What begins with the promise of toasted grains and caramelized sugar spreading across a baking sheet soon collapses into an unpleasant fruity morass of rehydrating dried fruits - raisins, cranberries, apricots, dates - forgotten in weak rum and lemon juice until swollen and sodden. These pulpy masses dissolve murkily when stirred reluctantly into lumpy, sticky porridge whose very revolting nature renders it immediately abandoned. Time passes, and what remains is merely a cloying potpourri, less a deliberate composition than a reminder of culinary aspirations left to wither on a countertop. Alternately, a fruit cake that mysteriously drowned in a lake in 1984 but somehow appears on your holiday table every year like clockwork, bloated and putrid, its origins forever unknown and unspoken.

With notes of soil and moss, Coven is meant to embody a shadowy woodland walk, and I think it's clear the results are pretty divisive. One reviewer notes, and I am paraphrasing here, that it smells like dumpster juice. My own partner thinks it smells like an exploded car battery. I can’t deny that there is a sickly sweet rot at play here, like the dark shadows of Dol Guldur slowly encroaching the Greenwood forest as the feral wizard Radagast the Brown watches in horror while the vegetation blackens and decays before his eyes and many of his beloved animal friends are sick or dying. As it dries, the whiskey becomes apparent, and a strange, sour cumin note emerges to combine with the mossiness and the sense of black mold and mildew and it conjures a sort of hungover Witch-King of Angmar, badly in need of a bath.

Tom Ford’s Ombre Leather is a fragrance I both weirdly like and I don’t like and I can’t make up my mind. The new car leather scent is front and center, like you literally just slid into the seat of some posh, luxury vehicle to take it for a test drive. The smarmy salesperson slithered into the passenger seat next to you and they are wearing that screechy-sweet jasmine scent from Tom Ford that you really despise and at first you want to roll down the windows but you can’t figure out how they work so you just give up. But somehow the syrupy musk of the jasmine alongside the smooth, slightly bright, slightly animalic leather is a striking combination. But the two notes never really meld, they sit separately for the duration of the scent’s journey, and much like that trip twice around the car lot with the stranger that you’re not going to buy the car from anyway, it’s ultimately an awkward ride.

Mizensir’s Celebes Wood is a scent I love, but I think I love it more for someone else. This is a frou-frou boozy woodland party of a fragrance. A dozen rowdy princesses gather in the forest at midnight, all glitter and glamour and flowing hair and dazzling tiaras and ballgown pockets stuffed with cakes and confections and clutching jeweled flasks of sweet, strong liqueurs that cost half a kingdom to procure. There’s gossip and gifts and drinking and dancing and sweet kisses and secrets under the moonlight. And these princesses aren’t sleepwalking or under a spell, they’re alert and more alive than they’ve ever been, women with agency and autonomy and a vision for the future that will shake the very foundations of their world, because it doesn’t involve pleasing parents or marrying princes or making themselves or their dreams small or hiding their hearts’ truest songs. So...yeah. That kind of party. This is a sumptuous ambery scent, opening with a swirling of almost effervescent sparks, like someone tossed cinnamon and cardamom on a flame, and when the embers die there is a deep, rich heart of tonka bean and resinous labdanum and something a lot like patchouli, but creamier, and less earthy. It’s beautiful and on the right person it could be devastating, but somehow it’s not me.

Dragonfly from Zoologist is a scent that apparently I’ve been sampling for so long I’m left with only fumes. But I'm not sure that I need a full bottle. I don’t own many scents like this…which is not to say it’s incredibly unique, because I’m not sure that’s the case. It’s a sort of gentle, watery floral musk with cherry blossom and peony and sweet, powdery heliotrope. While it’s nice, it’s quite pretty even, I’d definitely put it in the aquatic category… and I don’t love aquatics. Even one as wearable as this. I guess that’s what I mean when I say that I don’t have many like it. I’m sure there are lots of things that smell similar, I just couldn’t tell you what they are because I don’t wear or typically even sample them! I’ve read that dragonflies thrive in fresh, clean water and I think there is something of that purity that comes across in this scent. Purity is such a fraught term and so I hesitate to even use it, but that is the first word that comes to mind, and honestly, now that I have said that, you know who I can imagine wearing this scent? The brave and ridiculously sweet Laura Lee from Yellowjackets. This scent is perfect for this character.

