“The first time I wore lipstick, I wore it as a wound. Later I wore it on my lips in order to say: what if I were beautiful? But lipstick never forgot its first meaning: instead of a razor blade.” (Aurora Mattia, The Fifth Wound.)

It’s taken almost three years to begin publishing a series that could be considered the main thesis of much of my career as a burgeoning critic of the perfume industry at large. In many ways, I often feel bludgeoned into inaction by the immensity of the intellectual daisy-chains sprouting out from my myriad of ideas about perfume that smells like lipstick. Powdery scents served as my primary introduction into not only collecting niche fragrances, but also to thinking profoundly about scent as a medium and affective culturing dish. I owe much of this initial interest to the writing and career of the wonderfully talented Matt Morris, whose Fragrantica criticism and mixed-media painting, convalescing around lipstick and powdery texture, first gave me tremendous faith in perfume criticism as a contemporary form with a great deal of intellectual rigor. Since the initial surge of interest in niche fragrance post-pandemic, I find the landscape of content online is mostly catered toward beginning and intermediate levels of fragrance knowledge. This is, of course, completely fine. To put it compassionately, there’s a much-needed space in the world for people to talk about fragrance who aren’t necessarily interested in dissecting its intellectual context; I just think that as critics, we hold a responsibility to indicate to that public that a more sophisticated substrata of consumption does indeed exist. This new perfume criticism, as I would envision it, is less concerned with perfume as a commodity and more invested in considering it an allusive and transitory medium alongside high fashion, sculpture, and painting. Mind you, fashion, sculpture, and painting are also extremely bloated industries filled with slop sold to make the rich richer and delineate luxury in the name of mere decoration. This fact does not negate the presence of sparks of real, true creativity within the medium, nor does it inherently degrade the degree to which we as informed prosumers can muse about symbols and meanings behind these works of art. I am talking about the creation of things which do not simply complement a space, but define it. The difference between a room housing a generic wall painting bought from Amazon – refracting stale echoes of 20th century abstraction to say nothing in particular so quietly it never speaks over the space itself and a piece by an artist as visceral as Francis Bacon, is palpable. I believe these distinctions also exist in perfume. There is perfume designed to pleasantly fit into a crowd, and there is perfume designed to stir the cloudy and duplicitous wiles of the human heart.

It is perfume that smells like lipstick which first brought my own heart to considering niche fragrance in tandem with such a lofty ideal. It’s something I had quite a long love affair with, and had burnt myself out writing about on Twitter (R.I.P) so often that in the last three or so years I subconsciously shifted my locus of obsession into church incense perfume, but in private my love of powdery scents has never, ever wavered. Something about the sheer fascistic delirium of the present political moment, however, has me retreating back into hyper-femme fantasies, and as I am now a devout Episcopalian girl altar-boy, the concept of smelling like dusty incense is less of an exotic aspiration and more of a lived reality. Lipstick, however, is still as far as it comes from my daily life. Despite what some might assume, I am indeed too much of a killjoy women’s lib feminist for my own good, and lipstick has always felt like a statement accessory for people with less insecure inhibitions and without paper-thin white girl lips. I’m not really interested in deeming certain aspects of the beauty industry feminist or not feminist, and I do believe that the critical mind should be able to straddle my love for Dworkin with my plans to get a boob job this summer – so when I say that lipstick is often a gaudy accessory, know that this word contains the vast depths of both complementary and disparaging connotations. That said, I think tasteless, camp, over-explicated attempts at enacting glamour are some of the most beautiful things in the world. I think this human sort of failure to correctly perform gender roles is Butlerian and virtuous inasmuch as it reveals the rigid boundaries of how gender is created and enforced. To me, the most enticing applications of lipstick consider it a tool for disruption and general mischief-making. I think of some of the ways in which women’s appearances are disparaged (“putting lipstick on a pig”), and the ways in which makeup designed to disguise its own presence (of which I am a tacit consumer) has won over the women of the world at the cost of the romance of visible artifice. While my own lips generally stay coated in generous globs of Trader Joe’s knockoff Laneige Lip Masks, or for special occasions don the cheapest gloss I can find at CVS, I am forever endeared to the idea of lipstick as a ritual, connecting women with the paradoxical yet endearing fantasy of becoming something wholly different from oneself. In this sense, what lipstick perfume does for me lies somewhere in between homosexual fussy-femme wiles and heterosexual theory put into practice.

When used in fine fragrance, cosmetic powder accords are usually comprised of a trifold blend of rose, iris, and violet. Tweaking any one of these ingredients to a higher dose than the others brings out certain facets of the accord. An iris-forward blend will smell more powdery, a violet-forward blend more sweet, and a rose-centered formula will give more of a classical chypre effect. What my personal favorite lipstick perfumes are able to accomplish with any of these combinations is something more conceptual in nature. It’s fascinating to have a specific subset of cosmetics that smell like other cosmetics. It’s almost as if the boundary between signifier and signified has collapsed, and the thing that refers to something else is finally enabled to smell like itself. I touched on this concept years ago in an earlier investigation into perfume that smells like water – which plays by a similar set of funhouse rules. That said, lipstick and makeup smells distinguish themselves in enabling the wearer to fully inhabit glamorous fantasies of becoming someone else. All perfume can serve to construct alter egos and reify the boundaries of the self, but when you smell like waxy compacted powders, the inherent performativity of how we fabricate identity at all is placed front and center in the femme psyche.

One of the first fragrances to do this to me was the delicate and lovely Insolence EDT from Guerlain. Quite literally named in tribute to bratty defiance, this was Guerlain’s confusing attempt to spear the marketplace of the Early Aughts teenage girl. It’s laughable now to imagine high school girls smelling like dry chalky powder bombs, but the brand vision was certainly so sophisticated that Mitsouko-wearing mothers felt as if, for the first time, they could put their children on to the immortal house of Guerlain. Insolence is consequently a strange sort of monster. With one of the strongest sillages I’ve ever encountered on skin, five sprays of this bright purple-pink liquid chokes out most octogenarians in your vicinity and transforms your immediate surroundings into an icy cold boudoir. More so than other fragrances of its ilk, this is great to wear in cold weather. It has a fierce vivacity that is able to cut through harsh winds and bitter freezes. A very long time ago, when I was first getting into perfume, I posted that this fragrance smells like fairy makeup. This is still true, but it also smells like bright-colored sidewalk chalk and eating the erasers off your number two pencils. I don’t find Insolence as regal or sultry as I do other powdery fragrances. The main note here is violet, which is, to my knowledge, generally the least common note to spotlight of the aforementioned lipstick accord triumvirate. Violet is a wily smell. Associated with lesbians, the Virgin Mary, and innocence, its floral symbology is rich and associative. It’s not very realistic here. Instead, perfumer extraordinaire Maurice Roucel (of Frederic Malle fame) casts it in a plasticine coating and an ultra-chalky veneer. Insolence is PICA exposure therapy for boarding school bratty children and the European mothers who tolerate them. Wear it to bed, or to a prestigious job interview you didn’t prepare for, to make it seem like you’ve never worked a day in your life.

The Italian perfumer Francesca Bianchi is best known for her unmistakable animalic compositions. Rightfully so, because fragrances like The Dark Side and Sex and the Sea are masterpieces. What she does best in my eyes is the balancing of notorious animalic accords like castoreum and civet with more approachable perfume hearts: orris, pineapple, or honey. My favorite work of Bianchi’s, Angel’s Dust, is a bit of an anomaly in her broader oeuvre. Inspired by an imagined scene, this carries the typical Bianchi DNA, but applies it towards creating a lipstick fragrance altogether sensual and full-bodied. Its copy reads: “In a dusty boudoir of bygone times, a mistress is putting on lipstick while waiting for her lover to arrive.” This sense of preparing oneself for an intimate encounter is an essential sexual component of lipstick. It’s something you wear to attract, to seduce – but often the fragrances themselves speak to the preparation done beforehand. The materialistic beauty rituals of women are themselves extremely loaded performative battlegrounds where heterosexual desire is negotiated, formulated, and often challenged. Angel’s Dust is perhaps the heaviest of my lipstick fragrances, its weight coming from a musk-sandalwood base and a balsam-vanilla heart. Wearing on skin like a situation, it casts an immense cloud that beguiles and intrigues. It bothers me that a significantly less imaginative ISO-E super bomb has made the name Angel Dust famous. To me, this is the one and only dust wrought from cherubim. Think amber-powdery; this combines the best parts of classic fragrances like Shalimar into a more modern boudoir-banger that smells of dry chalk, honeyed mimosa, antique waxed wood, and indolent iris.

Arguably, one of the most versatile and well-rounded lipstick scents is 1889 Moulin Rouge by Histoires de Parfums. To me, this is the paragon of a trashy, weird lipstick perfume – lacking in very little and handily delivering on most aspects of why cosmetic accords appeal to me. Inspired by the iconic Montmartre cabaret and emblematic of its red windmill design, this composition sparkles with a hefty dose of purple plum and absinthe. Despite its namesake, this fragrance doesn’t feel as inherently vintage as something like Sixteen92’s Montmartre, but carries the same sort of sugared-sweet jollity. Maybe one of the least violet-forward entries in this catalog, the aforementioned cosmetic cloud is made from rose and iris, making it feel much more fruity, yielding its substantial heart to the prominent plum accord. Half-gourmand, half-floral, this isn’t overly mature or self-serious and reads more like a cartoon vignette of seduction and fin-de-siècle sleaze, akin to its equally gorgeous, versatile, and foul-mouthed twin Putain des Palaces. I think for someone looking to get into powdery perfumes, this is extremely wearable, and can be bought for a pretty affordable price on secondhand markets. There is only a hint of mushroomy, wormwood underbrush here, which ultimately prevents it from entering mass-market body spray territory. It’s a gorgeous bottle and would look very pretty squared neatly into a collection of Creed Absolu Aventus and other boring no-frills fougère powerhouses that are clearly missing something wide-hipped and sexy to heat up the joint.

Speaking of mushroomy, Baruti’s Dama Koupa is utterly insane, and bears a drydown that smells like chewing on play-dough squatted on all fours over a pile of manure. This is, without a doubt, the perfume here with the largest and most beguiling sillage. I wear it as an extrait, and genuinely, this still smells on my coats and blouses even after washing them. Almost entirely iris, vanilla, and a pink macaron cookie accord, this is hyper-saccharine and neon Gatorade blue. What I love about this fragrance is how utterly screeching and repulsive it is to men. At their best, really powdery maternal fragrances can terrify men looking to smell women who evoke sexy babies–entirely rounded, prey-like, and non-threatening. This is an alpha female scent, one that signals to everyone in its immediate radius that you’re a bitch who gets what she wants, and you aren’t going to pluck the three wiry gray hairs that sprouted up on the back of your head last year. In a world of perfumes designed to make people smell forever young, powdery perfumes proclaim that smelling like your grandma is beautiful and that she was a fashionable woman with good taste, thank you very much. This isn’t actually anything close to what perfume used to smell like in the 20th century, but it has all the hallmarks of fragrance made to evoke subtle fantasies of powder-puff décolletages, only this isn’t subtle. It will choke out anyone old enough to actually remember firsthand stories about The Ziegfeld Follies and what Coty products they were actually wearing. Spray with abandon, and descend upon your hometown Sephora like a dark omen.

Perhaps the platonic ideal of a lipstick perfume, Vermeil by rehabbed vintage French luxury brand Bienaimé, literally smells like a tube of green Clinique lipstick given to you by your well-meaning grandmother. The design here is gorgeous, harkening back to the 20s-era art-deco and preserving names of actual releases the house put out from that era. I love the idea of reviving vintage brand names with an entire lineup of powdery scents, soaps, and creams. The team behind Bienaimé has done just that. Everything here smells nostalgic, sparkling, orris-laden, and oh-so 20th Century. I enjoy Jours Heureux, but without a doubt, Vermeil is the collection’s shining Bleu Royal diamond. Carrot seed, aldehydes, and rice powder read like a laundry list of some of my favorite things in life. Supplemented by the whole gamut of iris, violet, and rose, it contains nearly everything needed to evoke a waxy, powdery, and cosmetic slurry. Like Dama Koupa, this doesn’t actually smell like something from the 20th Century, but rather smells itself like the action of looking back at its trappings and atmosphere through a caricaturized pair of rose-tinted glasses. Perhaps the most fatty and waxy fragrance herein mentioned, there’s a genuinely addictive sort of chalky, crumbly characteristic here that scratches the part of my brain that loves eating de la Rosa Marzipan by the round. Carrot seed, heliotrope, and aldehydes each contribute their own essences to the composition. It feels extremely composed and forms one living, breathing lipstick accord more fluently than most boudoir-inspired perfumes I’ve come across before. Quite pricey for a full-size bottle, I do think this product justifies its own cost. You’re not necessarily paying for a name, but for a revitalized archive. Something once beautiful, that has become beautiful again – but different. Isn’t this the story of glamour itself? The appeal of reaching for beauty tools seen as outdated, relegated to grandmother’s closets and estate sale backrooms. Spray, inhale, and bring this half-living specter back to its full vivaciousness. Like Madeline in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, this is a fleeting persona you’ll chase after for the rest of your life.

