ghoulnextdoor
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A Persephone-inspired composition, minus the pomegranate! How incredibly marvelous, I love it already. Instead, a pale floral incense with a core of bleak woods. The release of a bitter, burning, frozen heart. A bleeding fist breaking violently through the earth, clutching a soft bouquet of pallid blooms. A blackbird's shadow in the snow. A weeping spider biting through its tears. A spill of grief transmuted through the incubation of dreams. An exhalation of fading winter memories. A weary spirit in two halves, the beauty of how in escape you kept both. A wrist ringed with the ghost of spring blossoms you'll never smell. All the springs before you yet.
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Charting the void with phantom maps, new territories over familiar terrain. Leather emerges first, strangely mentholated and cool, running your hand against the grain of scales. Snake Oil's incense weaves through the leather landscape, a compass that points to itself, creating landmarks that shift each time you attempt to find them. An unexpected almond whisper hides in the coils, sweet and slightly bitter, the pit left behind after devouring whole the fruit that was forbidden. Engulfing its own origin, repeatedly shedding and reforming as it warms on skin, leaving behind the undertow of the past while somehow still carrying it forward- the same beast viewed through different dimensions, simultaneously ancient and newborn, forever caught in the moment of transformation.
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The camera pans across perfectly toasted rice grains, each one glistening with a hint of savory oil. A steady hand sprinkles roasted nuts, arranging them in a mesmerizing pattern that took fourteen takes to perfect. The creator's chopsticks move to the dessert compartment, revealing jammy Fig Bar Cookies topped with large flakes of sea salt that catch the light like tiny crystals and coconut shavings, their edges curled and caramelized from slow caramelization. A sweetness remains restrained, a mellow complexity. Our lunchbox artisan steps back, still filming, and watches the comments section explode with hearts and flame emojis. This fragrance hits that sweet spot between culinary art and comfort food - savory, sweet, and somehow both elaborate and profoundly satisfying at once.
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Forget enemies to lovers, this scent captures lovers to landscapes, passion transformed into geological wonder. A clean, crisp amber polished smooth by ocean tides holds the memory of ancient heat at its core. The fragrance shifts into mossy-musky dampness, like vegetation slowly reclaiming abandoned statues in a forgotten garden. When warmed against skin, it exhales a humid velvet aura, luxurious yet wild, as if cosmic bodies once pressed together have now cooled into mineral formations still somehow radiating their original warmth. Time has crystallized divine indiscretion into something that will outlast even the gods themselves, leaving only this aromatic evidence behind: a perfumed fossil of desire
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The cypress leaps out first - almost tactile in its intensity, a lemony-green sharpness that feels like running your hand along a prickly branch. Then the scent shifts and settles, becoming a soft, languid incense drifting through empty rooms. It transforms into an indolent sphinx of a fragrance, stretched across sun-warmed stone, with delicate wisps of aromatic smoke curling from its enigmatic smile. The agarwood and sandalwood form the creature's body, substantial yet somehow also ethereal, while the yellow amber creates its half-lidded eyes that watch with ancient, unhurried patience. This incense has all the time in the world to gradually enchant you into reverence, each tendril of smoke winding around your senses with the languorous confidence of something that knows eternity is on its side.
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Imagine licking a chocolate lollipop only to discover an impossibly tiny, purple stained glass cathedral trapped inside it. Press your eye against the glossy cocoa surface and see microscopic nuns bathed in divine grape juice light, aubergine and amaranthine rays streaming through intricate amethyst-hued filigree whorls and whirls of the vitreous panes. Each lick dissolves another layer of bitter chocolate veneer, revealing more of this sugared sanctuary within. The chambers grow increasingly purple-stained as you reach the center, where fermented grape sweetness meets cocoa dust in an unlikely communion. Somewhere in the sticky core, a miniature priest made entirely of dark chocolate lifts a tiny candy chalice of concord concentrate to lips that will never taste it, forever frozen in a moment of grape-stained reverence.
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The Pearl opens with an unexpected fruity-tarty-sweetness as if someone had sliced a perfectly ripe persimmon atop a bed of dried apricots. This initial surprise fades as the scent settles into something truer to its nature. It becomes the olfactory embodiment of iridescence - if the pearlescent interior of an abalone shell could release its shimmer as fragrance. There's something mineral and organic happening simultaneously here, like salt crystals forming on driftwood at low tide. From there, the scent unfolds in luminous ripples, revealing the strange not-quite-colors that exist inside shells - those blues that aren't blue, the pinks that aren't quite pink, the greens that seem to flicker in and out of existence depending on how the light hits. It smells exactly how that color-shifting, mysterious inner world of abalone looks - ethereal, ancient, and somehow both oceanic and otherworldly at once.
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Pink Fuzzy Handcuffs transforms what could be a cloying rose soliflore into something unexpectedly compelling - like stumbling across a street vendor in some fantastical night market who specializes in tanghulu made not from strawberries or cherries but from enormous, dewy rose petals. Each crystallized bloom catches the neon lights, creating jewel-toned fragments that shatter between your teeth with a satisfying crack. The sugar shell is a hyper-concentrated, almost electric pink that buzzes on your tongue and makes your fillings ache in a kaleidoscopic way. This is a gleeful, rosy, sugar-spun audacity.
