ghoulnextdoor
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Everything posted by ghoulnextdoor
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The smell of creative obsession after you've been working for days without noticing, that moment you finally surface and realize you're hungry and aching and haven't showered in who knows how long. Something sour and unwashed, cheesy and human, the physical cost of disappearing into your work. From across the room it's intriguing, that musk of someone deep in the zone, but up close it's almost repellent—the reality of bodies neglected in service of making something. Where do we go when we're like that? What liminal space swallows us whole, spits us out days later blinking and disoriented? You leave your body there, or it leaves you, time moves differently or doesn't move at all. You emerge with paint under your fingernails, ink stains blooming across your palms, the ghost of ideas still clinging to your hair. The work gets done but you can't remember eating, sleeping, the basic maintenance of being alive. You've been somewhere else entirely, some fevered creative underworld where the only thing that matters is finishing, completing, manifesting whatever's been clawing at your insides demanding to exist. This is what that place smells like—not the glossy fantasy of the tortured artist, but the actual funk of artistic sin. Stale breath and forgotten meals, skin gone sour from stress hormones and tunnel vision, clothes worn too many days in a row because changing them would mean acknowledging the outside world still exists. The sourness of someone who's been burning themselves as fuel, converting flesh and sleep and sanity into something tangible, something real. You bring back the work, yes, but also this smell, this evidence of the sacrifice, proof you went somewhere most people won't follow because it costs too much to stay there. The dry down smells like the finished work itself, an earthy elegance polished by multiple drafts and a diligent editor, refined into something presentable... but underneath runs an insistent current, the indelible signature of the creator's weird funk.
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What if the green fairy wasn't absinthe at all but lime flavoring? That chemical brightness that tastes nothing like actual limes but everything like the Platonic ideal of citrus translated through laboratory genius. An electric emerald conjuring that appears in jelly beans, gummy bears, snow cones, Jello molds, Freezee pops, a green that only exists in artificial form, nature could never! La fée verte viridian visions granted not through wormwood but through whatever makes lime lifesavers taste like that, like chartreuse and shamrock make you feel, impossibly, deliriously green.
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The main character from some isekai anime I'm making, totally making up just for this perfume review, but if someone writes the screenplay, they'd better give me credit! "I Died Choking on Strawberry Milk Pocky and Got Reincarnated as the Autumn Demon Queen." Dead leaves crushed underfoot, meeting kawaii streetwear: the crunchy vegetation of seasonal decay paired with fuzzy pink cable-knit and cartoon-animal faces. She's supposed to preside over fall and mortality but shows up to every council meeting in a patchwork sweater with bunnies on it, strawberry milk powder dusting her sleeves, strawberry marshmallow mochi in her pockets, strawberry white choco latte in her baby pink Stanley cup, pastel in a world of russet and rot, autumn trying its best to be taken seriously while its demon queen insists on being adorable. (I'll be honest, this sweater inspired this entire review.)
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Sneaking into Deborah Turbeville's Unseen Versailles, elegant ghost stories and hazy hallucinations of antique decadence. A sliver of lavender soap worn translucent, the waxy trace of vintage lipstick on forgotten drinking glasses, pale powdery woods exhaling through dust-shrouded chambers. Those fleeting witnesses—hairpins, papers, cosmetics left in neglected storage rooms—so delicate an open window might blow them all away. The specific scent of beauty rituals frozen mid-performance, isolation and romanticism suspended in abandoned gilt, the haunting intimacy and immersion of faded grandeur where pristine splendor once might have kept you behind velvet ropes.
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One of my brothers-in-law is a bit of a coffee enthusiast (also a bit of a snob, but that's not important to the story) and he drags us to every cafe and coffeeshop he can find whenever the family is all together. This smells exactly like what he orders, or some version of it: cafe mocha and a pastry, bitter-chocolate darkness meeting sugar-glazed fried dough. He's Icelandic, so he usually goes for the cream cake option, but this is my rose-tinted glasses recollection of those afternoons I've spent at small tables while he evaluates the beans, the roast, the crema, and I just smell this exact combination over and over until it becomes the scent of family obligation turned oddly tender and sweet.
