ghoulnextdoor
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The ube and red bean listed in the notes are there in spirit if not in letter; what actually shows up for me is baked and grainy, the sweetness of pop tart crust and cake donut and olive oil cake, and maybe even bran muffins, baked up relentlessly wholesome, radiating warmth and carbohydrates, stacked high…and a cozy determination to snorf it all down. Lazy, nap-loving Rilakkuma in his motivated era, powerloading for Fat Bear Week!
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Fruity-zingy-almost-fizzy-definitely-giddy, this is a chaos of golden retriever puppies, a whole pile of them, all of them tumbling over each other, absolutely delighted with everything, no agenda beyond maximum joy and maximum destruction…translated into a very-berry-forward scent.
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Eco-poet-author Robert Macfarlane writes about daylighting, the process of bringing buried rivers back to the surface, re-exposing them to sun and air and the communities who had been living unknowingly above them. And when it comes back, everything around it comes back too. Mangetsu smells like that recovered green space. The sharp green bite of new grass pushing through loosened soil. Unripe citrus, a cool, punchy idea with as of yet no focus. A powdery floral haze, waxy, something blooming in cool air for the first time in a long time, all that new growth over warming earth, something skin-close and alive underneath it all.
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There is a lumberjack in the backwoods mountains somewhere. I don’t know if they are a man, a woman, genderfluid, nonbinary, cryptid, or what. Doesn’t matter. They look good in a flannel and a beanie, and they have a kind heart and exquisite biceps, and sometimes in winter, with their big, strong hands, they feed you spoonfuls of blueberry porridge they kept tucked up under their armpit to keep it warm for you. Syrupy bláberjagrautur, warm grainy oats, a gorgeous bit of musk.
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I am not sure how I am supposed to write a review that even compares to this poetic list of notes, so I can only say is that it smells like when someone who knows better murmurs, “the soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis.” Incense like a drifting tide of stone and honey, heavy and dripping with craggy grief and stoic matter-of-factivism.
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Rose Quartz Phallus conjures delightful visions of a grapefruit Haribo candy burlesque performance, pearled sugar pasties, bright pinky-coral musky-soapy citrus wig. A jiggling, jellied, bouncy, exuberant, tassel-twirling, sass-and-wink-and-shimmy extravaganza.
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Honey Dust, Patchouli, and Orris Absolute
ghoulnextdoor replied to doomsday_disco's topic in Lupercalia
Barry Keoghan, post-Saltburn grave-humping scene, Emerald Fennell’s most deranged gift to cinema. A cheeky sprinkle of improv sweetness, speckled and spattered across freshly turned earth, loamy and dark, coffee grounds worked into the burial mound. Somewhere, twenty miles away, a pale iris sits in a funeral bouquet on a windowsill. -
A white sheet ghost of your most aspirational self. The day you did everything right, you woke up early, exercised, kept every appointment, every promise, did right by everyone, and took care of yourself, too. Clean sweat and goodwill and hard-earned dopamine pride, imprinted onto freshly laundered cotton and stored in a hermetically sealed chamber for the day you wake up feeling like a big loser pile of shit. Throw the good ghost sheet over your head and take a deep breath.
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The paradox of recognition without origin. I know this smell, except I don’t, except I do; something in the olfactory memory reaches for it and comes back empty-handed, certain it was there but wouldn’t recognize it if it was. A confectionary Saturday morning something, cottony and fruity and starchy-soft, heady-waxy florals. Turkish delight by way of circus peanuts, both and neither, made of lychee and guava, rolled in coconut powder. This smells like someone’s childhood, somewhere. Not mine. But somehow I feel the loss of it regardless.
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Hot beeswax and honey pooling on warm, musky skin, sticky and languid and lacquered and frothed with cream. Bodies handled like precious objects, anointed and presented and arranged, elaborate ceremonies. I can imagine this is the fragrance Anne Rice had in mind when she wrote the Beauty series.
