ghoulnextdoor

I am so curious to know how this sits on other people’s skin, and what sort of smells jump out at them from this kitchen sink jumble of kitchen witchery. It’s not listed in the description, but what I experience immediately and intensely is a minty aspect, cool and camphorous and mentholated. I’m not a huge fan of mint, but this isn’t the unpleasantly spearminty toothpaste variety that makes me gaggy, this is more like a cup of fresh, strong emerald-hued mint tea. I keep looking at the notes, though, and thinking, “where is this even coming from?” Maybe a combination of tomato leaf’s distinctive velvety astringency, vervain’s lemony-grassy aspects, and yarrow’s pineiness? Huh! As it wears, the mint loses its manic fervor and almost becomes a bit sleepy, there’s a warm woody aspect that surfaces, like a worn wooden tabletop where upon aromatic and sweet herbs have been processed and dried, tinctures and elixirs have been portioned out, and all of those oils and essences have worked their way into the grain. At this point, what began as a really energetic “wakey wakey!” perfume now urges you to curl up and take a lovely little nap.

You arrive at the inn early and await your companions–five strangers who are meeting for the first time, anonymously accepting the intriguingly vague but highly lucrative-sounding adventure guild request. You are served a measure of fresh-pressed apple cider in a rustic wooden goblet. There is a bit of dried patchouli leaf and a thread of saffron floating on the golden surface of the drink. Is this evidence of a hexing or perhaps a culinary oversight? You inquire of the barmaid, who only repeats the same question, “what’ll it be, love?” Huh, that’s weird. Almost as weird as when you noted that you only have one arrow in your quiver, and one health potion in your bag. Almost as if…you have to play at some game to earn more of them. And hey, that’s no barmaid, that’s just a random NPC! Wait a second! Did you get sucked into an RPG again? How does this keep happening to you???

Begins as vegetal and brisk, but not a brisk pace, like you’re huffing and puffing to keep up with your spouse’s long legs on an autumn stroll (it’s not a marathon to Mordor, Yvan, for Pete’s sake slow down!) but rather the weather has turned brisk and crisp overnight, there’s an unexpected chill in the air, and you’re taking a PROPER stroll at a REASONABLE pace, YVAN! And you’re moved by that familiar olfactory symphony, that annual concert of sniffs, that gorgeous, romantic decay of fallen leaves on a late October afternoon, and you just look at your person and soften and think, damn, what a wonder it is to spend any moment at all with someone you love. And as your mood softens and hazes, so does this fragrance, like the scent of a comforting candle, something with hints of amber and vanilla bean and sandalwood and cashmere musk, but the flame been lit for an hour or so, and you barely smell it anymore, it’s hovering at the edge of your senses, pleasant and cozy and familiar.

I was a little afraid of this one at first–pomegranate can be so syrupy! And C.S. Lewis tricked us dreadfully re: our formative notions of Turkish delight!– I needn’t have worried. This is a fresh, exuberant pomegranate seed, unencumbered by the burden of expectation and dread associations. This is a juicy, crisp, bright pomegranate seed with complex floral nuances and the tiniest bit of tart sass, a pomegranate that has actually never experienced anything than pure utter, joy. This is a pomegranate seed living its best life. It’s going to become a wholesome, universally beloved TikTok influencer and get signed for a dozen bankable sponsorships and give an inspiring interview on Oprah. (Is an interview on Oprah the gauge of having made it, nowadays? Maybe it will get invited onto Hot Ones, instead.)

Initially, this is a fragrance focusing intently on the dead leaf aspect of this combination of notes, that element of sweet autumnal decay and sour, earthy fungi farts that the Lab does so astonishingly well. Then, without warning, that aspect of the fragrance disappears completely and is replaced by a rich, rich, buttery vanilla custard.

This necromancer is an incredibly learned worker of the dark arts who is very secure in their knowledge and would never be up in someone’s DMs being a “well actually” know-it-all and they’ve got better things to do than troll the comments section with their obnoxious devils advocate scenarios. They’ve got quite a subtle presence, you hardly even know they’re in the room, they’re just minding their own beeswax and working their magic in the background. How do they fragrance their person? It’s a faint perfume of mild, milky fig, and heady lilac–but just the barest dab, on skin softened with sweet almond oil and warmed in cashmere cloaks.

