ghoulnextdoor

Dream Skin is akin to a dream diary, a midnight scrapbook of filmy filaments teased from nocturnal murmurs, pressed between pages of mist and glass. Belled flowers gently floating across the face of the moon, reflected in a dark, fathomless pond. The whispered conversations between spectral, silvery quartz rock and wild, golden lightning, a tender grinding cascade of stardust. A pale moth glows and dims and dies on a cool silk shirt; a marble egg wrapped in lavender ribbon, shattered and swathed. An atlas of personal symbology, a grimoire of private fables, something beautiful but annihilating filtered through the eerieness and unreality of deep sleep brainwaves; an echo, unraveling at dawn.

Even though I have always wished it were otherwise, I have never sniffed a precious jewel, glimmering gem, or polished stone that smelled of anything in particular–even though the dazzling drama in those crystalline depths seem to promise, at least to me, that these geological treasures should somehow be radiating the most marvelous perfumes. Alas! Nope! It is sadly a wish I’ve long let go. Sphinx Skin, however, rekindles this daydream in the most fantastical and feverish ways, because I’m absolutely certain that if a moody, golden topaz had a scent? It would be the smoky umbral honey, spectral shed snakeskin musk of Sphinx Skin: heady, tobacco-infused amber with subtly shifting floral vanilla facets, a rich, sticky, resinous vein of dragon’s blood, and the faint, slithering earthiness of patchouli, dark, damp, rooty, and grounding. A stone formed from crystals in cooling magma (or so I understand), in reality, topaz probably smells of the fumes and vapors wafting amongst the cavities of igneous rocks in which it grows, but here, in the surreal secrecy of our intimate cocoon, where the writer and reader connect via a shared dream and can believe as we please - let’s choose to believe in exquisite lapidary aroma magic, and that a glowing sphere of topaz smells like a small bottle of Sphinx Skin.

The greenest stickiest resins, tree gum, and sap, tingly with a frisson of spearminty-pennyroyal cool-electric-crispness.

It's the most bonederful time of the year! Wherein even things that do not have bony skeletons inside their skins get treated to cheap plastic skeletons and sold for $5.99 at Michaels and Party City. Worm, you get a skeleton! Octopus, you get a skeleton! And so on! The flamingo does in fact have a skeleton and as scientists know, its aroma is that of the most delicious bitter grapefruit Haribo candy cross-bred with deliciously salty Icelandic lakkrís, spliced with white chocolate. When I talk about my profound love for things that inspire a sense of demented glee, a fragrance like this is exactly what I am thinking of.

This one has a spectral and musty quality, like shed snake skins and brittle, broken bird's nests, but also oddly evokes spring leaves, damp and dewy and almost jittery green, teeming with chlorophyll. It culminates in a fragrance that you might attribute to an altar deep kept in the wood, obeisance to a thing so old it doesn't even have a name, with offerings of shoots and stems, bones and claws, trinkets both living and dead.

The softly decaying dead leaves component of this perfume is so fleeting, almost as if leaf litter and loam were used as padding for a parcel of treats, but the parcel was delivered and the packaging was tossed willy nilly, and what we are left with is the sugar-crusted delight of candied ginger-flecked buttery shortbread with crisp, caramelized edges.

The leather in this blend is an airy, floral leather, conjuring visions of a little bat snoot dootling deep in trellis vining, moon-luminous night-blooming flowers. The incense is cool and crystalline, frost on stone, smoky winter mists high on a mountain while a witch sits in silence, tracing runes in the snow. Like a Wardruna video. With more bats and flowers and witches.

The caramel aspect of this blend is what I notice most, a buttery-milky brown sugar caramel that wants to ooze over vanilla ice cream rather than firm up into fudgy squares. Shifting beneath the caramel are those faint, faded attic-trunk florals and creamy cobwebby linens I recall from Antique Lace and a cracked leather buckle so ghostly and elusive I’m not sure if it was actually ever there at all.

A dusty, honeyed wistful, sepia-tinted floral; the olfactory representation of the concept of "dés-vu", or the awareness that this moment will become a memory.

Utterly incandescent. Crystalline radium glass lime, the sticky bite of ginger syrup + a dry dram of allspice's mince pie charm.

I wouldn't typically use the words "chocolatey" and "fresh" together in the same sentence and I don't know that's what I am doing here either--but I don't know that I am not? Halloween cat smells a bit like huffing dry brownie mix; absent the sweetness and gooeyness, there's a bracing, savory aspect to the cocoa. A pale nimbus of citrus hovers, a timorous, shimmering aurora haloing the arid chocolate.

Whenever I see the word "gooseberry" I think of the time I spent listening to Eddie Izzard's memoir and how his British pronunciation ("guuzbury") always makes me smile. As a matter of fact, this sweet/sour, tart/tangy scent blanketed with a molassey-gingery cozy streusel, could even be the cake he's talking about in his "Cake or death?" clip from his Dressed To Kill special. Let's just make it canon. Our beloved, wicked Eddie Izzard circa 1999 smells like a guuzbury gâteau, a witch's currant cake.

Washing your hair with a fragrant aromatherapeutic "spa-like" shampoo and then immediately running outdoors on a crisp October afternoon and rolling around in a pile of loamy leaves and moss, like a great shaggy golden retriever after a bath. This is stunning. STUNNING.

This smells like a thick, nourishing lemon salve that you aren't supposed to eat but holy jeez you are definitely tempted to eat it. My spouse says he thinks it smells like luxurious lemon peel soap, to which I countered "But do you want to eat it?" And he was like like "Well, I mean yes." This is one of those simple scents that somehow doesn't seem like there's much to it, and yet is more than the sum of its parts and is weirdly definitely habit-forming.

I don't talk about fragrances in terms of whether they are masculine or feminine but I will say that this scent is initially, and surprisingly, quite "handsome." An aroma that at first evokes some sort of rare, centuries-old cognac and things being aged in French oak barrels, but then because you have no use for stodgy tradition, you eschew drinking it neat and instead concoct a cranberry Manhattan with bitters and vermouth, garnished with a wooly frizzle of earthen moss because you are actually just three gnomes in a trench coat.