I think Valentine’s Day is a lot like dying from Tuberculosis – it used to be a lot more fun in the 19th century. As much as the high-femme pageantry of what the holiday has become in the present day speaks to my aesthetic sensibilities, the lace and cherubim of old Valentine’s cards are, in my mind, the peak expression of the February spirit. It’s a weird sort of cabinet-of-curiosities style of design, reminiscent of the psychosexual vicissitudes of Jeff Mangum’s lyrical worldbuilding and the art used for his album releases. This is, to me, the true spirit of Valentine’s Day, one that I feel is reflected wholesale in one of my favorite fragrances of all time: Rundholz Parfums’ Feb. 14, 1912. Its name feels like a sort of evocation, of lost loves and a specific moment in history. Known for their experimental dying methods and asymmetric clothes, this fragrance was released as part of a broader series exploring wholly experimental takes on incense accords, each given the name of a different day in either the past or the future. This is the earliest date enshrined into fragrance, and it certainly has the most dated atmosphere. Think sideshow laws of attraction, a rendezvous with the meek middle child of four country girls at the world’s fair. Somehow both matronly and reminiscent of bittersweet memories of the old world. There is no one centerpiece note – the composition is defined by generous suppertime helpings of licorice, milk, incense, and a relevant lipsticky orris butter. At its core, this fragrance could be called a breastmilk incense powder-bomb. Anise Avon body powder gives way to a lactone-laden drydown core, savory yet oh-so comely. Its most unique facet is fennel. Aniseed and tarragon blush swollen against the very earth itself. This fragrance is powdery, spicy, and velveteen. Its Maison is quoted as saying: “THERE ARE NO HARD AND FAST RULES ABOUT FEB.14, 1912. PRECIOUS MOMENTS REMINDING OF ANCIENT SILKY BOUDOIRS, OFTEN KISSED SKIN AND LEATHERY FETISHES.” It seems to me from the beginning this scent was intended to seduce, labyrinthine in its complexity yet beguiling in its old-world romanticism. It isn’t necessarily a historic scent and doesn’t carry the same sort of legacy as its predecessors– Après L’Ondée being its great-great-grandmother. Arturetto Landi is the perfumer behind Rundholz’s entire fragrance line and seems to have composed all of his fragrances for the label at the same time. Having worked on the development of other fragrances for left-of-practical fashion houses like Diesel, his herbal and aromatic style seems to lend itself quite easily to evoking nostalgia and the uncanny. This fragrance is a meager recession dinner of roasted vegetables at her German immigrant parents’ home. Coral lipstick stains the silver prongs of her fork. This is the night you’re going to ask her gangly father, sitting across the table, for his blessing. You touch your worn leather loafers to her stocking-lined leg under the table. She smiles a crooked smile, lips smeared in bright red. You’re going to make love tonight. This lasts all day on skin. You will never smell anything like it again.

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s “Chronovisor” is, at it’s core, a research project. It is also a gripping mystery film in line with more pulpy Vatican conspiracy from the mind of Dan Brown, but the actual institution of the Roman Catholic Church is merely an incidental stage by which the principal subject – the research process itself – is permitted to spread like bacterium on a petri dish. The film begins directly in media res: we follow Columbia professor Beatrice Courte (played by the actual Behavioral Science professor Anne-Laure Sellier) from after-class department dinners, to dimly-lit University libraries, and to her own personal study. There is almost no genuine dialogue between characters. I would go so far as to say there are barely even scenes with more than one character on the screen. The narrative is constructed instead via diegetic communication. Phone calls, receiving faxes, requesting analog library holds, opening boxes of mail, and most importantly, the reading of myriad books become the mechanism by which scenes are set and the plot is established. Through Courte’s careful perusing of archival material in all kinds of languages, we slowly learn the goal of her research: in the 1960s an Italian Benedictine monk named Father Pellegrino Ernetti claimed to have invented a machine that was able to detect, decode, and reconstruct electromagnetic radiation and sound waves left behind from history itself to create miniature reconstructions of past events. There were other figures with reported shadowy involvement with this process: famed physicist Enrico Fermi and former Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun among them, but the actively cloistered Fr Ernetti was both the invention’s mastermind and its representative ambassador. In essence, this Chronovisor was purported to be a high-tech analog television that could use unseen ripples of past time to tune into any given moment in history. The machine was obviously never publicly debuted, but there are multiple controversial paper trails of this invention’s fruits – lost transcripts of Hellenic tragedies, and countless references to what might well be the very reason this technology was created: the ability to witness firsthand the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Our protagonist Courte is a successful albeit tightly wound scholar of neuroscience specializing in memory, and seemingly holds a personal interest in parapsychology. From the very beginning she demonstrates her obvious shrewd intelligence, and thus her interest in the Chronovisor continually seems to run the knife’s edge between thought-provoking conceptual exercise and true conspiratorial belief. In fact, this tension is in my mind the film’s real emotional heart. She starts the on-screen research process very much connected with the academy at large. We see her amongst her colleagues, she borrows from University libraries, and yet the subtle expressions of Anne-Laure Sellier’s fantastic performance from the beginning bely a tentative belief in the device’s real functionality. Between forged photographs published in Italian newspapers and retired Priests giving sincere testaments to Ernetti’s brilliance, the real name for Courte’s belief is hope. To waver like this, between scared and shameful suspicion and endlessly motivating conviction, is in fact the very essence of the Christian faith. True belief in miracles – in the resurrection of the dead and life of the world to come – is as delicate as its implications are world-altering. One could just as easily believe that a monk in the 1950s built a television to broadcast the crucifixion of a man who lived two millennia ago as one could believe this very same man was God incarnate and rose from the grave on the third day. If we are to understand Courte as part-pilgrim, unknowingly embarking on a non-linear journey towards faith in the Chronovisor, we must also assert her confidently as an unconventional but sound researcher – for in fact the very essence of research is faith. To answer a question one must first ask a question, and to ask a question one must consider something without knowing if it is true. To take this even further into scripture, the apostle Thomas’ assertion that “except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25) is a reasonable demonstration of the scientific method, and itself becomes a path towards miraculous faith in the risen lord. Many outside of the academy imagine the research process as a slow but steady march towards that which is already true. In my experience that notion could not be farther from reality. To research is to fumble aimlessly through the dark for a series of successive doors, not knowing whether the place you end up in will feel anywhere like truth. This film is ultimately an elaborate portrayal of Beatrice Courte’s own life-altering research process, one that sees her move beyond the classical Western notion of experimenter as physically and emotionally separated from her experiment, and into a more holistic and unabashedly parasocial type of obsession. This high-stakes game of life-consuming research is familiar to anyone with a graduate degree, but also subtly relates itself to the vocation of religious discovery. What is academic burnout but the dark night of the soul, and what is unexpectedly finding Jesus but a rediscovery of your work’s true purpose. Maybe I’m biased, but as someone to whom both of those things has happened, the feeling was similar enough to me.

If the subject of this movie is research, the main actress is the slew of tactile artifacts by which information is stored and conveyed. The film’s texture is palpable: the grain of a page, the shine off VHS tape, the pointillism of images printed in foreign newspapers. This leads to a specific experimental technique I have not yet mentioned. Frequently, as a means of translating the materials currently being read by our polyglot heroine (she fluently speaks up to four languages in this film!), Walker and Auen superimpose illuminated English text over choice lines, both as a means of translating things for a presumedly anglophone audience, and selectively drawing our attention to certain key parts of the text. This process feels far more drawn from the rich tradition of superimpository text in video art, as opposed to the normative conventions of narrative film. I think more of artists like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose work deals with the substance of translation and the aesthetics of signs than I think of detective novels or National Treasure. Via this artistic choice, the act of translation is made unmistakable, and languages elide into each other seamlessly. This itself is another larger motif of “Chronovisor:” the degree to which language ceases in Courte’s interior world to be a barrier to thought, but a textural element in how thought is conveyed. I might even go so far as to liken this to the gift of tongues at Pentecost, in which God’s Holy Spirit gave the apostles sudden mastery over foreign languages, and their preaching of the gospel was enabled to travel across the world. These illuminated, translated, and excerpted words form a visual aesthetics of knowledge-building, where inert and analog substances become conduits into historical mysteries and altered states of mind.

Walker and Auen’s camera frequently lingers on terse close-ups of Beatrice Courte’s eyes. Sellier’s delicate performance shines here, with frequent shaky and sleep-deprived contractions against brightening light alluding to the notion of the human eye itself as a camera. There is an excerpt of text frequently flashed and transcribed during and between scenes – one itself directly alluding to one’s own consciousness, one’s own sensory input being harvested as mere data collection to form a grand interpersonal repository of memory over time. The narrator references themselves as a director’s tool, their eyes and their sight aiding the construction of some grand Hitchcockian movie drama. This eerie idea is not only the process by which recorded history perpetuates itself, but also the direct mechanism of the Chronovisor technology. At what I consider the film’s climax, Courte accidentally cuts her finger on a book page’s edge. From this moment on, her character becomes a decisive believer in the Chronovisor’s real functional existence. It’s a subtle scene, but one that belies the final eradication of the Western research dynamic – one where the researcher herself is protected, kept at an unbiased scholarly distance, from the emotional reality of her research. The idealized scholar is able to come home from the library or the classroom and completely disengage. This itself is a product of a Capitalist culture that allies research with work, and keeps workers alienated from their labor. The best scholars are wounded by their research. I know very few academics who truly feel as if the vulnerability of inquiry is a one way street. As Courte pricks her finger on a book about Ernetti, his creation makes its way into her bloodstream. She makes connections no one has made before, and in a reconstructed VHS tape from a distant relative to Ernetti, stares at a shaky video testimony that the Chronovisor technology is not only undoubtedly real, but comes with a Faustian cost. Ernetti was indeed able to grant users the ability to witness past historical events, but in doing so, those events seep into your own personal memory, and the boundaries of the individual’s own distinct life and experiences begin to blur. Careful readers will recognize this as an illustrative exaggeration of the very real process of historical research. In learning about the past, we surrender ourselves to it. In true and honest attempt to resolve the matter of history – to get to the bottom of myriad jagged unknowns and misty correlations – we surrender the naive notion of our own lives as uniquely different or more worthwhile as the ones that came before it. In knowledge, comes the crushing weight of a thousand unsaid stories and unresolved wrongs. In Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, a mad kidnapper muses:

“The world was made for the dead. Think of all the dead there are,” he said, and then as if he had conceived the answer for all the insolence in the world, he said, “There’s a million times more dead than living and the dead are dead a million times longer than the living are alive,”

This is the real cost of using the Chronovisor. The crushing weight of history, of true and honest understanding of the past dissolves the ego. One’s mind is merged into the grand deposit of thought that came before it, and the scholar with insignificant personal motivations becomes merely a tool by which a larger story is told. After learning this, Courte journeys out to a remote island where one of Ernetti’s research partners was rumored to have stolen and kept the true Chronovisor for himself, warping his mind beyond repair with constant addictive use of the device. It is here, in this impossibly eerie and tense moment, that the central doubt behind this conspiracy’s truth is explicitly done away with, and the film shifts from a more conceptual exercise in belief to a true sci-fi. It’s all real. The delirious madman who stole the Chronovisor, and the dusty machine itself standing haphazardly in his bedroom. Courte slowly inches towards the clunky analog set she has seen and heard countless reports of, and the doubting Thomas has now seen and touched the pierced risen hands of his lord and his God. She fires up the machine, and the narrative film as we are accustomed to watching comes to an end. There is a sense in which I would be completely satisfied with the narrative stopping there. With a feeble assurance of founded faith, our heroine lead to the ends of the earth in search of an experience we can never see and she could never describe. Instead, the story is utterly exploded, and a sequence portraying the output and effects of the Chronovisor serves as an ecstatic moment of complete ego death, and the self’s utter dissolution under the great burden of humankind. This sequence is utterly haunting, and could easily serve as its own short film. Against ethereal droning sounds the machine casts feedback loops utterly drenched with analog texture and 80s-era video artifacting. It is perfectly held at the boundary of gauche and genuinely terrifying. Both what we might have expected to see looking into the Chronovisor, and something altogether beyond. We see Christ’s crucifixion – plain and simple, cast against a void-like sky and innumerable faceless bystanders. We linger on eternity itself, the weight of this mighty act and the cost of its wager in the mass anonymous humanity of the crowds. Immediately this disruption of time is met with consequences. Pasolini-like passion visuals merge with existing footage of Courte entering the building. Past memories, our own sight as audience and their own recording as filmmakers begin to seep into the Chronovisor’s view. The fourth wall collapses, Courte-as-character now becomes a performance viewed by Courte-as-audience, we as real flesh and blood audience members feel implicated. Our own eyes, our own documentation is implied to also be part of this cinematic reality. The film becomes not just something that is projected, but the substance of the film, where it happens, expands into including the audience itself. Minor White, an American photographer steeped in the legacy of Barthes, once wrote:

“Camera and eye are together a time machine with which the mind and human being can do the same kind of violence to time and space as dreams.”

This is the film’s central thesis. The research project, and the project of research altogether are mechanisms by which we intervene forcefully into time – and vice versa - are sequential instances in which the surreal, dream-like internal logic of the psyche is pricked, hurt beautifully and irreparably, by the sublime immensity of reality and truth. In this respect, to inquire meaningfully is to mechanize the self, to knowingly trade a depersonalization of one’s individual mind for knowledge impossible to holistically view from one’s own personal experience. Yes, this process is a mystical or even explicitly religious venture, but in high doses it pushes mankind dangerously close to the brink of madness. To successfully complete a research project is really just a matter of gathering around the ancient communal psychedelic regression circle a-la something like Dune’s Spice Agony or the hokey Mayan ritual pastiche in Altered States; drinking exactly enough mysteriously brewed hallucinogenic as to provide meaningful visions of your past self, but not enough to shatter your mind altogether.