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Waxy cherry candy stretched into ropes, dense chocolate-adjacent chew that's not quite chocolate, the slick pomade perfection of Kennickie's hair catching light in the rearview mirror ("A hickey from Kenickie is like a Hallmark card, when you only care enough to send the very best!") Fake-fruit plasticky Twizzler sweetness, Tootsie Roll richness, everything polished with product and oily swagger, neon light shine and candy-slick confidence.
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A dream, a classroom, you hear your name, but it's coming from both inside the lesson and outside the door. "The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead/ Did squeak and gibber...were it not that I have bad dreams," intones a distant voice, fading. Death wrapped in vinyl, a smear in a shower curtain, a red, red hand pressed against the film. A trail of something slick and sticky, honeyed tobacco, a fruity resin, and sweet, grassy, dried blooms in its wake. A shape beckons through the barrier, a dread, phantom thing in wrapped plastic, calling from beyond the corner, and you're walking toward it —you can't stop walking toward it.
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Honeyed and narcotic, the kind of dizzying pareidolia where you keep almost seeing something recognizable before it dissolves back into confused blooms. Marzipan shaped into wedding cake flowers, perfect and poisonous, the immediate wrongness of food mimicking flora mimicking food. Almond ghost-flickering through a blanket of heavy white petals, there for a second, then gone, sweetness piled on sweetness until it becomes a hypnotic spiraling, beautiful in that specific way that makes you slightly sick.
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Soap bubbles catching October's dying light, the way autumn evenings used to stretch infinite even as they ended early, time moving differently when someone else kept track of it for you. Steam rising from water drawn by someone's hands you'll never see again in this lifetime, that drowsy warmth after hours spent kicking through leaf piles, the exhaustion of childhood translated through clean suds and amber dusk. Bath time as the day collapses into early darkness, warm and safe and somehow unbearably tender in retrospect.
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Perfect citrus segments arranged on a plate you can only see through iron bars, the breezy morning light cruel in its beauty. Grapefruit pith papery and bitter, dried allium flowers, pale purple pompoms translucent and slightly vegetal and musky-sharp, the detritus of something once fresh now aged into brittleness. That texture of things left to desiccate in captivity, the ghost of brightness viewed through obstruction, just the bitter rind of it pressed against your tongue.
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The other end of that proprietary spectrum, what happens when you develop the negative and all that jealously-guarded darkness flips to stark white light. Bare canvas stretched over scorched wood, primer coat before the ink goes in, the erasure that comes before creation. Bleached cotton, chalk dust, correction fluid painted over mistakes, clinical and clean. The empty space, the blank page, a more fraught and unforgiving reckoning than being lost in the dark, somehow more existentially annihilating than staring down the void.
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The blackest black that light refuses to touch, proprietary darkness jealously guarded, Vantablack if it grew roots and got tangled in underground electrical wiring. Dank sour earth threaded with something chemical and adhesive, the smell of vinyl insulation wrapped around ancient woody resins, rubbery and sharp and deliberately strange. A color so black it's basically a monopoly, a void so deliberately crafted it feels witchy by sheer force of absorbing everything around it, turning incense smoke into something industrially arcane and territorially weird.
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Sugar-cubed breakfast tea staining antique lace, a doily dropped and ground into cemetery mud, delicate embroidery work sodden with petrichor and root rot. Something powdery-sweet that should be refined and parlor-proper now caked in wet earth, the smell of a Victorian burial shroud exhumed after a heavy rain, still clinging to its faded elegance even as soil crusts the hems. Graveyard loam sweetened with the ghost of afternoon service, bone china teacups filled with dirt.
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Cartoon-bright citrus fizzing with fruit-punch pandemonium, the unhinged glee of Marge Simpson and Linda Belcher getting day drunk on gin-gimlets sprinkled with pop rocks and Nerds and deciding they're starting a cult or a band or maybe both, their vision board includes glitter, all the cutest pictures of Gene Wilder, and at least seven different shades of pink highlighter.
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The warmth of living fur translated through frost, musky and intimate but held at a distance, like running your hand along a taxidermied ermine in a Victorian curiosity cabinet, soft, oddly tender, and deeply unsettling in its refrigerated stillness. There's a chalky sweetness clinging to the claws, cream gone cold and dusty, the chilled incense of snowy little footprints preserved in ice.