If one were to pack a picnic for venturing into the shadowy otherworld of the Fae (and one definitely should, because it’s best not to eat any of their tricksy offerings) one might pack a loaf of the humble but gorgeously tasty Icelandic rúgbrauð, a dense, dark rye bread made with golden syrup and soured milk and baked or steamed low and slow. It’s delicious with briny salmon or smoky lamb or even just a dollop of cold, creamy butter, but even–especially!– if you don’t dress it up with a single thing, it still smells absolutely amazing. Rich and hearty and sweet, and really, it kinda smells like Christmas, and you don’t even need to visit fairyland, because this is already some really good magic. Cancel your plans (yay for canceled plans!) and make some bread instead. Or don’t do any of that, maybe you agreed to all that stuff, but now the vibe is off, and you just want to be a potato for the evening. You can conjure both the fairy ring and the bread by liberally smearing yourself with Shadowed Veil. Protip: slather and suit up in your coziest fleece onesie, skellington or otherwise. Future you five months from now will thank you.

Oh, I do like this! But I don’t know that I am getting most of the notes. To my nose, it’s the electric peach and ozone-y vanilla that I envision this dream of a dress smells like, with maybe the tiniest, almost indetectable dribble of camphorous ink smeared on the skirts. A note that begins with “Dearest Mother,” and a foggy sense that one has slept too long in the moonlight.

This is wild, even though I have applied the same amount of this same scent on each wrist, it smells like in one hand I’m clutching a fruity fistful of tropical Jolly Ranchers and Smarties, and on the other side I’ve got a pocketful of creamy butterscotch Werthers, but I’m smelling them collectively through a luminous white musk, green tea, and honeydew haze.

Fresh…cold…produce? I’m not a farmer, but I just imagine pulling up the last of a harvest before the frost hits. Or maybe harvesting your cold-weather vegetables, your cabbages, and leafy greens and carrots and such. And then you immediately juice them and drink them down with a scant teaspoon of honey. There’s something so fresh and vegetal-sweet about this, with the tiniest bit of ozone-y plasticity as well, like veggies stored in a plastic bin. Like you carved a disconcertingly jaunty little face into a crooked carrot with a plastic spork.

I blame a friend for the immediate association I made when I sniffed this perfume. On Facebook, the other day, I was asking folks for their favorite persimmon recipes, and A. shared a sort of “salad of the underworld”: persimmons and radicchio and pomegranate seeds and a few other goodies, and they suggested serving it with a lime and ginger dressing. A sweet-tart-bitter and lightly spiced foil for all the unctuous richness at a banquet table for the dead. Erewhon salad bar katabasis.

When you realize you’re never going to smell as good as whatever fragrance it was that you wore five months ago and which still faintly clings to the stitches of your coziest cardigan, mingled with whatever uniquely intimate magics your skin oils and musks were making on that particular day, this is that smell.

More an ambient murmur than a sonic scream of a pomegranate, it’s such a subtle red fruit, I can barely tell it’s red, or that it’s a fruit. I smell it faintly on my wrist, in the warmth of my skin, the throb of my pulse. It’s a heart healing itself, stitching itself back together in the small devotions of gentle fairy tales, favorite flowers, and pictures of baby Snoopy. Being kind to yourself when you get sad, and homesick for a home that doesn’t exist anymore. Allowing yourself to weep for someone else’s grief when you read for the 100th time the howling sorrow of Andrea Cohen’s poem “Refusal to Mourn.” In lieu of flowers, send him back. Letting your heart feel all of it, so much of everything. Breaking it every day. Mending it forever. Hoping and dreaming and loving and doing it again and again and again and waking up in the morning with the sunrise and feeling and smelling that tiny throb at your wrist and knowing that it’s the only way any of this works. What else can we do?

