ghoulnextdoor
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Everything posted by 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.
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There's no cardamom listed in this scent, and there's no cardamom here, not really. But this is what cardamom might smell like, absent its bitter spice: green eucalyptus sharpness, citrus-wood undertones, cool and aquatic, faintly aromatic. Ghostly flowers float on inky waters, musk of a moon moth, sweet and clear as a bell. This is a being who exists on a frequency you'll never tune into. She operates in a reality parallel to yours. She has never been human. She will never be human. The concept of humanity might not register as something worth knowing. She also does not know what cardamom is. Who? She asks, eyes insectile and lunar. Glassy, unblinking, and strange.
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Following the international bestseller KRAMPUS'S FORBIDDEN GRIND... TRIPLE SHOT AT LOVE: GROUNDS FOR SUSPICION #1 in Rare Book Romance (CW: dangerous manuscripts, competitive bidding, caffeine as foreplay) When rival rare book dealers Sebastian and Margot both find themselves at Café Arcana hunting the same impossible alchemical manuscript rumored to transform gold into the perfect cup, they agree to a temporary truce. The barista, fair Ophelia, has been counting on exactly this. The moment they trust each other, they're hers. She serves them a dark demonic brew roasted at temperatures summoned from the ninth circle of hell, and they settle in among brittle manuscripts and ravaged bindings reeking of forbidden knowledge and dust older than empires. As ancient pages whisper their mysteries and Ophelia's brews grow dangerously, addictively potent, they realize she isn't just making coffee. She IS the manuscript. She's been waiting 300 years for the right combination: two rivals stupid enough to think they could possess her, arrogant enough to deserve what's coming, and desperate enough to stop competing and start copulating. I mean collaborating. "Finally, a love triangle where everyone WINS and also maybe loses their SOULS" (Occult Romance Weekly) "The chemistry is UNREAL and so is the coffee and I haven't slept in 48 hours" (#BookTok)
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Violet wallpaper in the hallway, plum velvet drapes in the parlor, lavender silk sheets on the bed. Lilac gloves laid out beside the mauve hatbox. An amethyst brooch pinned to her orchid-colored blouse. She arranges the iris-patterned teacups just so, checks her reflection in the mirror framed in wisteria wood. The aubergine carpet muffles her footsteps. In the kitchen, eggplant preserves gleam in glass jars on a pristine countertop Her tools rest in a mulberry-lined case: the No. 7 crochet hook polished to a shine, sharp as surgical steel but delicate as the hyacinth lace she crocheted last winter. She does beautiful work. Precise. You can barely see the hole hooked into the throat of the corpse on the floor. When she's finished, she washes up with thistle-scented soap, changes into her indigo dressing gown, and sits down to crochet something new. Maybe a shroud.
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A lime on an ice floe, wearing sunglasses. Pale juice, cold-zapped. Sun on snow, blinding white. The lime casts no shadow but casts a circle in salt. The lime is simultaneously freezing and thawing, bright. Sharp. Frozen, broken things having a good time at the end of the world.
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SPECIMEN CLASSIFICATION: CRYSTALLUS SINGULARIS Observed December 21st, 1927, Miskatonic Valley Professor Elias Wentworth, Department of Crystallography Upon first observation, the specimen presented geometries of such singular and cyclopean complexity as to defy conventional Euclidean classification. The primary hexagonal structure, while superficially conforming to known ice crystal morphology, revealed upon closer examination a fractal recursion of nameless intricacy, each branching arm subdividing into ever-smaller iterations of impossible precision. The coloration proved equally anomalous: not the expected translucent white, but rather a frosted sage of spectral luminescence, shot through with veins of glacial verdure and gelid chlorophyll that seemed to shift and multiply when viewed through the kaleidoscopic lens. The effect was not unlike peering into dimensions of space hitherto unknown to mortal science—angles that should not exist, proportions that violated natural law, yet arranged with such terrible beauty as to inspire equal measures of awe and incomprehension. Most disturbing: the specimen exhibits a menacing quality I cannot adequately describe. Fresh. Chilly. Herbal citrus notes emanating from its crystalline surface. Further study req— [ARCHIVAL NOTE: The above entry represents Professor Wentworth's final coherent observation. He was discovered three hours later in his laboratory, having etched hexagonal patterns into the laboratory walls, floors, and his own flesh. He remains under care at Arkham Sanitarium, where he continues to mutter about "the geometry" and refuses to look at snow. The specimen in question melted without incident. —Dr. H. Armitage, University Librarian, 1928]
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You're having a peaceful morning, enjoying your elevenses, minding your own business, and living quietly as one does when you glance out the window and there's your weirdo neighbor again. Full setup this time: gimbal rig, ring light positioned to catch the morning sun, lavalier mic clipped to their embroidered waistcoat. They've arranged a tableau on their hobbit-hole's front step - bowl of heritage grain toasted oats, bunches of fresh carrot greens still dirt-speckled, pot of fresh, lemony verbena tea steaming invitingly. "Good morning, Shire fam! Welcome back to my channel. Today we're doing my cozy morning routine - very clean hobbit aesthetic, very second-breakfast-core." Take after take, adjusting the angle, moving the honey pot three centimeters left. "This heritage oat situation has been such a game-changer for my wellness journey, link to the mill in my description, don't gatekeep!" The whole scene smells genuinely wholesome despite the production: toasty grains, fresh-pulled vegetables, proper tea poured with care. They grew those carrots themselves. The oats are from their own stores. They might be ridiculously mugging for the camera, but you can't fake roots that deep. You smile ruefully and help yourself to another slice of seed cake. Maybe a barley scone too. It's a long time til afternoon tea!