Needless to say, the finished film makes for an utterly enthralling viewing experience. Straddling the boundary between stylish thriller and genuine paranormal investigation, falling into the universe of “Chronovisor” feels like staying up reading until four in the morning hunched over a dim reading light, right eyelid twitching on and off uncontrollably. Moreover, as a Diptyque employee I must call attention to the impeccable set design choice to have an unidentified 70g mini Diptyque candle (Mimosa? that feels most in character) burning on Beatrice’s stylishly messy oh-so-European office desk. If you’re going to spiral into conspiratorial obsession over secret Vatican time travel technology, you might as well do it in style.

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

Thou lovest righteousness, and hatest wickedness: therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.

All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee glad.

(Psalm 45:7-8, KJV)

As a Jew who grew up in the Reform tradition, one of the first things that drew me to Christianity was its scent. I had gone to synagogue a few times a year, grew up going to Hebrew School, and kept most of the Jewish High Holidays with my family at home. But I also lived across the street from a prominent Eastern Orthodox church, and would occasionally peek in as a teenager while wandering around the neighborhood on humid summer days. I still remember the scent of the polished wood that formed the knave, stained with calcified layers of incense. It set apart the space as something different from my regular environment, it told me at a pre-conceptual level, before my rational mind was able to understand and later to agree, that something sacred happens here. I get the same feeling at Ascension. I’m sure everyone is familiar with the very specific smell you get upon first opening the doors off LaSalle. Maybe you, like me, sit near the center middle of the pews on purpose to be as close as possible to the thurible of incense that censes the gospel during the Liturgy of the Word. Maybe incense gives you a headache or makes you sneeze, and still you show up anyway to this church that uses it to an almost excessive degree. We all work from an understanding that like it or not, the scent of incense does something important here, and is necessary for our corporate prayer. It is not an ornament to worship, or something that sets a mood, it itself is part of how we pray. This is something almost universal to worship worldwide – Christians are not the only people to burn precious scented resins during times of prayer, and many have written anthropological studies documenting the different ways in which our sense of smell is used to aid prayer, which is of course a process that uses every single sense and faculty of the human body to its fullest potential, whether you are aware of it or not. American Christians, much like many Americans of all faiths, seem to have a mindset carried over from the Reformed tradition in which the “smells and bells” of worship as we so lovingly call them here, are supposedly a distraction from the purely cerebral understanding of the true word of God. You and I both know that isn’t true, and I would argue that understanding religion as something that happens just in your mind and your heart and not in your body is a very abstract form of heresy. A traditional Anglican blessing for Christmastide begins: “May Christ, who by his incarnation gathered into one things earthly and heavenly, fill you with his joy and peace.” It is especially true of our beliefs as Christians that because God has at one point taken upon himself human flesh, not only has humanity been made holy, but the entirety of created matter itself has been given new dignity and worth. In First Temple Judaism, Solomon’s Temple was to be the only dwelling place of God on earth, and appointed representatives were tasked to offer unblemished sacrifices on behalf of the faithful public. After the incarnation and resurrection of the God-man Jesus, a tiny church building in a po-dunk town in the middle of nowhere can literally be the dwelling place of God. Both inasmuch as that church can contain a tabernacle where the Eucharistic body of our Lord is reserved, and also by virtue of being a place in which God is uniquely present in general, rightly worshipped and received bodily at the altar. I notice this a lot in Hindu traditions too, to give one example, that temples are not just places we go to think about God really hard, but garbhagriha, or “womb-chambers” in which God is understood among the faithful to physically reside, often in millions of places at once. It is then necessary to keep these material prosthetics to faith-based worship around, so that even when our mind is unable to completely reconcile the reality of the divine in front of our eyes, our senses can interpret what our heart longs to behold. As Aquinas writes in Pange Lingua Gloriosi, these sacramentals are “our outward sense befriending,” which upon experiencing the immaterial realities of the sacraments “makes the inward vision clear.”

In this respect, scent is an invaluable aid to modern worship across the world inasmuch as it establishes, argues for, and proclaims the presence of God on earth. But the specific type of incense we burn is not used in churches simply because it is convenient for us to do so, in fact it very often is not. What we burn in thuribles is obtained and imported (often from Africa and the Middle East) as a specific material reference to the practices of early Judaism, which existed at the time of David, the time of Solomon, and most importantly the time of Jesus Christ. The use of incense in the early life of the church was actually far more contested than most would think. Stemming from their rejection of Roman spirituality, which often involved incense sacrifices offered up to the gods, Athenagoras (c133-190 AD) went so far as to say of the Christian God that ‘He is himself perfect fragrance’, and thus does not need perfumed sacrifices. Yet as traditions evolved and the Hellenistic rites of worship died out and were forgotten, Christian regard towards incense as offering and as sacred material began to soften. The hymnographer Saint Ephrem the Syrian (306-373 AD), whose songs are still sung in Orthodox churches today, was a major influence on such a doctrinal shift. He lived his entire life during a period of time in which Christianity was legalized, and thus never experienced the negative association between incense and Paganism. Ephrem instead grew to follow the older tradition that sees God as pure fragrance, and calls Christ the ‘fragrance of life.’ He develops this theologically potent metaphor in terms of how the material substance of incense entangles the body and becomes united to and within it, speaking on how incense offered as prayer is able to permeate and purify the soul. In this model of Christian worship, Christ-as-perfume enters the body and soul; even as the breath of life animated the lifeless body of Adam in Genesis, so too would the inhalation of the fragrance of Christ bring life and regeneration to the devout Christian. From the 4th Century onward, incense became common in first Eastern then Western churches, and only really receded in near-universal commonality as Reformation-era theologists like John Calvin deemed it an inappropriate sensorial distraction, and many Puritans in the English church feared its association with Roman Catholicism and “Popish superstition.” Our beloved Oxford Movement not only restored incense to the life of the Church of England, but also helped its popularity in corporate worship grow among similarly minded Lutherans, Methodists, and other high-church Protestant factions. That said, it is undeniable that religious incense use was an extremely common fact of life for those living in the levant at the time of Our Lord, and as such, references to these practices abound in scripture. The Gospels’ explicit reference to fragrance and ritual scenting form a constellation of rhetorical aromas, in which precious ointments, fine smoke, and even decaying flesh emit scent in the service of arguing to the world for the in-dwelt purity of Christ’s body and His kingdom, as well as bearing crucial material witness to the reality of His resurrection.

The first and most notable example is Mary of Bethany washing Christ’s feet with her own hair, an extremely intimate moment prefacing Christ’s own symbolic example of the washing of His disciple’s feet. Luke’s gospel describes the moment thusly:

In this act, Mary is not only utilizing fragrant ointment to distinct Christ’s body as holy beyond all else, itself a Christian theological statement, but also unknowingly to foretell His burial and ultimate sacrifice. The passionate, self-debasing love shown to Jesus is herein given a fragrant smell, an outward realization of the purity and righteousness of her devotion. As Christ Himself says: “My head with oil thou didst not anoint: but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment. Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little.” This is itself a common theme – fragrant smells are associated with pure love, care, and tenderness. In this case, they argue Mary’s understanding of true devotion, her own need for mercy, and in its wake God’s grace and forgiveness. You see this connotation all the way back to The Song of Solomon. “How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices!” The motif continues to present day – our own worship of Christ is fragranced, and by association our love is hopefully held by God to be true.

A contrasting example utilizing unpleasant odors is contained within the account of the raising of Lazarus. It’s a quick moment when Christ approaches Lazarus’s tomb that most might overlook:

I think about this phrase a lot – “Lord, by this time he stinks.” Here smell is used as a reminder of the bitter and grotesque nature of our own mortality, a measure of just how far Christ is willing to descend in order to redeem us to eternal life. The raising of Lazarus was not a perfectly normal man with his eyes closed, who after being prayed over for a minute or two blinked open his eyes and started walking around. This was a man in burial shrouds who had already been subject to the natural forces of decay for four days, at which point bacteria have already started to break down tissue, causing severe bloating and a vile stench of decay. It is here that Christ meets us – calls us by name and brings us to the life of the world to come. Without this smell, this stink – we can’t really understand just how much God is willing to endure for our sakes, how broken and indecent we are without life, and just how utterly and wholly we rely on God to provide it to us. It’s scary and also beautiful. Perfume exists not just to imbue us with scent, but to cover up and challenge the all-too-common reminders of our filth. In this sense, to scent both in and outside of liturgy is to look briefly towards the ultimate resurrection of the dead – to represent ourselves not as we are, but as we will be. Paul reminds us, writing to the church in Corinth: “for now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face (1 Corinthians 13:12).”

If so far scent in holy scripture has served a dual purpose: to sensorily remind us of both the filth of our present mortality and the unstained glory of eternal life, the precipice of the resurrection’s discovery, perhaps the most well-known use of perfume in the bible, encapsulates both of these purposes at once. Mark’s gospel states it plain:

This is the very moment Christ’s most intimate female apostles realize and understand the depth of the Paschal mystery. The Myrrh Bearing Women, as they are called in Eastern Orthodox tradition, are held as the first witnesses to the resurrection, and hold a special place among all of mankind. Many focus on the women’s evangelization – they proclaim the empty tomb to the twelve Apostles and anyone who will listen, and were often dismissed due to their second class status as women. What I want to draw our attention to, however, is the service they were prepared to give Our Lord in His tomb, and the task they had originally come to do – to anoint his body with sweet spices. Traditionally, these spices included liquid myrrh, sweet cinnamon, fragrant cane known as calamus, and a cassia oil base. These are most of the ingredients mentioned in Exodus 30:23–25, an instruction given to Moses by God the father himself to anoint sacred ministers. There is a connection here to the oil of Chrism we use in not only the sacrament of holy orders, but in baptism and confirmation. That said, it is worth pausing to recognize that not only is there an exact formula for perfume in the Old Testament, but that this recipe is said to be created by God, and clearly worth preserving. Across the ages the formula has been followed quite well, not just in Christian traditions, but in ancient Jewish traditions of Christ’s own day. These spices exist, as it is written, so that “whatsoever toucheth them shall be holy.” In this sense, the Myrrhbearing Women bringing them to Christ’s tomb is a clear testament to their faith in His human body as deeply sanctified. That said, in this dynamic something is different. In every other act of anointing the dead, the spices exist, as previously mentioned, to overwrite the natural scent of decay. They are a correction to the forces of death, and yet, ultimately sublimate themselves to it. Scented oils fade, decay is eternal and ever-eventual. And yet, here, the dynamic is inverted – the balms are never actually placed on a body, and now exist not as condolences or cover-ups, but as gifts to celebrate the risen Lord. I would even go so far as to compare this to the Three Wise Men of Christmastide – bringing fragrant gifts of frankincense and myrrh to meet the newborn king. Only now, He is present upon earth in a new kind of way, and the gifts mankind first meets him with as He is born into a new kind of life are testaments not of things to come, but of a battle which has already been won. The whole of creation has been turned on its head. Death has been trampled down, and embalming materials become jubilant adornments to a heavenly throne. This is to me, the meaning of the resurrection. The cross has gone from an instrument of torture to a means of life, and the women traveling to perfume a dead man’s body have stared down the empty tomb and come back with mouths full of praise and hands full of fragrant oils. What do you think happened to these oils? Maybe they neatly brought them back, and saved them for some other occasion in the new life of the church – but maybe the Myrrhbearing Women left the oils in the tomb. Maybe they dropped them in shock, because maybe as I like to imagine – Mary came to understand that all the smells in the world can’t compare to a passing glance from the one who made every single petal of every single flower, who put the warm sticky sap of every single tree in its bark, who gave us sweet fragrances and gave us noses to smell them. If this moment was to be the risen Lord’s first real encounter with humankind on earth, these embalming ointments were its sensorial stage. If Mary Magdalene was in fact composed enough to gently put down her anointing jar, maybe no one ever came to pick it up. Maybe it stood there for decades, maybe it toppled over in a storm and returned its scent to the earth itself. Maybe bees came in swarms to hover meekly around it, looking for some sort of sign of flowers to pollinate. Maybe they knew, knowing as all of God’s creation somehow must have known, that something sweeter than flowers had bloomed there indeed.

Fine scents in the bible are not only sacrifices, costly things laid at the feet of the holiest of holies, but are themselves demonstrations of how we live. Paul mentions this, in Second Corinthians, writing “For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ, in them that are saved, and in them that perish” – a divine aroma that evangelizes and spreads itself among the faithful not by force, but through the pleasantness of how we worship and how we as Christians love. St. Seraphim of Sarov is quoted saying “acquire the spirit of peace and a thousand souls around you will be saved.” In this sense, the way in which scent travels and emits is likened to the spread of the church – it’s impossible to hide scent from some people and show it to others, it permeates a space for all to smell. Some like it, others don’t, but it spreads all the same. It emits off of a physical presence, and intangibly tells us something about what is tangibly in our immediate surroundings. If we smell an unpleasant scent, we look for an unpleasant thing around us. If we smell smoke, there must be fire. Likewise, when we as Christians live our lives as fragrant scent emanating from our own knowledge and love of God in Jesus, people will look for its source. You cannot really effectively tell someone about God without living as the sweet-smelling fragrance of the living God Himself. Think about the most gorgeous, beautiful flower you’ve ever seen in your memory, one you’ve really spent time around to touch and smell. Maybe it randomly bloomed outside of your local grocery store, or maybe your parents or your parents’ parents planted the tree in their backyard and you’ve seen its blooms every year. You could show me a picture of this flower and I might maybe think it a lovely shade of blue or red or purple, but I haven’t really smelled it have I? I haven’t really known what it’s like to be in the presence of this flower, to bask in the shade of its tree. Truly I tell you, Jesus Christ is the Rose E’er Blooming, and every good thing you’ve ever smelled in your life and every beautiful sight you’ve ever seen is just the trace bits of incense that stick around in the corners of the ceiling of the church after the eleven o’clock mass. We may worship God now, but we haven’t the faintest idea of the real glory of who it is we’re wafting our worship towards. We may experience God’s graces in this life as fragrance bellowing from innumerable great censers, but His essence – the fragrant materials of His kingdom – will be incomparable in their perfection, and inescapable in their searing and transformative love.