It’s a challenge not to experience a perfume like this one through one’s own lens, this “scent of a disaffected deathrock kid skulking around Hollywood with her ne’er-do-well friends…but minus the Boones Farm.” In 1990 I was 14, a freshman in high school, and desperate to shed the bookish, nerdy, teacher’s pet image that had been following me around for as long as I could remember. ..so the first week of school, I snagged myself a heavy-metal boyfriend. I am not sure how this happened, but I suspect it was because I was wearing an Iron Maiden tee shirt and an impossibly short, incredibly tight skirt. This was a case of someone probably being way too cool for me, but not in the actual-cool way that I would have been comfortable with, rather the smoking and drinking and badly-behaved-way that teenagers think is cool. Anyway, I ended up skipping a lot of school, receiving a lot of detention, and getting threatened through a third party that I was going to get beat up by some girl I’d never met because she liked my boyfriend and wanted him for herself, I guess? I never got beat up, so I still don’t know what that was about. Autumn 1990 smells like realizing dozens of times over that I was too bright, too clever, and too interesting for this guy, but then worrying that no one would ever ask me out again, and deciding to be okay with having a boyfriend who people thought was cool but with whom I barely had a single thing in common. Spicy incense smoke and caustic hairspray, and pilfered, musky spritzes of my mother’s nice perfume, embedded in a denim jacket that he wouldn’t let me keep, but that he would sometimes let me wear on rainy November days.

This is an impossibly creamy, rich dessert of a fragrance brimming with buttery goodness, a decadent paste of toasted oatmeal, ground nuts, and brown sugar nestled beneath a coffee crème bavaroise with mocha sauce– and blended into a thick, cold, vanilla McFlurry.

I love this scent from BPAL’s Witches, Sorceresses, and Sorceries in Art History collection for several reasons. One, because it is inspired by an element within The Love Potion created by Evelyn de Morgan, an artist whose lush mythical and allegorical paintings were associated with the later Pre-Raphaelite movement. This was an artist who defied the expectations of her class and gender to become one of the most impressive artists of a generation, whose canvases conveyed a profound sense of feminism, and spirituality, as well as rejection of war and material wealth, rendering them quite relevant today. She’s pretty fab and I love her. Two, because I love seeing derpy and weird animals in art. Not exactly in the same vein, as this cat, but I think Jamie Wyeth’s A Very Small Dog is my very favorite. And three, because this scent immediately brought to mind a certain cinematic feline. Giallo fans amongst you may conjure the image before I write another word, but Gooped Familiar is a fragrance that smells like opulence through the filter of fur. A perfume of spicy florals and musky amber that adorns the wrists of a beautiful and beguiling stranger with a heavily fluffed cream-colored Persian cat in their lap. When you bury your face in that fancy feline’s neck later in the evening, you catch the phantom of the perfume through the heat of the animal’s skin and its vibrating purrs.

This is unexpectedly fruity! But not a fresh, juicy harvest; this is more the fruity aspect of tobacco, sticky dried cherries, the intensely golden bronzed honeyed sweetness of dates, and even a bit of dried pineapple. As it wears, there’s a lovely incense of vanilla and hay, a mingled smokiness of a scented broom whose bristles singed when lingering too close to the hearth, a domestic ritual of ashes and small, satisfying work. It’s a scent that makes me think of this thing (but much lighter on the cinnamon.)

Before I reminded myself of the notes, I thought to myself…what is this? Apple and …latex? Apple …and chlorinated water? In this blend, nibbles of autumn apples are blended with BPAL’s Daddy scent, and that’s where the “diabolical incense” and the “infernal fougere” come in, and I don’t know what comprises either of those, and I couldn’t even begin to guess. But whatever latex-esque chlorine mingling vibe I am getting initially, it paves the way for a vibrantly grassy, subtly woody, absolute freshest, most hyper-realistic apple perfume I have ever sniffed. So weird and so very cool.

This earthy, spicy, jaunty rhizome is a snazzy gent and has splashed a verdantly aromatic-cedary-citrusy essence on his whiskery roots to make a good first impression, put his best foot forward, so to speak. It is unfortunate that in doing so, he neglected to put either foot through a pants leg. But he smells so dashing and handsome that you can almost forget the fact that he showed up for your date without a stitch of clothing on.