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A memory you can't explain the significance of, where nothing happened but everything felt inevitable and true. Late afternoon, winter, pulled over on some rural highway to watch the sunset. Purple streaking through grey, the sky bruised and soft, every shade of twilight from plum to dove, from amethyst to ash. A cardboard cup from a small-town artsy café, steamed milk infused with flowers, vanilla syrup frothed and foaming. A scarf that smells faintly of perfume, worn three days ago when the trip began. The woods beyond the guardrail are bare, sanded smooth by wind and cold, no angles or edges. Breathing winter air through cabled wool stitches, once dense and taut, now relaxed and shaped to our skin. For reasons you'll never articulate, this moment brands itself into your soul as important. Years later, you'll catch this scent and be back on that shoulder, cup warming your hands, light failing, everything soft and rounded and impossibly tender. Impossible that it ever happened at all.
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"3 AM/awakened by a sweet summer rain/ Distant howling /of a passing /southbound coal train." Jim White's low, laconic narration, Aimee Mann's sweet echoing lullaby. "Was I dreaming, or was there someone just lying here/ Beside me in this bed?" Lavender's herbal whisper, threaded with cool grassy thistle. Clean linen, powdery soap, freshly laundered pillowcases, cotton worn thin and shaped to a body that doesn't feel like yours anymore, it hasn't in a while. Hiss and hum, signal loss between stations, the fuzzy half-awake feeling where you can't tell what's real and what's dreamed. Every certainty you built your life on dissolves into white noise and snow. The quiet crisis of middle age, waking in the dark and realizing all your convictions were just incomplete pictures, inadequate attempts to understand. Everything you think you know is just static on the radio.
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A lost Wes Anderson screenplay wherein Little Red carries the remnants of her Halloween candy to grandmother's house for Christmas. The contents: six tangerine-orange circus peanuts (slightly stale), twelve lemon sherbets wrapped in yellow cellophane, three jammy strawberry boiled sweets the color of fresh arterial blood, and one spiced pumpkin confection shaped like a small gourd. She encounters the wolf at precisely 2:47 PM, seventeen meters past the old balsam grove where the snow is deepest and wettest and most tactically advantageous. Act I: The Decoy. The basket drops in slow motion. Candy scatters across white snow in a perfect radius—citrus orange, sherbet yellow, strawberry red, pumpkin amber. The wolf's pupils dilate, furry nostrils flare. He has, Red notes with satisfaction, a documented weakness for sugar. This was always part of the plan. Chapter Two: Infrastructure and Positioning. While he inhales the scent of lemon sherbet (his favorite), Red moves through the balsam with the efficiency of someone who attended Camp Hemlock, Summer 2019, Wilderness Survival Track. Her supplies: three beeswax candles (ivory, hand-dipped), one ball of cranberry garland (crimson, 6.5 meters), hearthwood kindling, and a small tin of smoked myrrh resin she's been saving for exactly this scenario. The tripwire is string between two symmetrical trees. The kindling arranges itself into a small, controlled pyre. Part III: The Immolation. The wolf collects circus peanuts in his mouth like a child. He doesn't notice the garland at ankle height, stretched taut and gleaming. The fall is spectacular—all four legs, perfect cartoon arc. He lands directly in Red's carefully constructed fire pit, which ignites on impact. The smoked myrrh makes it ceremonial. The beeswax makes it beautiful. The spiced pumpkin treat, crushed beneath him, makes it smell like Halloween and Christmas happened simultaneously in the same terrible instant. Grandmother receives her Christmas candles at 4:32 PM. Most of them, anyway. Red keeps one as a souvenir, amber-drizzled and slightly singed.
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Thomas Dambo's wooden trolls spend their days in the elements, rain-soaked, moss-creeping up their knuckles, lichen settling into the grain. By nightfall, they're sodden all the way through, rotting slowly like any forgotten sculpture left to the weather. But they have a place to go when darkness falls, a sanctuary no one else knows about. Inside, the air is warm and impossibly dry. Cured wood, glossily lacquered, polished and gleaming. Spices whisk and whirl—cardamom and allspice, toasted and bronzed and blistered. A warmth that draws the damp, straight through to heartwood. They settle in, creaking and groaning, and feel a glow kindling in their hollow chests, the feeling inside when you're finally, finally home.