woody-musky shadows, slithery spice as hissed threats between bathroom stalls. Mean girls who devoured high school bones and all, used losers' broken phalanges to pick their teeth; earned their MBAs in rancid witch she-devilry and leveled up into the cuntiest of lady bosses; perfected the art of smiling while sliding knives between ribs and stabbing square in the middle of the back. Creamy almond undertones, just enough sweetness to mask bitter herbs. Fake pleasantries/ menacing undercurrent, espionage in every conversation, veiled threats disguised as small talk. How's business this quarter? How are your kids? I'll cut a bitch. I'll strike when you least expect it. More canapés?