You know how sometimes those glossy, glowing multicolored strands of Christmas lights on a dark, cold wintry night look like sour, sugar-crystal candied neon orbs strung on chewy licorice filaments? No? Well, they do to me! Imagine you could just crunch your way through all of them. That’s what this scent smells like, just pure, irradiated broken-toothed-but-worth-it joy.

The scent of the best, the ultimate, the most winningest cookie to bring to cookie swap night! Just the perfect amount of sugar, fresh lemon zest, and real butter, the good stuff, Kerrygold or your local dairy equivalent–and your secret ingredient: each cookie is served with a full-sized lemon drop martini. I’m not saying you’ll win because you got the judges drunk (and I’m not saying you won’t be disqualified* for bribing the judges!), but I think either way, it’ll be a good time.

A blood-memory of pagan festivals, and mystical ecstasy, evanescent shadows coalescing into giant woodland spirits cavorting in the dark, the scent of the animalic and fungal, leathery root and balsamic wood, a reed-wrapped parcel tossed in the flames at midnight, gingery, peppery spiced sparks drifting lazily skyward.

I don’t know how to explain this in a way that makes sense to people who function normally. But do you ever resist something or not allow yourself to experience something because you feel in your heart that x/y/or z thing isn’t meant “for people like you”? I’m not even certain what that means, exactly, but it’s a feeling that’s been tethered to my soul, strangling it, for as long as I can remember. And whatever those off-limit things are, I know them when I see them. They’re usually fun, playful, or exciting things, and there’s just something deep-seated within me that’s forever admonishing me, making me feel foolish even for thinking that I could ever partake in anything merry and mirthful, that my presence would ever be welcome at the table of joy. I think the pink and blue candy cane, that nostalgic, old-fashioned hard candy hook in a fusion of blue and pink twisted stripes, epitomizes all of those feelings in one eye-twitchingly sweet, crunchy confection. BPAL’s interpretation of these sweets is a fluffy, spun sugar strawberry jam-scented hug, with a cool, ozonic blueberry pancake whisper of “treat yo’self.” It is warm, and it is gentle, and in my reviews, I desperately try not to use the same words and descriptors as the Lab has used in their note listing (because what’s even the point of me writing this here and now if I am doing that?) But their description of this scent is exactly what it is, and my ramblings here about it are basically just me barfing my angst on you in the meantime.

You think this is going to be a simple, straightforward scent. You would be wrong. It begins as rich, buttery, generously salted–nearly briny– shortbread crust, but just as you’re imagining it quivering with, say, an eggy black olive and manchego cheese mixture just before entering a 350° oven to quiche-ify, it surprises you. It becomes a lightly caramelized oaky vanilla-orchid floral, the type of thing that wants to catch more flies with honey than it does with vinegar, the thing that softens and sweetens with age and experience and has learned to pick its battles, and sometimes that still just actually means all of the battles because your life and what you’ve made of it–and of yourself, in all of your sweet and salty and quichey and caramel incarnations, in all the tragedy and beauty of being a human–is delicious and gorgeous and worth fighting for. I don’t know why this fucking perfume is making me cry, but here we are.

The rich, oaken warmth of a firelit library in a grand country estate that you’ve been entreated to make yourself at home in; your host had to take a phone call, so please, browse the leather-bound titles, flip through those well-worn pages to your heart’s content. Beeswax candles flicker in the reflections of the gilt-edged mirrors hung from every spare inch of unshelved wall space, and as you marvel at the glowing refractions on the shimmering glass, a curious draft tickles your skin and shivers up your spine. Where could this peculiar chill be coming from? The room is nearly as warm as being swaddled in a down comforter in your bed at home! You trace its path to the bookshelf, where you notice a fine layer of dust along the surfaces of the floor-to-ceiling shelving and their contents, with the exception of one pristine title that appears absolutely untouched by time or human hand. You reach out to examine the book, and as your fingers graze the pebbled binding, you hear a series of clicks and the grating of hinges as that solid wooden shelf swings heavily inward…revealing a hidden staircase. Do you a.) hastily fumble the scene back into order, take a seat, and wait for your host? or b.) grab a candle stick and descend into the dark? In either scenario, you’ll smell of a mysteriously cozy Choose Your Own Adventure room full of books and firelight and waxy, dripping candles sitting atop delicate powdery doilies.