Saint Paul writes:

Amen.

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

The Alloy Studio, Faux

I’ve followed the work of Bryson Ammons and Eddie from The Alloy Studio for a while – having first smelled the initial scent offerings at Stéle in New York. Following the success of their first two fragrances, it seems like the perfumer/designer pair has ushered the brand into a new era, adding candles and many fresh fragrances to the lineup, each positioned between contemporary Afrofuturist aesthetics and sincere nostalgia. Needless to say, I really like the direction the pair has followed. I was really endeared to Luster, a homestyle sweet potato gourmand that was so easy to love, I felt like it practically sold out within the first few hours of the first day. That said, what I ended up bringing home was Faux, a composition I had been eyeing from afar for mention of a cosmetic accord base. Inspired by a glamorous fake fur coat, Ammons builds out an entire environment for this scent. The copy muses: “lounging in a brutalist boudoir, the air sweet with the scent of vintage makeup, Japanese incense, and dry cleaned fur coats.” I think he nails it. There’s a plastic sheen to the opening certainly reminiscent of soft strands of fake fur, but what really dominates the composition is the power couple of orris and suede. This is a dead ringer for another fragrance I adore that also happened to be stationed across from Alloy Studios at the event, I’ll Never Learn by Pearfat. Both perfumers cast the buttery warmth of orris butter against a very sort of artificial smelling suede, and in the process, make something that feels deeply fuzzy. Where Faux differs is a fruitier opening, attributed to peach, and a denser sort of drydown that keeps the initial static purple haze going longer than Pearfat’s mossy counterpart. I love the allusion to incense in the copy notes. I perhaps wish that came through a bit smokier here, but I also respect that the average consumer doesn’t care to wear something as dry chalky and smoke-laden as the scents I often crave. Ammons does a great job establishing a mood with this fragrance, and it’s something I’ve already reached for constantly in the days following the event. I wish more niche brands would heed The Alloy Studio’s example, because I do often feel like there is a real market to be seized upon in the indie perfume sphere for dry powder-bombs. I honestly see a bit of this inclination in my second-favorite scent of his Silver Haze, which was itself a perfume that at times came off somewhat cosmetic, albeit much sweeter. If these recent releases are an indication of the artistic path the brand and community built around it will grow in the days to come, I think Ammons has his fans in good hands.

American Perfumer, Madame Chouteau

This was one I hadn’t even heard of, and one I left raving about. American Perfumer is a great new venture – assembling formulas from various perfumers and brands, it is both a publisher and distributor of perfume made in the USA. They have some favorites from Christophe Laudamiel previously published under The Zoo, including the delightful Rhubarb My Love. What captured my heart this time, however, was a newer extrait entitled Madame Chouteau, named after Marie-Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau, a wealthy fur trader considered one of the founders of St. Louis Missouri. The composition that bears her name is truly unclassifiable. The characteristics that first came to mind were creamy champaca, purple florals, and a neon sort of chocolatey oud base. The stated notes boast a “mousse de St. Louis” note, which is the perfumer Shawn Maher’s version of the notorious vintage Mousse de Saxe accord. The finished product comes across fantastically. This is a perfume that smells somewhat vintage, but also has a modern sort of fullness to it that reminds me a lot of the work of American Perfumer labelmate John Biebel of January Scent Project. Dense, but floral-fruity, this is an oud fragrance that feels profoundly flirtatious and glamourous. Pair that with its powerful extrait concentration, and this feels like the perfect salve to wear sulking around long wooden staircases at the foot of a historic home. Bright blue, somehow, in its impression – there is supposedly a yerba mate absolute base alongside the Thailand oud that makes this fragrance even more insane on skin. Maybe the most experimental thing I sprayed at the convention, it came bottled very humbly in an unbranded tube, signed by its perfumer. Honestly, if I can be so candid, I regret not buying the 30ml bottle then and there. That said, good whirlwind festival romance couldn’t be complete without the one that got away.

MOCO Fragrances, Green Ribbons

This one I did buy, because I’ve had my eye on it for months after first smelling it at The Center for Order and Experimentation in West Town. I really like the simple, modern-coquette design of their releases, but hadn’t until now been able to find a release from them that fully resonated with my taste. Green Ribbons, however, reads a lot darker than their traditional fare, and crept its way into my brain over weeks. A green amber, it darts between disparate accords like cardamom, orris, and “Green Pith” with ease, settling on skin as a sort of spiced oakmoss and purple floral smelling base. There is a stated "Wrought Iron” accord as well, which lends the sort of stony metallic quality of a well-worn antique gate. The whole affair reminds me quite a lot of the historic homes lined with Spanish moss in my hometown of Charleston South Carolina. Stemmy, powdery, and warm, this perfume feels appropriate to wear in all seasons, containing both light and dark elements, and has been an easy reach for me to wear to work in this dreary time between Winter and Spring. As an aside I also really enjoyed getting to experience Morgan Conner’s candle work, specifically Rhubarb Rouge, but was most drawn to this fragrance of hers in particular. I consider it sort of a spiritual cousin to my beloved L’ombre Dans L’eau EDT, which keeps up the gothic but verdant pastoral atmosphere by focusing in on the entire blackcurrant bush. Green Ribbons does something truly unique, with a palate of fragrances frequently employed by other perfumers, but in combinations that herein feel wholly creative and novel. Wear Green Ribbons to languish in an old Georgian mansion, overgrown with sundry weeds and thickets. In general I found that this was a good event to smell green-toned perfumes, and a sort of watery snapped stems profile seems to be very in vogue with niche perfumers at the moment.

Nostos, Shiver

This brings me to Shiver by NYC-based super-sleek Nostos. Which has amassed a great degree of viral hype online due to its conscious design and art direction featuring fellow weird perfume maven Camryn Kim. Quietly composed by arthouse veteran Marissa Zappas, the Nostos brand seems to be an interesting experiment in which mainstream techniques of commissioning perfumers to ghostwrite a cohesive line of scents for an already completed brand design are applied to the world of niche fragrance. In a market of perfumers-cum-marketers, Nostos disrupts the sanctity of the singer-songwriter take on selling fragrance, opting instead to apply the existing talents of established perfumers towards fleshing out a world made by professionals in design and marketing. I think the resulting collection is a sleek little trio of amusements, and definitely seems marketed and optimized for people just beginning their journeys into the realms of experimental fragrance. That said, Shiver stuck out to me as far more complex and weird than the other two releases, and was perhaps the only fragrance of the three I would personally wear. Immediately, I was reminded of a very niche fragrance from my employers at Diptyque called Eau de Lierre – inasmuch as both of these perfumes utilize a fantasy green ivy accord that smells somewhat like watermelon rind and hyper-watery chunks of plant flesh. The fragrance’s branding evokes the moment of deep Winter turning into Spring, but this to me feels almost Summertime in how camphoric, bright, and transparent the formulation feels. There’s a lot going on here, certainly. A wet concrete accord reminiscent of CDG Serpentine also makes an appearance, buttressed by orris, oakmoss, and musk. Watery, earthen, and clay-like, this perfume smells like trolling the city park in April looking for trouble, hoards of people outside enjoying the newly warm weather and trampling down wiry shoots of undergrowth beneath their Birkenstock’ed feet. Much of the Nostos line is focused on both nostalgia and youth culture, and I do think this fragrance is able to land the having fun outside with your childhood friends sort of smell in a way that feels new and exciting. I would wear Shiver on an early morning bike ride, and come back with my sweat mixed into a blend that smells of urban outdoors and the darker tones of the warmer seasons.

Domestica Perfume, Home With You

Founded this year by business partners and real life partners Marty Schissler and Alvaro Lozano, Domestica is a new Chicago-based line holding fast to the Windy City’s track record of experimental kitsch and nostalgia-based brews. Their sleek little three perfume debut collection is really fun, and holds to a mission statement of elevating the mundanities of domestic life into the spotlight of luxury. I love their very professedly anti-escapism viewpoint. It’s a oft-neglected power of perfume to take you viscerally not into far off locales or exotic vistas, but into the routine moments of your daily life. This process imbues them with, or rather simply reveals the already existing indwelt sacredness to the practical rituals of our own lives. This technique is most exemplified in my favorite from the line, Home With You, which intends to capture the smells of a sick day resting at home. The main note is described as “cherry menthol cough drop,” and I think Schissler captures it quite well. Sweet, fruity, and camphoric, it’s blended with a delicious carrot seed and orris heart that contributes to an overall powdery chalky sheen. I wouldn’t necessarily call this a purple floral, but the heart does contribute to the overall purple feeling of the composition, echoed by the design of its bottle. Resinous minty opoponax rounds out the base, and accents the overall sharp sweetness of the composition quite well. There are reports of a Band-Aid accord in the fragrance, which is a delightful idea. I will say, that smell is not the focus of how this perfume wears on skin, but I can identify it in an overall musty sort of animalic undertone to the scent, and does contribute to correlating the fragrance not just with remedies for sickness, but sickness itself. Overall, I find Home With You to fit quite well into the sort of resinous floral amber type I often really enjoy, and think its execution is able to live up to its extremely creative inspiration. I will be keeping up with Domestica Perfume quite avidly, and I’m really excited to see what this new brand adds to the vibrant Chicago perfume scene.

Perfume Who, The Very Eye Of Night

I’ve long been eager to smell the complete line from Perfume Who, an NYC-based studio stepped in the mores of experimental film and design. Their brand identity is seemingly founded on anonymity, obscuring multiple founders and collaborators behind product-focused marketing and impeccable art design. I’ve enjoyed burning their incense, but the real center of their collection is their egg-shaped perfume bottles. My favorite from the collection, however, ended up taking me by surprise. Their newest release, The Very Eye Of Night, inspired the Maya Deren dance film, captured my attention with an achingly delicate verdant array of piths and seeds. I’ve long-touted the unique synchronicities of film and fragrance, and it makes me so happy to see genuinely experimental brands bringing scent into active conversation with experimental film, much less the brilliant oeuvre of mid-century avant-gardist Mara Deren. The Very Eye Of Night as a film was made in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, and is a fittingly dim, moody, and subtle reflection on movement and group choreography. I’m interested in the perfumer’s decision to make this scent incredibly light and green, as opposed to darker and more brooding. It’s almost as if the dancer’s movements are tracing root paths or estuaries, mimicking the natural world through deliberate human movement. Another ivy fragrance I found at Fumed, this is much more watery and powdery than Shiver, supported by a violet and Exaltolide musk. I’ve noticed that Perfume Who is often exceedingly transparent about the specific molecules they use, listing them as notes as-is, rather than embellishing them with epithets like “soft fairy musk,” as many other niche houses often do. I admire the honestly here, and I think the market itself is beginning to trend towards this consumer recognition of certain uber-popular synthetics like Ambroxan. Accented with Givaudan’s proprietary Rhubafuran rhubarb synthetic, the most palpable note to my nose is thick and chewy cucumber. I’m reminded of those time lapse meme videos of snails eating cucumbers really fast. It wears on skin like the watery juice from a freshly cut stalk. Overwhelmingly delicate, it was easily outperformed by the intense general aroma of the convention hall. Upon leaving and walking back home, however, its fullness came into view among the sprouting buds of late March in Ravenswood. This was maybe the full sized bottle I came closest to buying at the event, and I still really think it would make a great addition to my collection. I’ve found very punchy, tomato-leaf forward green scents have been in vogue lately, and I’m always delighted to encounter green scents that are able to prioritize naturalism and the true delicacy of plant life. It feels unique compared to the rest of Perfume Who’s collection, which prioritizes florals and earthy tones, yet carries a similar sort of gauzy wistfulness I see as a through line for the body of work at large. Wear The Very Eye Of Night to climb the beanstalk that grew in your yard overnight, and also to just barely make the southbound Red Line train to the Gene Siskel Film Center to see the latest program of FVNMA Department short films with your expired SAIC student ID the attendants at the register graciously still let you use to get free tickets most of the time.

