ghoulnextdoor
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To my nose, this is a wistful, romantic reverie of introspective painter Charles Burchfield's mystical naturalism viewed through Beatrix Potter's whimsical lens. Ultramarine is a scent for gathering wild berries as twilight fog swirls underfoot, to be savored later with billowing clouds of softly sweetened, vanilla-scented cream. The faded cotton of ruffled floral aprons cradle dusky harvests, the tart sweetness tempered by evening's cool breath. Mist-shrouded meadows drowse in the gloaming, where weathered fences stand sentinel to deepening indigo shadows. Nightbirds trill a tender lullaby as tendrils of aromatic steam curl through dampened air. Petals pearled with dew unfurl in the blue hour, their fragrance mingling with the earthy whisper of leaf litter and loam. A first-quarter moon's reflection shivers in a porcelain cup, its slanted light filtering through lace-curtained windows to illuminate lilac petals steeping in its wake.
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A chiaroscuro of earthy depth and hallucinatory sweetness, Bat Moth is the ecstatic fever dream intricacies of a Victorian fairy painter's tiny fae revelers, filtered through Silky Bat's sugar-spun patchouli charms. Or perhaps replace all the fairies in this frenzied vision with a wondrous delirium of bats: a warm-woody-fuzzy-fleecy chiropteran cloud of musk, beady black-jellied eyes, leathery-resinous flitterings in a dizzying expanse of sweetly dewy night air. For all the frenetic moonrise mania as the scent begins its evening's flight, its midnight repose is a softly patchoulified haze, a velvet brown sugar nocturne, a drowsy incantation, a dissolving reverie.
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Lethe is a still, subterranean lake, a study in chilled, mineralic, mossy notes. It's the languid escape endlessly downward, deep into the cool, indifferent embrace of shadows, past the mists, the driftwood, the cypress knees. A dream of the sovereign of a rain-soaked realm, their heart a stony tomb where green waters slowly pulse, instead of blood. An eerie, emerald luminescence, the quietude of forgotten things, and the mordant astringency of embittered ghosts clutching pale flowers of the dead.
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In Pythia, jeweled walls weep with myrrh, their tears an opulent, balsamic wash of whispers. Dusky plums, swollen with strange knowledge and light caught in limbo, stain the tongue a starless sigh. Honeyed and dripping, dreams incubate as thick syrupy glimmers, opaque with the remembrance of things you never knew you’d forgotten, only to be forgotten again and again and again. A narcotic lullaby, a lavish cosmic jest, this ambrosial abundance of oblivion.
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Wherein loamy lavender blooms, sweetly earthy and aromatic, an amethystine herbaceousness intertwining with the bittersweet floral tang of sour plums. These notes swirl and eddy, pulling you deeper into murky waters of consciousness. From these violet-hazed depths, a citrusy brightness pierces through, guiding the dreamer upward. But as dreams are wont to do, the scene shifts abruptly. The light turns sharp and piercing, transforming into a pair of eyes - emerald as new leaves, stinging and keen. They cut through the dreamy haze, a surreal beacon in the depths. And just as reality seems within grasp, the scent dissolves into phantom wisps of frankincense smoke, curling impossibly through the watery realm.
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Treasure glows with bright, gorgeous, golden sweetness, like citrus caramelized by a fiery sunset, beneath which something burnished and floriferous swirls, rootless blooms born in twilight skies, seafoam and honey, dissolving at dusk. Salt-weathered driftwood marbled ablaze with amber's lambent translucence, etched and grooved with a ghostly tidal language that speaks to liminal spaces between sea and shore, day and night, memory and dream.
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Imagine all the forbidden nocturnal mystery evoked by rich, smoky, brooding resins such as opoponax, oud, and frankincense, but soften it with sweetness and snuggles, make it a kinder, gentler darkness. Brown sugar candle glow, amber lantern light, the honeyed hum of a streetlamp– a companionable luminescence for the midnight soul, and a comforting balm for night owls, moonlighters, and after-dark enthusiasts.
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The Acrobats is the flushed exuberance of juicy-peachy apricot, its delicate brightness made unsettling with amber’s dimly glowing resins and the bitter tang of tannins. I don’t know if I am unduly influenced by the heart-rending painting upon which it was based, but it really does smell like a sweet memory tinged with unbearable sorrow.