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White Chocolate, Date Paste & Lime Zest
ghoulnextdoor replied to doomsday_disco's topic in Lupercalia
I want this to be a bar cookie-like dessert, so I can nibble on it. I want it to be a gorgeously quaffable cocktail, so I can imbibe. I want this to be a fragrance, so I can — oh, wait. This one we can do. I hate to use the literal notes of a perfume when I try to describe the experience of wearing it (it seems lazy to me as a writer! I want to use the words that describe its aspects and qualities and spirit and essence, and not just that, but I want to use the most ridiculously beautiful words available to me! And tell a speculative alternate timeline diary entry, a surrealist fairytale dream about it! But as a reviewer, I get it. You just want to know if you can smell the dates and the limes. Well, yes, you can! You can smell the sugary-tobacco-y dates and the cool, slithery lime and the creamy cocoa butter white chocolate, but it smells better than any single one of those things on its own. This is rich and chewy and opulent, a serving of Lime-Kissed Sticky Date Blondies with White Chocolate Drizzle and a Date Night: dark rum, white chocolate liqueur, fresh lime, date syrup float. -
A friend tells me this afterward. She and a date snuck into the empty apartment in the corner of the building, the one with the perpetually broken lock and revolving door of tenants. The space smelled strange, she said. Overripe stone fruit and the dark ink watercolors of night air and the void and emptiness of a place between people. The wallpaper was intricate, spiraling, mediumistic, automatic linework, a Madge Gill drawing duplicated perfectly if Madge Gill had papered a bedroom in a building like this. In the dim light, mid-coitus, it resolved into eyes, dozens of them, staring, swiveling, seething, a shadowy shifting panopticon, humid and pulsing with fleshy plum pulp. Ma’am, this is a Wendy’s, I said.
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Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board
ghoulnextdoor replied to doomsday_disco's topic in Haute Macabre
A lullaby sung backwards, an incantatory influorescence. Ephemeral floral and shadowed herbal, somehow both purified and unblessed, a conjuration of the unseelie court and a glory of seraphim. Cool, slightly medicinal, pale translucent blooms drifting like shawls woven of mist and moonlight, a frenzy of elf maidens at the feast, trapped in stained glass. The incense of suspended places, a liminal hush of resins, dusty echo of wood. Tarnished silver, clouded glass, filtered light, words illuminated in the margins, scattered like moths, humming and glowing. -
The Donkey's Tail
ghoulnextdoor replied to doomsday_disco's topic in Gifts with Donation or Purchase
I don't want to write a review for this, I only want to tell you this smells like an extremely fuckin' haunted doll and also that I want twenty bottles of it. But that's not fair, and it is also a bit lazy. So: You dream of someone crying. soft and persistent as rain on wool. At the antique stall, "Mourning keepsake," the card said. "Unknown provenance." Her head, porcelain. Her dress, pewter silk and blush-faded ribbons, lavender stems worked through cotton. Someone loved her into being. Someone, heart-rent, hands shaking with grief. Heavier than she looked. Inside, something whispered and later, the seam gave way. Funeral roses. Brown now, petals ground to dust, packed tight into her body like prayers into a throat. Tell me— when you wake from the dream of her crying, what do you do with all this sadness this grief that isn't yours? -
Roses preserved in amber resin, petals crystallized to honeyed bronze. Estate sale jewelry boxes lined with yellowed velvet, gilt-edged brooches oxidized to a dusky patina. Caramelized corsage, barley sugar twists and horehound drops, unctuous burnt-sugar varnish. Your grandmother's nosegay pressed between the pages of a 1950s etiquette book, ribbons still faintly fragrant with Helene Curtis Spray and the face powder she wore to Wednesday night bridge club, way back when getting dressed up called for gloves and a little hat, even if you were only going three blocks over to Maureen's house for that undrinkable coffee everyone politely finished because that's just how you did.