Puppet Parfum, Ingénue

It was a pleasure to meet the husband-wife team behind Puppet Parfum, a cute little lineup of self-taught fragrances I’ve heard lots of things about online. Haunted Baby was in my experience the bestseller, an earthy sort of brew that combines dirt notes with vetiver and petrichor. My favorite of the three, however, was by far the perfume entitled Ingénue, of which I was happy to immediately buy a bottle. The inspiration is incredibly tender: designed as an ode to the perfumer’s own complicated relationship to childhood femininity, it shines with powdery, creamy, and sweet sentimentalism. That said, there’s clearly a tension at play here – the disparity between an idealized girlhood and the real trauma of misogyny, self-alienation, and the many unique cruelties inflicted upon girls before they become women. It’s in the wake of this history that the bittersweet nature of nostalgia happens, and the emotional core of the fragrance is affixed. I think these disparate influences really do come through in the finished product. I was immediately reminded of a perfume I love, but don’t think I’ve heard many people online review. Dauphine, by Goest Perfumes has a shared brooding hyper-femme influence, and comes across with similar undertones of bitter almond powder, play-dough, and creamy musk. Where Ingénue differs is the waxy cosmetic base, and a lawn-mower style green grass effect in the top notes. At its heart, however, notes of sugar cookies and sandalwood kindly lend their milky warmth, softly swooning towards memories of baking and rummaging around your mom’s medicine cabinet in equal measure. People who aren’t tuned into powdery scents writ large could construe an off-putting baby wipes note here, or rather a general sort of powdery chapstick-y sweetness that does kind of recall the scent of products used for infants, but needless to say those tapped into the inspiration and execution of the scent at large will find it wholly unintrusive and at its best explicatory of the nature of childhood. Of all of the fragrances I’m going to refer to in this article, this perfume is undoubtedly the one I actually wear most frequently. It’s the perfect bedtime scent, and a great companion to adult sleepovers with my best friends. Puppet Parfum is another brand here that has a lot of growing in its future, and is undoubtedly bound to keep playing around with scent with the self-possessed creativity of someone who quite wisely has learned to make perfumes primarily for herself.

Nose of Gatsby, Double Espresso

I do think this is the only scent in this list to have come from a brand I had not heard of before trying out, and as such represents the complete wild card for my own smelling experience at the convention. The product of perfumer Gatsby Yeh’s own musings, there’s a very wide range of fragrances under his employ that demonstrate quite an impressive degree of variance in style. I really did enjoy his ode to David Lynch, and his Art and Olfaction Awards Honorable Mention in Burning Piano. That said, I have to write about Double Espresso, because this perfume is genuinely insane. I’ve truly never smelled a coffee fragrance like this, and the punchy-savory quality of it was immediately enough to snap me into a state of attention. Bitter chocolate and oud lend an animalic base to this fragrance, but the star is his Coffee Arabica accord that smells darker and more smoldering than any other note of its ilk. I swear, there’s something even lunch food-like about how the coffee comes across here that evokes not just the cup but the entire cafe around it. It feels crazy to say, but the more sour and savory aspects here almost seem to evoke a ham and cheese sandwich, as if bought from the display pane of glass, heated up, and placed on the table besides your hot black coffee. As seems to be a trend with Yeh’s fragrances, it’s extremely potent, and wears down into a more subdued version of the central coffee-chocolate-oud triage at the scent’s center. I honestly don’t know if I would buy a full bottle of this perfume, as I’d have to be a very specific mood to wear it, but travel pens had already sold out by the time I made it to his booth, which itself feels like a testament to how interesting the masses found his work. Needless to say, I will be keeping up with Nose of Gatsby’s future releases, and heartily recommend his work to anyone interested in a set of bold fragrances from floral to gourmand, all imbued with a kick.

ERIS Parfums, Mother’s Milk

This is a bit of an outlier, because I had graciously received a sample of this fragrance from Barbara Hermann, the founder behind ERIS Parfums, before attending Fumed. That said, I do think smelling the full bottle in context of the larger ERIS line via Chicago vendor mainstays Field and Florist did help solidify my feelings on the release. The inspiration is lofty, and very much in line with the transgressive and scandalous nature of the larger collection’s scents, coming from a mind who quite literally wrote the book on transgressive and scandalous perfumes. This was intended to be, in a sense, the primordial gourmand perfume. Harkening back to the first ever food most every human on earth is fed: breast milk. Bridging the gap between comforting and strange, I think I initially misunderstood this fragrance, because I went in expecting the worst that can be wrought by its perfumer Antoine Lie. It’s safe to say that Lie is the bona-fide virtuoso of sweaty-milky-secretion scents. He is perhaps most well known for Sécrétions Magnifiques by Etat Libre d’Orange, which is hailed as the most disgusting perfume of all time by scent noobs farming reaction-bait whose idea of a challenging perfume is something that’s out of stock at their local Nordstrom Rack. That said, I do like Sécrétions Magnifiques, and think it does a good job of mixing the salinity of seaweed with cool iris and a quite realistic blood note. As to whether or not this smells like cum, I would have to defer to people who have had received more facials than a silver-star lesbian with giant glasses. That said, Lie will always be famous to me for making Post Tenebras Lux, a fragrance inspired by a shower orgy film scene that wears gorgeously on skin, asserting itself as my own personal favorite body fluid fragrance. How does Mother’s Milk fit into this matrix? Quite softly. I was surprised by how accessible it was. The most prominent notes to my nose were vanilla and sandalwood. This can maybe be considered the milky base. It is disrupted by orris and suede, but there’s no trace of animalic notes to be found. Mothers Milk is a perfume that disrupts via the strangeness of small differences. There’s nothing egregiously off-putting going on here, but after wearing it for a few days, you really do start to develop a strange relationship to the sweetness of the scent. Kind of like almost sneezing and then having it ruined. You’re very close to receiving the sort of smooth vanilla gourmand that would slot really easily into a concept labeled something like ‘cozy kitten fur vanilla snow day,’ but then you’re… somewhere else. Does this smell like breast milk? I’m not sure. The only friends of mine who have experience with lactation are art students who self-induced lactation with breast pumps as performance art, and trans women who were put on weird hormone cocktails that induced lactation at inconvenient moments. I don’t know very many mothers well enough to have really smelled breast milk up close, and I’m about as infertile and homosexual as it gets. Do I think this fits into the concept Hermann describes, of quote: “The Bad Mother, who (in our fantasies) withholds and punishes instead of being a never-ending source of giving and comfort” – definitely. Wear this scent to the gay bar and meet a brazen nonbinary submissive off Feeld you’ll have really intricate roleplaying sex with twice and then ghost when they ask if their 40 year old boyfriend can come with them to your house.

Mitti Parfum, Virasat

Another highlight of the weekend was meeting the team behind Mitti Parfum: founder Ridhima and perfumer Neerav. The duo was both incredibly passionate and well-spoken about their own fragrances, and exuded a sort of kind confidence that shone through to the public’s reception of their work. I had looked over their collection online, and wasn’t really sure which one would end up sticking out to me most. After review, my favorite was absolutely Virasat, the dryer spiced amber inspired by heritage and tradition in a way that feels pointedly different from other brands taking names and inspiration from Asian culture and ritual. The impression I got from Neerav was that this scent was not necessarily about the very large concept of “tradition” inasmuch as it attempts to create a smell that represents (tricky sort of imperative) a specific thing or moment that is objectively or uniquely Indian. Virasat (trans. “heritage”) is more akin to an emotional palette of textures, feelings, and of course smells that evoke his own memories of family and generational tradition. I really like this idea, seemingly a more down-to-earth and confessional take on bringing one or two people’s familiar aromas and smells of Asia to a market oversaturated with orientalist marketing. The copy on Mitti’s website reads:

The sandalwood stored in wedding trunks.
The aroma of cardamom steeping in chai at dusk.
The quiet reverence of a handwritten letter, folded and refolded.

To my nose, I smell an almost attar-like blend of dry lemony frankincense, dark red rose, creamy frangipani, and smoked cardamom. The blend is quite dry, and it wears relatively lightly on my skin. This isn’t exactly an incense fragrance, and isn’t exactly a spice – I would consider Virasat closer to an apothecary amber floral, one that radiates a deep brown warmth that speaks to kind memories and half-formed material conventions of the Indian subcontinent. I would maybe reach for a comparison to something like the gorgeous Tam Dao EDT, which contains the same sort of creamy milky sandalwood essence utterly foreign to modern-day pickle “santal” junkies, herein splayed against red and yellow blooms. Into the drydown I mainly get cardamom and semblances of saffron. If the whole of Mitti Parfum’s offerings could be considered a storybook, this is the first chapter. Something that speaks chiefly to beginnings, but has the wisdom to linger in your mind until the very last page.

Maya Njie, Aethi Opum

The last fragrance I’ll mention is from Maya Njie, the inimitable London-based fragrance artist who draws upon her Scandinavian and Gambian heritage to craft tepid spiced odes to memory that all have an extremely unique signature quality about them. Aethi Opum is perhaps the least like a classic Maya Njie fragrance I’ve ever smelled: her usual palate of cedarwood, cardamom, spiced vanilla, and tobacco is eschewed in favor of something entirely more earthen and incense-forward. A loose reference to the Borassus Aethiopum palm tree of Gambia, historic and imposing presences in the African landscape. The opening is coffee-like and dark, blending dry roast notes with suede iris and vanilla. The mood quickly turns, however, and a hyper-earthy petrichor sensibility emerges with black pepper, vetiver and Thiouraye herbal incense. The way this fragrance wears on skin is almost rubbery, the nutty qualities of vetiver blending into sharp incense and soil notes feel like a uniquely arresting callback to stability and strength. I really can’t say there’s any other fragrance I’ve smelled that I can compare this to. Perhaps the warmth and sheer depth of Diptyque’s Vetyverio EDP, but this isn’t as green or as one-note. The degree of complexity to this fragrance is staggering – it evolves over time and blends notes hitherto unheard of together into something altogether new and inventive. At this point Njie is clearly working in her own genre of fragrance-making, creating iterations of memories and experiences across space, diaspora, and fine art –and all we can do is follow her there.

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is mostly a perfume blog entirely by Audrey Robinovitz.

Audrey Robinovitz (@foldyrhands) is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

I watched Canadian filmmaker ’s Castration Movie Anthology i. Traps at its Chicago premiere in The Music Box theater – amidst a crowd of unkempt trans women and guys with strange beards who laughed really loud at stuff that wasn’t all that funny. To be honest, I had worked a stressful eight hour retail shift, and was not in the best headspace to handhold my synapses through a five hour camcorder movie, but I did it anyway, mostly out of my own stubborn commitment to cinema and a principled sort of allegiance to the time and effort that people put into making movies. I left with very few thoughts other than a sort of inborn awkwardness around what felt like a convention for people who spend a lot of time on the same strange parts of the internet. Nevertheless, as a huge fan of castration, and a huge fan of movies – I was really looking forward to being there. I primarily recognized that Weard as a director was steeped in both the cultural mores of Letterboxd pro film obsessives, and the unique style preferences of extremity film nerds whose comfort movie is Martyrs. That said, with both with the first and second installments, I was honestly prepared for something far more obscene. The Castration Movie anthology seems to be much more invested in collecting slow-paced vignettes of a specific kind of person living a specific kind of dysfunctional life in a specific kind of city. Like fragments of wayward lives leaning either slowly into or out of transgender identity – it chronicles gender itself as a series of synchronized failings at interpersonal connection and self-presentation that if nothing else deliberately place us further into establishing agency over our own bodies. The first film was to me its weakest drawing these tentative corollaries between the interior lives of miserable failed men and successfully transitioned women, and its strongest focusing on the uniquely embarrassing and precarious lives of a specific type of usually white woman or woman-adjacent person in New York city during (and even after ceasing) medical transition – not in half-realized states of maybe or maybe not pursuing it. That said, I respect how irresponsibly and compulsively Weard seeks to represent the cringe-worthy material reality of being in active medical and social transition, that is to say indeterminacy. Much of trans-cinema still maintains a sort of internal preciousness about the sanctity of trans womanhood. As if wincing prematurely at the eyes of cisgender onlookers – some eager to misuse their intimate statements on the contradictory nature of identity against themselves – it makes sure to maintain that transition is a clearly defined sort of once and for all process that is undoubtedly effective in turning sad women into happy men and sad men into happy women until the end of time. Even more so than its predecessor, Castration Movie Anthology II makes no such claims. I get the sense in this installment that Weard intends for identifying oneself with the characters in this film to be a deeply humiliating and implicating experience. It’s kind of admirable how ill-advised and irresponsible a movie like this feels in the current political moment – and I struggle to conceive of how this film might come across to an audience uninitiated with this specific type of white trans woman living in NYC, much less an audience who isn’t at least gay or has something maladjusted going on with their gender themselves. I think Weard’s unabashedly mumblecore slowed+reverb style takes exceedingly well to an increase in inter-community attention, mainstream institutional funding, and filming resources afforded to her and her crew after the release of the first of seemingly four (?) five hour movie anthology installments. Perhaps seizing upon its committed star actor Alex Walton’s own detrans-curiosity, it challenges an audience of undoubtedly insecure and defensively self-justified transsexual women to find empathy for people who frequently serve as community punching bags: bricks, catgirls, reppers, fake nonbinary girls, detrans guys with weird moustaches, twinkhons, age gap groomers, AGAMP cis girl chasers, and everything in-between.

What makes this feel somewhat different from the first installment is that much of that recursive and honestly really pathetic 4chan language isn’t often accoutrement for fourth wall breaking ‘get it?’ type bits, but actively and quite eerily identified with cult-mentality and material harm. The film’s central narrative blends Sci-Fi with documentary cinéma vérité pretty effectively, keeping occasional powerful moments of eeriness where closeups of faces talking to unknown CGI avatars and looming over strangely marked jars of excrement start to feel real and somehow magical. The suspended belief of these scenes is dealt with quite delicately. You can never really tell if the loaded guns are real, the dicks are actually semi-hard, the ketamine is fake, or the white liquid is really cum. Some of the acting is great. Ivy Wolk shines as Keller, the hilarious pseudo-biographical enfant terrible of the gender-fucked party scene, and my favorite character Devon is played with an almost inconvenient amount of heart by Alexandra McVicker. Some of the acting is really weird, some of it seems like it was filmed completely behind people’s backs at real parties, and some of it sucks. Two hours in, it doesn’t really matter – and the internal relations of the characters in the story make the pretty clear absent-minded tendencies and real personalities of the actors feel baked into the plot. Weard gives us a lot more substance to grab onto here, and while her scenes are just as overwrought and unending as the first installment – the plot itself feels denser, and my attention feels more worth centering on completely random aspects of the set design, the characters appearances, the specific parts of New York City they filmed this in, and other things your brain locks onto during thirty minute takes of really zoomed in faces shouting at each other over loud music.