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Brooding resins, dark lurking patchouli, pitch-black pine blood, abyssal anise; a warped and wicked tripping of the tongue summoning that which dwells in shadow, feeds on secrets, and sleeps in the ancient wounds of cursed soil. Predatory, perilous, and potent, you know - a real good-time gal. And my all-time favorite BPAL scent since 2006.
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Jammy incense, midnight berry-stained narcosis, the plush blanket of shadows, falling into the darkness of dream. A sumptuous plummy-amethystine obsidian ode to the pantheon of night.
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Mineral-sharp sourness, cedar and graphite alchemized in lunar essence. Underground chambers are revealed, mineral veins exposed; xenolithic flora, Earth's scar tissue, sprouts shadow-fed roots and subterranean blooms, ghostly and calcified fronds.
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Psychic shockwaves of cognitive estrangement - what demented pleasure to recognize beloved scents transformed into their shadow selves. Of the two wolves inside me, this delights the freak who admires a perfumer capable of subverting grapefruit and ginger so thoroughly. Grapefruit distilled to its most accusatory elements; ginger gone a bit septic, medicinal rather than spiced. The feverish chaos of sickness made olfactory, an eerie parade of familiar notes whose expressions now exude subtle paranoia, discomfort, distrust. The landscape of unease settles: coniferous shadows lean too close, fruit-sour brightness concentrated to vinegar and bitter quinine, the delirium and dread of existence seeping through pores like chilled and electric, frantic fever sweat. It dries softer, and tangier and fizzier; a jittery-prickly rose-gold ruby panic shrub.
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Dreaming Mandragora: Baptismal linen, lavender-pressed and yellowed, moth-eaten sweetness. Fae changeling cradled in lace and linen, ruffled sack of secrets. Mound of dirt spiced and sweet, loam and leaf, twig and root. Old earth magic's powder-soft pretense; lacunae of child, empty rosewood coffin, pile of dust, and twisted hay. The pores of the earth opening, breathing, exhaling; mulberry-stained fingers emerge. Blinking in the light. Tiny, grasping, changed. Crawling home to hollow hills.
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Rare book dust mingling with desiccated roses pressed between spiral-bound grimoires hidden beneath honors English textbooks. Velvet chokers and silver rings stained dark from handling mineral-rich crystals, dark and humming. The earthy chaos of bedroom altars with black candles melted onto windowsills. Berry-bruised lip prints marking forbidden invitations, invocations, intimations passed during third period. Thrift store incense burning in brass holders stolen from church, sweet smoke curling around cassette cases stacked by candlelight. Resin-infused attar dabbed on pulse points before midnight gatherings in empty football fields and abandoned playgrounds. A single blackened bloom pressed flat between The Crucible and Wuthering Heights, its dried petals holding blood oath secrets of late-night college radio frequency mix tape confessions and cut-up fevered, foreboding Sylvia Plath poems, falling, fading, drowning, until out of the ash I rise with my red hair. The cult of the outsider tracing salt circles on bedroom floors while parents work late. Doc Martens tracking red-black droplets across scuffed linoleum kitchen floors. Flannel shirts concealing greasy vials of aromatic oils that mark the difference between playing at magic and knowing certain shadows respond only to your voice. The scent of skipping homeroom to mix potions in the back of someone’s older brother’s car, parking lot witchcraft with pilfered herbs and resins from that shop at the edge of town where the owner with kohl-shadowed eyes watches but never says a word about the small things that disappear from lower shelves.
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Hollow spaces where the gods of splendor and shadows used to live. A decadence of dreams without a dreamer. If a knife's edge could be lush, it would smell like this, if an abattoir were opulent. If danger pricked thrice and bled on velvet were cast into the void. Satiny plums that ripened in the dark between stars, balsamic amber thick as the silence after the trembling last hymn dies. Musky patchouli rising from earth that never knew sunlight, spiced powder that might have been clove, might have been wine, might have been the bloody tears of marble saints. The bitter richness of nothing, damask curtains drawn over windows that face nowhere. An empty reliquary, precious, hollow, gleaming with an absence of excess. A devastating, desolate indulgence.
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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.