Maya from Tocca is a scent that I bought on a whim a few months ago when I was grabbing a few travel-sized scents from Sephora. Tocca scents generally don’t work for me and this one is no exception. They are all, or at least the one I’ve tried, these ridiculous fruity-florals that remind me of somehow of Edible Arrangement fruit bouquets. I don’t care for fruity florals but I don’t think this is a bad version of one. With top notes of black currant, violet leaf, and some underlying jasmine and rose, it’s a bombastic burst of jammy, patchouli-cloaked fruit, and musky florals, and it was driving me nuts because it reminds me so much of a scent that I used to wear in my late teens, when I first started taking classes at community college. The reason I remember this is because our cat peed on my bookbag and I tried to cover it up with this particular fragrance and 15 minutes into class I realized with a sinking heart that my solution was not working, so I gathered up my stuff and left and was too embarrassed to ever return. That scent was Tribu by Bennetton. I just checked the scent notes and it also lists black currant and violet leaf, jasmine, and rose. It does not of course list cat pee from one Leroy Parnell, our Siamese cat at the time, but in my memory Tribu and screechy, skanky cat piss are inextricably linked. Maya does not share that aspect with it. It's just a run-of-the-mill fruity-floral. It's fine. A touch of cat pee might make it more interesting, though.

Megamare from Orto Parisi is an absolute Atlantean kaiju of a fragrance. A massive, mysterious sea beast, a preternatural creature of divine power, wrapped in radioactive seaweed, rises from the unfathomable depths of an otherworldly ocean trench to surface in the middle of a typhoon. Tsunamis wreak havoc around the globe, saltwater instantaneously soaks every surface, a strange cloud of mossy musk forms, algae blooms, visibility drops to zero within seconds. At the vortex of this calamity is MEGAMARE, a gentle creature cursed with a hulking stature and an immensely briny, brackish odor that can be detected from other planets, other dimensions. It takes in the citizens of the world in a sweeping glance of its kaleidoscopic cyclopean eye and thinks “fucking hell, these humans are garbage” and disappears into the abyss never to be seen again. But its unearthly DNA changed the very essence of the seawater, and from every place a drop fell that day, a strange aromatic blossom appeared. And so history will never forget the vast flowering of judgment, the day of Megamare.

Picture this: the devil girl from Mars levels her cotton candy raygun, and the blast floats eternally in zero gravity. Each crystalline sugar cloud drifts through stratospheric winds, spun and respun by ionized air. The atmosphere crackles plasma-charged, with impossible gamma rays that smell like electricity and stardust. This is pure space candy – confectionery untethered in the cosmic expanse, sugar crystals forming in streams of light. Sweet particles scatter like nebulae, catching starlight and spreading ever outward, a candyfloss cosmos; glittering, gossamer, and galactic.

In Venice Rococco, the wedding party dissolves into wolves, but their powdered costumes and countenances still hang in the air – rice-white, chalk-soft, cloud-thick, falling like snow in a fairy tale gone corrupt and perverse. Powder piles in drifts against the walls, powder floats in sheets through candlelight, powder settles like ash on abandoned masks, powder dusts every surface until the mirrors suffocate in white. The scent floats between reality and nightmare, each breath drawing in more sweet, choking powder. Underneath all those layers of white lies something wild – teeth behind the powder puff, claws stirring up fresh clouds with every step. This is what's left at the banquet table after the cursed aristocrats' lycanthropic transformations, their abandoned feast drowning in drifts of violet-white dust, confections and silverware scattered like bones beneath a blanket of perfumed snow.

In Venice Rococco, the wedding party dissolves into wolves, but their powdered costumes and countenances still hang in the air – rice-white, chalk-soft, cloud-thick, falling like snow in a fairy tale gone corrupt and perverse. Powder piles in drifts against the walls, powder floats in sheets through candlelight, powder settles like ash on abandoned masks, powder dusts every surface until the mirrors suffocate in white. The scent floats between reality and nightmare, each breath drawing in more sweet, choking powder. Underneath all those layers of white lies something wild – teeth behind the powder puff, claws stirring up fresh clouds with every step. This is what's left at the banquet table after the cursed aristocrats' lycanthropic transformations, their abandoned feast drowning in drifts of violet-white dust, confections and silverware scattered like bones beneath a blanket of perfumed snow.