I would personally resist connections to other super-long movies like camcorder twin Inland Empire (it isn’t even that long!) or Jacques Rivette’s Out 1. I don’t like the fetishization of long-duration film for its own sake, and certainly a number of people who self-select as '‘into cinema’ feel as if an insanely drawn out runtime correlates to intellectual density or a similarity in style. I see it all the time in literature as a genuine fan of Infinite Jest. Needless to say, Castration Movie Anthology II has much more in common with shorter films like Jonas Mekas’ The Brig, but also feels a little bit like Lena Dunham’s brilliant amateur confessional Tiny Furniture. In a sense, Louise Weard is kind of like Lena Dunham for girls with Y chromosomes, holes in their bedroom wall, and nowhere better than a basement orgy to go on Thanksgiving or Christmas. Her jagged camerawork deliberately casts its subjects in harsh tones and revealing states of embarrassing exposition. The point here is that these are not trans women we envy, or even trans women we desire, but they are trans women we know. Environmental storytelling sets the stage: they moved to New York City with no real skills, no real plan, and only the hope of utopian community in the wake of small-town community rejection. Many of them fall into a cult run by Seeking Derangements’ own Hesse Deni, and accept eating boiled hotdogs and rubbing ectoplasmic estrogen-gel from a bucket on their developing breasts because that’s the best they think they can do for themselves. The film’s central refrain is an off-line spoken by Agnes Walsh’s character Vycki – “this is what the girls do for each other.” Spoken outside of the scene, it sounds like saccharine found family moralizing, but heard within its proper context, it sounds like a threat. Our protagonist Circle has just briefly escaped the Polygon cult and is playing off subtle propositions for sex from a distant friend turned couch-surfing benefactor, all while avoiding any real attempt at admitting to Vycki where they’ve been or what they’ve been doing. This is the dangerous sort of dynamic we call trans sisterhood. Trauma begets trauma, and heaps of disaffected and vulnerable people manipulate each other like crabs in a bucket into trading around money, sex, and drugs, all while masking their intentions behind vague progressive theory group-speak and therapy buzzwords. Despite it all, I think Weard’s camera does a pretty good job of making it all feel endearing. From the inside, there are countless accusations to lobby, innumerable brainworms to uproot – but from the outside, you feel strangely protective of this little group of outcasts. Like it or not, anyone who has ever at any point been a faggot or a dyke or a tranny has been there. We can find ourselves respectable jobs, or move from Ridgewood to Park Slope, but at the end of the day, we are one ignored hatecrime or supreme court legislation or inter-community cancellation away from destitution and personal ruin.

If Castration Movie Anthology II is principally about the ways in which communities of way-too-online trans women in large metropolitan areas hurt each other in their syncopated stumbles towards stability, the blame here is not placed entirely on their moral consciences, but also on the world itself. The ending is almost a little too on the nose. After vomiting back up the pink pill, cutting their hair, and taking an Uptown train with their new girlfriend Keller in a final frame reminiscent of The Graduate, Alex Walton plays a whiny Jeff Magnum Live at Jittery Joe’s rendition of The Carter Family’s “Can the Circle Be Unbroken.” Everyone except Devon slowly leaves the filthy basement, people go back to their half-baked half-lives, and the only real hope of perfect and harmless intimacy between these scared, manipulative, marginalized souls is in Heaven. It would be crazy for me to respond to a 300 minute camcorder movie where beautiful women piss into men’s hands on the street and people do lines of ketamine off each other’s Estradiol tits with a Bible verse, but my head goes to one of my favorite lines from 1 Corinthians 13:12 – “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

If the price of community is pain, and the consequences of a bunch of angry teenage boys going on grey market hormones and mostly turning into maladjusted girls a couple inches too tall is a plethora of new and inventive ways to tell each other to off ourselves online, moments in which these people are able to honestly feel something meaningful together feel like flashes of fools gold in a deadpan filled to the brim with shit. I don’t really think this movie has much to say about my life in particular, and a lot of its material references feel as hamfisted and gauche as a John 50 in Paul’s Dolls. That said, I think Castration Movie Anthology II is a successful film inasmuch as it chronicles a series of affecting failures at gender and intimacy in such a specific countercultural register as to cast a broader light on the monoculture at large. This isn’t what the girls have to do for each other, but it does give us some hints on what we as an implicated and interconnected queer public could be doing for the girls.

The entire Castration Movie Anthology as it is completed is available to download as a pay what you will offering on Gumroad.

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

In the 18th century, tuberculosis was as common as it was deadly. As if to cope with its omnipresence, society had coded a very specific image of who it afflicts and why. The disease could be contracted anywhere yes, but was mainly transmitted by those living in close contact within large urban centers. As a consequence, the disease became a sort of bohemian fashion statement — it was delusionally reported to favor frail, noble, and creative intellectuals. Ironically dubbed ‘the poet’s disease’ — its symptoms: pale skin, feverish constitution, and sickly thinness, were commonly aestheticized. You see it brazenly in portraiture from the era. The common understanding was a sort of transactional logic, in which brilliant minds were uniquely stricken with the disease, physically declining slowly and beautifully in exchange for an increase in artistic ability and emotional sensitivity. The remnants of this class-based logic are alive and well in our cultural understanding of Anorexia Nervosa, a condition as equally symptomatic of the contradictory logic of modern society and its excess. A frequently beloved subject by artists, many works manipulate the mental illness’ preciousness to bolster its autofictional intrigue, obscuring the pathetic and destructive logic played out within the anorexic-creative’s own life. It sometimes feels embarrassing to admit I used to have trouble feeding myself. But then again, it also feels a little embarrassing to admit I think the best work of art about disordered eating is an amateur student biopic of Karen Carpenter’s tragic and untimely death ripped in 240p from a contraband VHS and shot almost entirely with Barbie Dolls. Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story was made while the now-lauded director was a student at Bard College, and received swift and unanimous cease-and-desist orders from Karen Carpenter’s brother and musical collaborator, Richard Carpenter. It’s not hard to understand why. The film is kitschy, pessimistic, and quick to point fingers at Karen’s entire family for worsening and refusing to acknowledge her growing bouts of Anorexia. The film often goes so far as to claim her family, her label, and the pressures of nascent fame were responsible for her death, as she had been hiding chronic use of ipecac syrup to induce vomiting and keep her weight down in a manner she could conceal from her loved ones. I’m not interested in a historical investigation of her case, and I don’t really think Superstar is either. Haynes is clearly more interested in the conscious and unauthorized manipulation of her legacy into a larger portrait of women’s material and societal conditions at the height of the sexual revolution. The film’s structure itself takes the clinical and ironic tone of a public service announcement. It reads like something you’re exposed to as a child in health class, which carries with it similar affective qualities of ham-fisted nostalgia, trauma, and home video technology. Haynes spells it out with a voice half-ironic and half-sincere. Interspersed throughout the video montages, sharply interrupting narrative scenes are long title cards, one reading “As we investigate the story of Karen Carpenter’s life and death we are presented with an extremely graphic picture of the internal experience of contemporary femininity.”

There is a sense throughout the entire film that Haynes finds a vast and unfathomable emptiness at the bottom of contemporary womanhood and its miasmic fatalism. It is as if, unveiling the body of a murder victim to be autopsied, below the skin exists a large black void, refracting no light and slowing all attempts at pathologization into inertia. This is what I think Haynes gets right about eating disorders. Many notorious books, most notable among them is Rudolph Bell’s “Holy Anorexia”, have correctly categorized modern-day anorexia nervosa as a unique socio-cultural phenomenon enabled by overabundance and abetted by a self-sustaining mythos of self-neglect as cleansing piety. What bothers me, as a recovered anorexic myself, is how Bell and other male authors themselves sustain and validate by association this sparkly veneer to disordered eating. There is the sense, both in his reading of ancient mystics like Saint Catherine of Siena, and in his diagnosis of contemporaneous teenage girls, that disordered eating habits succeed in their attempt at manufacturing agency over one’s own body in a system built to profoundly distance women from themselves. This is a dangerous conceit, and one that afflicts even the most sympathetic of artists portraying the condition. Even Superstar takes its time to pay homage to the sort of perceived control anorexics exercise over themselves, one that reifies the logic of disordered eating patterns somehow successfully allowing women to momentarily escape the control-matrix of misogyny and meaningfully self-determine the nature of their bodies. One of my most clear memories from residential treatment was how childishly helpless I felt, and how deeply out of control myself and the women around me were of our own lives. Despite its own rhetorical pitfalls, Haynes’ Superstar is one of the only works of art I’ve encountered that clearly exposes the hollow and utterly worthless core of anorexia, not something that asserts, or says, or does, anything at all — but a simple and cosmically dangerous dissociative emptiness.

The film, entirely soundtracked by the Carpenters’ recognizable hits, opens with the only live action sequence: Karen’s mother discovering her body, overdosed on emetics and laxatives, limp and lifeless in her closet. It’s horrifying, and is immediately set against their best song — the aching and sparkling (They Long To Be) Close To You — a central motif in the film. This song, praising a lover for their beauty, and aching for intimacy, sets the tone of the entire film: somehow perfectly sincere and utterly fatalistic. We reach towards the core of Karen’s being longingly, wanting to be close to her, wanting to understand — yet all we are met with is suburban sprawl laid out on videotape, lifeless dolls, and empty platitudes. What Superstar does so well is pit the clean-cut, all-American sheen of the Carpenters’ public image against the horrifying internal reality of Karen’s tailspin into suicide and abjection. Indeed, it was the death of Karen Carpenter as a celebrity that quite literally invented the concept of modern Anorexia. It was the tipping point that brought the disease into public existence — from a set of varying female behaviors to a clinical pathology. The film’s narrative is straightforward. The Carpenters are discovered, signed into an exploitative record deal, and skyrocketed into fame. Karen takes up a number of dieting plans to maintain her public image, and becomes addicted to abusing laxatives and restricting food intake. At first her family doesn’t notice, then slowly first her brother, then her mother, catches on. The family’s immediate reaction is to belittle her, attempting to force feed her against her will, and responding with critical doubt when Karen makes one last attempt to relocate to a novel treatment center in New York to recover. It’s a scary and familiar process to pretty much anyone who has grown up as a young woman in middle class America. The details don’t need to be exactly the same, because the repressive, appearances-focused tension of the suburban environment, and the impossible prison of finding the language and resources to assert treatment against the egos, consciences, and infighting of a tight-knit family is always there. These dramatic dialogue scenes are interspersed with TV static and television clips. Most interestingly, there are glimpses of Vietnam War coverage laced into these montages. As if to echo Karen’s internal dissociation with the broader national derealization of the late 60s and early 70s in the face of brutal images of state violence, these images also cite commonly raised objections and disruptions to eating disorders as a “first world problem,” or a symptom of the global north’s abject excess on the back of exploitation. The Carpenters’ music as soundtrack to this moment in world history is particularly compelling, as a sort of grasp towards the idealism of the 50s in an era in which all notions of progress and betterment of the human condition are soiled with cash and blood. Haynes’ work seems to grapple with this, and frequently includes references to the Carpenter duo as “nostalgic,” “safe,” or “clean-cut,” in implicit and dismissive reference to the contemporary zeitgeist.

Indeed Anorexia Nervosa is itself symptomatic of this neurotic idealism. It symbolically represents an obsession with self-image, an authoritarian impulse that rests on the supposed victimhood of femininity, and paints the subject as both pretty, innocent victim, and harsh executioner. Haynes clearly displays a title card that reads: “Anorexia can thus be seen as an addiction and abuse of self-control, a fascism over the body in which the sufferer plays the parts of both dictator and the emaciated victim who she so often resembles.” Haynes is referring here in a psychoanalytic sense to a sort of erotic play. In what would begin a larger trend for him, there are odd scenes interspersed throughout the montage sequences of barbie dolls spanking each other. I would refute any labeling of this movie as a ‘queer text,’ despite Haynes’ own identity and the nature of most of his other work. That said, this interruption does seem to destabilize the boundaries of normative femininity, and echoes the alienating sexual consequences of anorexia, one in which over-enthusiastically violent performance of femininity replaces interpersonal sexual intimacy with autoerotic harm. A politics of aestheticized violence, in which pain is regarded as pleasurable and pleasure is regarded as inherently corrupting and ugly. The concept of ugliness is important to this movie. In a more straightforward sense, Haynes works through Barbie dolls because they are totems of idealized feminine beauty. What’s even more powerful, however, is how terrifying and how grotesque they are made to look herein. Much of this can be boiled down to the fact that there is no one clear restoration of the film, and because of the sheer amount of lawsuits raised against its contents, has had to remain circulated in awful quality formats via Youtube and VHS. That said, as the film progresses and Karen’s eating disorder worsens, Haynes literally shaves away at her doll itself to create an emaciated and hollow appearance. This use of dolls as interpersonal surrogates directly recalls the work of transexual artist Greer Lankton, whose entire life revolved around the constant compulsive creation of life size fabric dolls reenacting and deconstructing her own transition, eating disorder, and other abjected negotiations of the body.