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The Fourth Veil conjures a very specific, very private sanctuary of nostalgia for me. When I was very young, there was a moon-shaped waxen knick-knack... I think it was meant to be a room freshener of some sort, but it hung from a cord, and my mother was using it as a curtain pull. I used to hide behind the dusty, pleated fabric and drag my nails over it, scoring the smooth surface, collecting the sweet, powdery floral wax on my fingertips, which I would then run through my hair so that I could smell it all day. This scent echoes that pleasant waxiness and builds on it with something that smells like a wildflower and algae shampoo, sweet and brackish and slightly herbal, and a note that channels the olfactory version of arsenical wallpaper, verdant trompe-l'œil tendrils climbing over a musky base of translucent, chalky minerals that seem to trap light and transform it into something vaguely bioluminescent.
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The Dregs of a Bottle of Vanilla Extract (Discovered in the Mud)
ghoulnextdoor replied to doomsday_disco's topic in The Edward Gorey House
The Dregs of a Bottle of Vanilla Extract is what happens when you abandon your witchcraft supplies in the garden during a thunderstorm and return to find something unexpected has birthed itself. The remnants of Snake Oil's characteristic molasses-thick vanilla incense (this is not meant to be a Snake Oil spin-off as far as I know, but that's what I smell!) are here, but they've been washed with rain and submerged in soil until they've gone feral. That first breath is unmistakable petrichor - that post-storm mineral tang with its peculiar astringency that normally makes my nose wrinkle in distaste - but here it doesn't outstay its welcome. Instead, it transforms, pulling the sweetness of vanilla back from the brink of excess and anchoring it to something more elemental. What begins as two opposing forces—decadent vanilla luxury versus earthy, rain-soaked austerity—eventually melds into something that feels like sweet, damp secrets buried under fallen leaves, waiting patiently to be unearthed. -
Oftentimes, I get an idea in my head that one scent from these collections is DEFINITELY going to be my favorite, but I am often wrong because I'll get surprised by something else along the way. I think this time, my prediction was correct. I had a feeling I would love this slithery scent, and I do–it smells exactly like being mesmerized by an art nouveau femme fatale sorceress, just like the gal in Karl Alexander Wilke's artwork we see here on the label art. The eerie mortuary spice of carnations alongside Snake Oil's thick, heavily sugared incense makes for the most wicked avant-garde bohemian ghoulishness; I want to bathe in it, poison admirers with it, all the things. This is the fragrance equivalent of a Symbolist painting where a woman with serpentine hair reclines on crushed crimson velvet, her fingers stained with mysterious tinctures, the air around her heavy with exotic resins burning in ornate censers. It's a scent that would be at home in the boudoir of Salome after she's finished her dance of the seven veils, or wafting from the alabaster skin of Klimt's Judith as she cradles the severed head of Holofernes. Deep, rich, luxurious - an intoxicating carnation that's been corrupted by forbidden knowledge and loves every minute of it.
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This is not the avocado toast I was expecting - but rather a delicate, floral violet-tinged lavender jam mingling with thick, cultured salted butter of such distinct creamy richness, all melting into warm, crusty golden toast that's been dusted with what might be flower-infused sugar, might be fairy dust. This is what happens when your trendy café is secretly run by flower fairies who've decided to put their own enchanting spin on the brunch menu.
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"The weird the Spirit brings," as mentioned in the lyrics of this perfume's inspiration is jaunty and bright, and indeed spirited. This could be the signature scent of the most gleeful parlor ghost, whose enthusiasm for the spectral life is utterly contagious. The first manifestation brings bursts of rosy spice and diaphanous flower petals before settling into its true form: a tatted lace doily holding the memory of creamed toffees and sugared meringues, all grounded in something as smooth and refined as the cream in a proper lady's tea. The spirits probably attend her séances just to watch her elaborate table-floating mechanisms with fond amusement - they're happy to play along with a hostess who goes to such lengths to entertain them.
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Imagine if lavender went sepulchral, if coumarin turned to ash, if oakmoss grew on graves - this is the shadow-self of a classic fougère. Though we don't know this one's building blocks, we know its intentions: the familiar herbal notes have been submerged in something black and viscous, like catching your reflection in a darkened window at midnight and watching it linger after you've walked away. Doppelgangers embody pure existential horror - they violate our most fundamental sense of uniqueness through their unheimlich theft of selfhood. This is what happens when your double claims your signature scent as its own, and worse, wears it with more authority than you ever did.
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This is the scent of buttery, crumbly, melty cookies with a base of bitter, oily walnuts and a rich, caramelized shortbread bottom. Baked in the steam and sap of an enchanted pine's resinous heart, they've taken on the deep forest's secrets - as if being born in the heart of an ancient conifer has imbued them with its balsamic soul. Wear this scent and imagine this treat while Chelsea Wolfe's haunting voice carries you far over misty mountains cold, where dark things sleep in hollow halls beneath the fells.