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While I am much usually much more expansive in my reviews, I am confident in saying that all you need to know is this scent is BPAL’s Antique Lace, those faded phantom attic-trunk florals, and the milky-musky-powderiness of cobwebby linens, caught up in the misty salt-air mystery and bitter cliffside botanicals of smugglers and shipwrecks on the windswept Cornish coast of Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn.
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Midnight Snowfall is a winter's witching hour personified; Night Queen, shock of moon-pale hair glittering, cloaked in the dark unknown of ancient terrors looming beyond firelight, a creature born of the hush that descends upon the world as the last sliver of sun sighs into the dusk. Lunar dreamworlds, surreal shadow realms, secret starlit cities beyond time--limned in a single frozen glance, a soft, bitter stolen kiss, a phosphorescent lamentation of stars fading at dawn. The resinous nectar of champaca’s intoxicating warmth chilled by a shiver of pale, pearlescent moon flowers, swaddled, sticky, and senseless in a velvety oblivion of moonless night.
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An olfactory altar to the transformative agonies of sloughing off your broken chrysalis, The Shedding Time is a fragrance that calls for a moment, alone and in the dark. The clove is feral and sharp, a twisty slithering coiling around your awareness, deep in the shadows; each successive sniff draws it closer to the surface. Clinging to the bitter autumn honey of the serpentine spice is the shriveled exuviae of phantom flowers–a scorched and skeletal bouquet of tuberose and honeysuckle, mingles with the dissolving tendrils of earthy incense smoke. A rosy glowing emerges, the faintest sunrise blush on the freshly exposed skin, that much more alive. The body unshrouded, the psyche reborn, a perfume to witness the beauty of becoming through the crucible of transformation. Kick aside the remnants of your hollow husk and step out into the sun.
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Syzygy is the undying dream of a dusky poppy in full bloom, not vibrant and fleeting, but perfectly preserved within a gilded tesserae of amber, its vivid essence suspended in slow, honeyed time. Crumble these petrified petals into a steaming glass of milk, the creamy warmth coaxing out their hidden secrets. The first breath of Syzygy is this: a haunting sweetness, both familiar and strange. It's the memory of summer captured in a single, perfectly candied posy, not swaying in a sun-scattered field but tucked between the shadows amongst sun-baked stones. The rich, resinous beauty of the blossom endures, a timeless lure to the dark hum of ghostly bees forever adrift, doomed to perpetual yearning.
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Soil and shadow, a subterranean ember, smoldering. It’s the damp earth beneath bare feet, a bat-winged tickle of rain in the air at the edge of midnight; a primordial altar deep underground, shallow breaths sooty with ancient incense smoke and the stony language of deep time, a haunting chorus of fossil imprints and biological hieroglyphs; lights out at the last library on Earth, honeyed wooden shelves gleaming in amber candlelight, its welcoming glow extinguished, one flickering flame at a time. A keyhole cartography mapping everything, everywhere, all at once: a darkness that delights in revealing a kaleidoscope of shifting realities, where time folds in on itself, each blink twisting the vista anew. But you’ve always known how to navigate the paths of your heart’s own darkness, haven’t you? After all, both the lock and the key were shaped by you.
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In Tiffany Morris’ novella Green Fuse Burning, the author writes, “Spring was an assault that arrived at the door with flowers in hand…” and Roses, Pearls, and Emeralds is the olfactory equivalent of that neon green revelation. The lime, juniper, and pine comingle to create something surprisingly unarboreal, more oceanic, but also unnervingly electric. Massive bioluminescent algal blooms cause ocean dead zones, and ultraviolet radiation runs amok in wild grottoes and caverns. The rose, oh wily troublesome rose! (Me and rose have history!) is the unexpected, benevolent note-wrangler in this composition, reigning in the maritime radioactivity and lending a soft floral haze that settles and soothes and coaxes it back to land. A little cottage garden that sometimes dreams of kaiju.
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Aloof and alluring, a cool, bitter metallic shiver, like poison painting the tip of a small curved blade; musk and throbbing darkness, like psychic muscles cramped around the remembrance of a wound. The scent of duels lost, blood on the ground, moonlight elegies–all impressively tragic stuff, outrageous melodramas played out on the stage of one’s own mind…as is the wont of those of us who are really good at hurting our own feelings. Our Lady Of Pain is the most beautiful, most diabolical of Mean Girls…but as they say, the calls are coming from inside the house.