Lankton’s work gained notoriety for capturing the brutal physicality of the human body, and often portrayed popular figures of the New York art scene in surreal and objectifying scenarios. Lankton’s work is practically synonymous with her longstanding anorexia, and the desire to sculpt the dolls that built her art career was simply an extension of her larger desire to shape and form her own body. Like Karen, Greer fell headfirst into the sort of consuming emptiness that readily withers away at not only your mortal life, but your eternal soul. For both women, food and its absence was merely a medium by which you could touch, feel, and embody something bigger than oneself. It wasn’t until their deaths, however, that people began to see the contours of this larger self-effacing suicide monument. It is a terrifying, ungodly sort of thing that can only be glimpsed in fleeting glances between funerals for young girls and inside residential treatment centers.

In one of the more heartbreaking scenes, we see her family rejoice after a spell in treatment has seemingly cured her. The title card reveals that for most Anorexic women, recovery is quantified by the restoration of “normal sex functions” — and to this end women are often force-fed until they reach a stable enough weight to restore the regular menstrual cycle. Obviously, the real core problem is never addressed, but worse, the problem itself is quantified by a woman’s capacity to menstruate — that is to say to ensure her fertility. Utterly and grossly patriarchal, the film itself exposes a discursive environment in which the consequences of women hurting themselves are measured in men’s tears and a hypothetical nuclear family’s future existence. To destroy the body, then, is to attempt fruitlessly to remove oneself from this matrix of desirability, and often to distance oneself from the sexed body entirely. The late-stage anorexic, as the film glibly tries to remind us, only looks good in their mind. In reality, the inherent desire to be thin has gone from a socially validated practice into a masochism that ostracizes. The desire itself doesn’t change, however, the world does. To be anorexic is often to think oneself the winner of a game most people, supposedly healthy or not, are subconsciously all playing.

From Barbara Kruger’s 1987 review of the film, the feminist avant-garde has always been interested in Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Whether or not this movie is, itself feminist, I think can easily be called into question. Clearly the profound degree to which it sympathizes with Karen, and sees her as the victim of extenuating circumstances does portray her story in a light more sympathetic to the material conditions of women than most accounts of the story. That said, I want to question whether the idea of a movie about anorexia could ever be considered feminist in and of itself. Anorexia is not inherently a gendered condition, but what killed Karen Carpenter — the media spectacle of Anorexia Nervosa — certainly is a state of being fabricated on the exploitation and ritual debasement of women. It is as if a navel-gazing death cult were founded on the holy texts of a large nation’s religion, and that cult was itself so magnified and objectified that its ideals become biohazards across time and space. The ideas which lead themselves in their seemingly logical conclusions to the anorexic mindset are only diagnosed and treated as a disorder when they create symptoms that make women undesirable, unattractive. A woman’s desire to lose weight and be thin is as common as it is usually considered healthy and reasonable. It becomes a disorder when it becomes too important to a woman’s life, when she becomes too devoted to something as seemingly benign as dieting. To Karen’s family and fans, it is not that her desire to lose weight was inherently wrong, but that she became too addicted to the inherently destructive and punitive methods that all women are expected to employ against themselves in the service of patriarchy, and even the nation itself.

In her excellent review of the film, Kruger writes:

Shots of spankings, broken glass, toilet bowls, and piles of food melt into one another and repeatedly coalesce into a simple but glowing red, white, and blue graphic image of an object. No, it is not the American flag around which the film’s narrativity congregates, but a logo of a different order — a product that, like the nation’s emblematic banner, has the ability to delineate the looks, sounds, and purges of young women like Karen Carpenter: a luminously omnipresent box of Ex-Lax. It is perhaps this small film’s triumph that it can so economically sketch, with both laughter and chilling acuity, the conflation of patriotism, familial control, and bodily self-revulsion that drove Karen Carpenter and so many like her to strive for perfection and end up simply doing away with themselves.

A good portion of the film’s terse dialogue is just people calling her name. “Karen? We have to leave in five minutes. Karen? Where did you go? Karen? If you keep this up you’ll ruin both our careers.” An endless chorus demanding an explanation; an assertion of any real personhood or identity at the core of the name and brand Karen Carpenter. As the movie goes on, as the dirty shiny slick material of the screen becomes louder and louder, as the disordered eating and purging cycle becomes more and more of her whole entire life, these voices are answered only with silence. A short line near the end of the film has Karen confiding in a friend: “I know I’m sick. I guess I’m starting to realize that it isn’t something good.”

The latter half of the film’s runtime chronicles feeble attempts at healing: she attempts to reach out to friends, to family, to professionals. We know how they end. The film ends on a seemingly optimistic note, as her family celebrates her supposed recovery, but the film’s opening scene, the discovery of her body, pathetic and lifeless, in a clothes closet, casts these moments in a grim sort of resigned tone. The film ends with its centerpiece song. As shots of suburban sprawl play out on the screen, (They Long To Be) Close To You plays out. If there is a moral center to this narrative, it’s this song. We do long to be close to her, to know and internally rationalize this kind of struggle, the pure and raw drive towards death and total self-annihilation that fuels her condition and arrives as a consequence of womanhood itself. This is the bottom of the well, this is the logical conclusion of a half-baked worldview impressed upon half the world’s population as mere children. Modern-day Anorexia Nervosa is not a failure of modern society, it is a symptom. The core of the Carpenter story is hollow, emptied out by a self-serving death drive towards ideals of discipline and control. The raw sentimentalism of this film’s doomed ending suggests that what scarce scraps of meaning exist in the self-destruction of millions of women can be salvaged by circling the boundaries of this mass absence with a fine-tooth comb. Not so much to recover something that has been lost to time forever, but simply to be close to the gaping set of holes it’s left in every individual family, community, and the world at large.

Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story is available to watch on Youtube, and has yet to receive an authorized restoration.

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

I’ve never lost sense of the dramatic irony of posting this somewhat auspicious tweet in 2022, nearly four years ago. I used to be active on Twitter, before it became awful, and at that point I was mostly posting about niche fragrance, ironically self-identifying as a Jewish American Princess despite only ancestrally being from Long Island and having grown up Reform Jewish in the Bible Belt. I remember this tweet being used as a rhetorical gotcha by some of my friends in the replies of people on, hosting, or adjacent to the podcast Red Scare, and at the time I found those moments really funny despite knowing almost nothing about Christianity. It was of course, an almost omnisciently prophetic dig, and still remains true despite most semblance of performative Catholicism’s cool-girl mystique having trickled down from subculture into the mainstream, and having joined fully with a much larger current of young people converting to traditionalist denominations of Christianity seemingly in search of a greater personal vocation and communities unanimously imbued with conservative politics. That said, a good portion of my internet presence now revolves around being a catholic Christian convert, and I’ve now had people preemptively attempt to use my own tweet against me, given that with your eyes squinted a lot of what I post these days could be lumped in with the digital consequences of the very trend cycle I once ridiculed. I get it - God’s timing is weird. I gave this article a kind of stupid clickbait title precisely because I want to address this to people on the outside of the greater Church body and even outside of mainstream religion entirely. To be frank, I understand why a lot of what I post these days probably seems weird, and why it might leave a bad taste in your mouth. Most days I wear a gold cross necklace my sponsor gave to me at my baptism, and watching United States press conferences, I feel sick to my stomach watching Karoline Leavitt, a self-professed cradle Catholic, wear a similar necklace while viscously lobbing ad-hominem attacks in defense of what could genuinely be called a Biblical cabal of evil. A lot of young people shy away from taking on this sort of worldview, identifying the devil in irksome personal habits. It’s easy for men to be Christian when sin is about trying to not jerk off, and it’s easier for women to be Christian when the devil lives in showing shoulders and the condom isle at CVS. Put simply, I don’t think God gives a shit about those things when today The IDF bombed a girl’s school in Southern Iran, killing hundreds.

I shy away from saying this outright to a lot of my atheist friends, but I know in my heart that Hell is real, and that sin exists and ought to be confessed in both private reconciliation and public admissions during worship. When I was a catechumen in the Russian Orthodox church, I was taught that sin is the conscious turning away from God’s will, and the harm in sin is not an inherent power to specific actions, but rather the situational tendency of mankind to stubbornly turn itself away from God’s infinite and unconditional love and mercy. Needless to say, I’ve read the Church fathers, and Gregory of Nyssa’s pseudo-universalism is where I derive my soteriology. As a devout Anglican, I am quite easily able to reconcile a belief in Hell with a believe in God’s eternal love. This dichotomy, one butchered by uptight Presbyterians and backwoods Evangelicals alike, is one of the most misunderstood doctrines of the Christian faith. I would argue that most of the trauma imparted by the institutional church in the Western World – from Colonization to indoctrination – stems from individual Christians’ incorrect understanding of Hell as a separate place somehow apart from God. Amidst giant HELL IS REAL billboards looming over Midwest Interstate 71, St. Isaac the Syrian’s voice rings clear as the waters of Baptism, writing:

I also maintain that those who are punished in Gehenna (eternal Hell) are scourged by the scourge of love. For what is so bitter and vehement as the punishment of love? I mean that those who have become conscious that they have sinned against love suffer greater torment from this than from any fear of punishment. For the sorrow caused in the heart by sin against love is sharper than any torment that can be. It would be improper for a man to think that sinners in Gehenna are deprived of the love of God. Love is the offspring of knowledge of the truth which, as is commonly confessed, is given to all. The power of love works in two ways: it torments those who have played the fool, even as happens here when a friend suffers from a friend; but it becomes a source of joy for those who have observed its duties. Thus I say that this is the torment of Gehenna: bitter regret. But love inebriates the souls of the sons of Heaven by its delectability. (Homily 72.)

Hell is like a teenager, sad and confused, slamming the door in their mom’s face. Sulking in their poster-plastered room we sob, slitting our wrists, popping benzos, posting implicating expletives on LiveJournal, and doing everything in our power to hurt the person who loves us most. Protestant poet laureate John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats sings in Cry for Judas - “Sad and angry, don’t know how to behave. Still won’t know how, in the darkness of the grave.” If this line of thinking makes me a woke liberal Protestant, call me Martin fucking Luther. Yes sin primarily exists in personal decisions, but its face is most clearly visible in societal prejudice and institutional violence. A lot of Orthodox believers I talk to wince at statements like that, but my own church brethren in Mainline Protestant denominations like the Episcopal Church and the ELCA often espouse this idea more passionately than they even espouse the divinity of Jesus Christ. Needless to say, I believe the The Nicene Creed verbatim, and the simple answer as to why I converted to Christianity is that through a number of mystical and interpersonal experiences, I came to believe that a man born thousands of years ago in Bethlehem was truly the Son of God. This isn’t enough for most people, and it’s certainly not enough to differentiate my testimony of faith from millions of people who confess the same faith in clean brick buildings and send immigrants to die like livestock in concentration camps next-door. Needless to say, the punchline here is that the internet didn’t make Catholic, because I’m an Episcopalian. I know this confuses many people, because I adore the smells and bells of High Church Protestantism, and am an enthusiastic altar server in my very Anglo-Catholic parish. That said, as a woman, in many traditional Catholic churches I wouldn’t even be allowed to join the altar guild, much less to serve alongside female priests and deacons. This is in essence the reason why it’s easier for me to stay in the church most commonly associated with John Green and WASPy performative liberals than it is for me to lie about my sexuality to priests who can’t tell because I wear maxi skirts and Mary Janes in the service of joining the self-described One Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. Anglicanism, as one of the first historically Protestant churches, has never asserted itself as the one true form of Christianity. As the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey once beautifully articulated, the Anglican communion “is not sent to commend itself as ‘the best type of Christianity,’ but by its very brokenness to point to the universal Church wherein all have died.” This is the church I confess membership to. This is the Creedal Church, and this is the body of believers within which it’s alarmingly difficult to find many modern-day Christian converts obsessed with the ipso-facto nature of authority. Internet Christians who prioritize soaring aesthetics over inward experience infuriate me not because they’re joining the right saving faith for the wrong reasons, but because they frequently pray hollow prayers in gorgeously designed Gothic cathedrals. The whole amount of performative Catholicism and young people fetishizing conservative Christian traditions without a sincere and godly desire to do good works amounts to a delicately embellished pen-and-quill hand-written letter that says absolutely nothing. In my own spiritual development, I have found it infinitely more Godly, more Christ-like no matter your denomination or religious tradition, to follow the path of humility: practicing true and honest faith in rehabbed cafeteria buildings found in strip malls and bland tiny wooden church-halls. If those in gilded bishop’s cathedra and ergonomic desktop computer chairs revile you, know they hated Him first.

The worst thing about internet Catholicism is it’s a complete and utter misnomer. It became abundantly obvious to me during the COVID pandemic that the Christian religion rarely happens online. Religion may be discussed on the internet, but every single connection to divinity I’ve ever felt in my life has been away from keyboards and screens. Either in a Church, a Mosque, a Shrine, a Gurdwara, or in a field of wildflowers off the side of the road. It’s a very evangelical Protestant sort of mindset to believe - as many Americans do - that religion can be done alone. From my Jewish ancestry to my lower-case c four marks catholic beliefs, religion has always been a set of actions done as communal prayer. The Eucharistic liturgy is not just one aspect of my faith, it is the source from which it flows. It is from this jointly piloted prayer that I enter into unseen fellowship with everyone – people I disagree with, people who hate me, and people who defile God’s name with every waking breath. Ultimately, behind all my judgement of other’s assumed faith is the reality of my own hopeless death in sin. Maybe ultimately, through Purgation, everyone will be reconciled to God. Maybe Pope Francis was right to hope Hell might be empty – but in the meantime I live my own Christian faith in big buildings full of tradcath converts, cradle Catholic atheists, practicing homosexuals, amateur heterosexuals, soldiers, tired night nurses, alt-right extremists, crunchy anarchists, racist podcasters, raw milk homesteaders, sheltered Episcopalian grandmothers, niche internet micro-celebrities, multi-millionaires, homeless people, bible thumping Baptist preachers, and babies who have no idea where they are. At a certain point, it just matters if your prayers are sincere. And from one lost human desperately trying to find in-dwelt meaning in the world around myself to another, let’s just say it’s easy to tell when they aren’t.

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is mostly a perfume blog entirely by Audrey Robinovitz.

Audrey Robinovitz (@foldyrhands) is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

Moreover, as big business slowly but surely starts to move its attention and its money onto mercurial gestation-sites for culture like the internet, these communities, which once just felt like a disparate satellite network of friend groups and solo-investigators now hold lasting consequences on the lives and pockets of people who are entirely unplugged. I sounded the alarm cautiously on Fragrantica two years ago, which now seems to have somewhat spurned a principled boycott as the moderators of that website spiraled even more explicitly into paranoid fascism. I don’t think Fragrantica exists in a vacuum, however - and the sheer fact that fragrance collecting is an expensive hobby, and that money has to come from somewhere, means political conservatism is a common feature to this pastime, not a bug. This general sentiment, that the perfume boom is starting to feel bloated and overdone, has been echoed before, notably by Cat Zhang in an article I quite enjoyed on The Cut. It was weird to see her getting impulsive hate comments from people about this, because I think the things she brought up were entirely reasonable critiques of overconsumption and exploitative marketing. In fact, I actually intend to take some of her points further than she did. The global fragrances and perfumes market grew from 33.85 billion USD in 2025 to 36.24 billion USD in 2026. This year alone, billions of dollars have accelerated this industry into beauty’s most promising investment. I think it’s senseless for me to try and argue to you that collecting perfume is somehow a politically progressive hobby, but its also senseless to pretend as if it isn’t a practice laden with needless overconsumption, and a community that often thinks itself to be somehow ‘above’ politics, when in fact it is sustained on the backs of some of the most profitable industries. Perfume doesn’t really do anything inherently utilitarian, but rather becomes worth a lot of money because it is something people who are making that money elsewhere want to spend it on. It is the definitive commodity, it is textbook Marx. He writes in Capital, that “the mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use value.” But rather, the substance of the commodity is attached to the completed product ipso facto. Marx uses the language of religious devotion to describe how the manufactured fetish convinces us as consumers that it has inherent value, and I think this degree of adoration is apt.

I would be remiss to not reference Benjamin as well. I really enjoyed this video by fashion/culture theorist Ash Callaghan, in which she references Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura in relation to the unique effect luxury fragrance has on prospective customers in a specific cultural moment. For those not initiated, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction was itself a piece of cultural criticism that straddled the intrinsic value and affect of a physical work of art with the 20th Century’s development of intricate modern technology that could now for the first time serve to proliferate and reproduce works of art which for most of human history imparted a certain mysticism simply by our base assumption of them being uniquely made, once and for all, by human hands. To be honest, I don’t think there is a one-to-one translation of Benjamin’s conception of aura into the inherently and transparently manufactured product of fragrance, but the framework is undoubtedly useful in understanding why people come to value bottles of fragrance. In art criticism, a specific work’s aura was the sum total of the place, interpersonal context, and prestige in which a work was displayed and consumed. It’s something we now intuitively understand has diminished the intrinsic authority of the image. Most every person in the entire world has now seen an image of the Sistine Chapel on a computer or their phone before they have seen it in real life, if they are even so lucky to be able to visit Vatican City. The aura of this masterpiece would have been indescribably palpable to a 16th Century pilgrim who had never encountered this image before entering the gates of The Apostolic Palace for the first time, in a way now definitively and inescapably eliminated from modern life. Perfume is different, because from the beginning it was always made en masse. In the 20th and 21st Centuries the assumption is that the bottle of perfume you are buying is simply one of many – and yet, it too exists at a precise moment in time and in a specific setting. It’s strange to admit, but the value of perfume is not derived simply from the scarcity of its ingredients, but from the stylized setting and excitement within which it is presented. It’s contradictory, but perfectly Marxian. Expensive perfume costs so much because well, it is expensive. Its value is an Emperor’s New Clothes scenario in which funds from its sale are reciprocally used to gild its environment and accelerate its perceived desirability. I’m often stumped by random clients who wander into my impeccably decorated workplace and upon learning we charge $250+ for a bottle of perfume, ask what makes it so expensive. As a sales associate doing my job, I can’t tell them the truth, which is that luxury houses are only able to charge this much for fragrance because the public has inadvertently proven that to acquire a piece of this prestige aura and outwardly signal their own taste, they will pay this much for fragrance.

There’s another factor at play here, that Callaghan also cursorily touches on, which is uniqueness. Such a tricky and duplicitous word. Everyone wants to smell unique, but in reality, very few people actually have unique taste in fragrance. Whether the public likes it or not, fresh woods, vanilla, and clean florals will win over people’s serotonin receptors in nine out of ten cases. The real campaign to national fragrance businesses then becomes not making altogether strange and inventive fragrances, but pushing the boundaries as infinitesimally little as possible to create the perception of experimentation, while still firmly residing in the wheelhouse of that which is empirically proven to sell. Enter supposedly ‘irreverent’ houses with minimal white labels and amorphous bottles like Margiela, Le Labo, and Byredo – and on an even smaller scale, a number of independent niche perfumers who I decline to name here out of politeness. I worry that the internet has accelerated hyper-consumption of weird perfume into a tightly bounded aesthetic in and of itself, and that true olfactory experimentation has become a marketing Trojan Horse by which larger beauty companies can wrangle younger consumers into accessorizing their identity by buying the same set of novel fragrance types. I’m sorry if this seems curmudgeonly to say, but I fear that owning a giant collection of perfume from niche brands (often themselves owned by larger beauty conglomerates) has become the very hollow-chic trend cycle symptom it once sought to destroy. There are of course exceptions to the rule, but from my own position as someone who, not to lean to heavily on my own laurels, was one small part of the reason why alternative fragrance took off online, I sometimes feel as if the past free promotion I’ve done for Estée Lauder et al. is an albatross hung from my neck. If I could do it all again, I would focus exclusively on building community around the work of small businesses and independent fragrance auteurs. I’m not even sure if that would have itself staved off the rise of individuality and eccentricism as its own secret profit-generating and conformist trend cycle. It’s just so strange to see so many sweet and well-meaning people ‘getting into perfume’ via pouring thousands (and I do mean thousands upon thousands) of dollars into collecting the same ten overpriced releases from the same ten brands. When I see perfume influencers online with shelves of every single Louis Vuitton Les Parfums $350 USD 100ml bottle lined up in a color-coordinated row, I genuinely get a little scared. Even at my most financially irresponsible, I bought bottles of fragrance for over $100 probably two times a year. The fact that my perfume collection is itself something that takes up multiple shelves in my own room is mostly because of generous press gifts, perfume swaps between friends, and resale markets. Perfume itself only lasts for five or so years when bottles are stored in room-temp conditions. I know I’m not the only person who owns too much perfume to feasibly use every last drop of it before it expires. It’s really easy to do, but something that itself feels kind of shameful. I don’t want to finger wag at people spending their money on things that make them happy, and honestly if I made more money I probably would be spending more of it on collecting fragrances, but I think its important to be conscious consumers, and to guard ourselves from falling into fantasies of hype or exclusivity. Some of the most impactful experiences I’ve had with perfume were from smelling things I didn’t own. Some of my favorite fragrances are scents I’ve smelled once as a sample, and didn’t buy. I have a couple signatures as full bottles, and when they run out I’ll likely buy them again. If the niche perfume market is going to matriculate in a way that actually keeps the wellbeing of its constituents in mind, it will be through use of heavy sampling. In lieu of the actual technology to replicate fleeting scent through a computer or phone, the sample size decant seems to be the great equalizer between classes. Yet embarrassedly what often gets me to upgrade from sample to full bottle is not necessarily the immediate want of more juice, but the aura of having the complete bottle itself. Even now, I’m not immune to this effect, and I hardly mean to position myself as somehow more enlightened than other collectors or critics. What I am, however, is also someone who sells thousands of dollars worth of niche perfume a week for a living, so I feel extremely qualified to comment not just on my own purchasing habits, but those of the general public. I promise, your relationship to fragrance collecting will change drastically when you think about buying full bottles of luxury perfume the same way you think about curating a versatile capsule wardrobe. It’s not about the thrill of the chase, it’s about the fun of exploration.

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

There is no definitive account of how Mitsouko, one of the most successful perfumes of all time, yet just one of many feathers in Jacques Guerlain’s ornamental hat came to bear the name of an anonymous Japanese woman. The most commonly repeated account borrows from Claude Farrère’s 1909 novel “La Bataille.” In it, an officer in the Russian Imperial Navy romances a noblewoman betrothed to the Marquis Yorisaka, a Japanese commander. Set against currents of tradition and duty rustling through Japan’s westernization during the Meiji period, it is essentially a romance of contrast - Mitsouko awaits the return of both her European and Japanese suitors from war, fighting each other fervently on the high seas and in the bedroom. This is a very apt source to create a fragrance that would itself serve to magnify the soft political influence of France on the entire world by becoming one of the world’s first truly global scent trends. Mitsouko was worn on the wrists and decolletage of historic film stars like Jean Harlow, Ava Gardner, and Ingrid Bergman, along with cultural icons such as Charlie Chaplin, Anaïs Nin, and Sergei Diaghilev. In a sense, Mitsouko was an indelible part of France overtaking Italy and Germany to become the most renowned manufacturer of fine fragrance. We take for granted today that slapping Paris on a fragrance brand adds credibility and intrigue, but this effect is in no small part an effect of just how successful Mitsouko had become. I claim this not just because of its conceptual virality, but because of its scent. Mitsouko was objectively one of the first Chypre perfumes on the market. Derived from François Coty’s perfume Chypre (trans. of Cyprus) its name was originally nothing more than a signal of its exoticism. Touting ingredients from Middle Eastern countries like Cyprus, Morocco, or Palestine, it was marketed to Europeans in an age in which global travel was considerably more difficult and the idea of perfume was in and of itself a tool to signify worldliness and social standing. It is as if a new perfume type came into existence on the rural street markets of Thailand called “American” - and women wore it to make others wonder if she had gotten it on her most recent fabulous vacation to the land of the free. Obviously there are different dynamics of colonial power at play here, but the principle is just as ham-fisted under examination. I want to be clear here, Mitsouko was not just a phenomenon based on the financial subtexts of orientalism, but the erotic ones. It’s all-too-common now to see shirtless abusers like Johnny Depp advertise Dior Sauvage, but to my knowledge this was the first advertisement campaign of its kind to be so brazenly sensual. The images are gorgeous, yet politically and racially fraught. Women with long black hair and Anna May Wong makeup fade into darkness with long tresses entangling the bottle. Another more enigmatic advertisement portrays a vague silhouette of a woman with the bold question “are you her type?'“ Here fragrance is not styled as something made to fit itself to you. Mitsouko has such a defined brand image and olfactory identity that you must hope you can fit yourself to it. This was high glamour, but built on the legacy of exporting (extorting) fragrant resources from territories dominated and pillaged by interventionism and empire-making. What fascinates me about Mitsouko, however, is how widely this image spread, and what different things it came to mean to different people. I’ve written about this phenomenon multiple times before on this blog, that exoticism sells luxury not just in the west, but in the east. Mitsouko initially meant the mystery of Asia to people in 20th century France, but later on in 20th century Asia, it also came to symbolize the mystery of France, and the trappings of Parisian glamour. It’s a recursive cycle of cultural exchange, drawn irreverently across power dynamics and trade routes. The story of Chypre is the story of beauty itself, resting delicately on the boundary of violence and sensuality.

What this perfume smells like, is also of course extremely important to me. It was not only one of the first Chypres, but in my opinion is still one of the best. A heavy oakmoss base is the Chypre’s signature, and Mitsuoko’s is earthen and brooding. Its contemporary references, like Marissa Zappas’ “MAGGIE THE CAT IS ALIVE, I’M ALIVE!,” or Le Labo’s grossly overpriced Mousse de Chene 30 City Exclusive still hum with the same sophisticated vivacity. I think to modern noses, patchouli has replaced oakmoss as the base-du-jour; but as evidenced in vintage-inspired Chypre fragrances that utilize the hippie-herb like Eau Capitale, they accomplish similar things. What defines Mitsouko in contrast to other fragrances of its day is an injection of fruity peach. I would go so far as to say it is a downright sexual peach, one that interrupts spicy and clean notes with succulent, dripping nectar. This might not seem like much to a generation trained on Juicy Couture, but you have to understand this was quite literally the first perfume ever to utilize a fruity note. Can you conceive of what smelling a woman wearing a somewhat fruity perfume for the first time used to do to the collective erotic imaginations of men? I would liken this to the psychosexual invention of the wheel; Prometheus bringing fire to mankind’s loins. When I wear Mitsouko to bed, as I do most nights this winter, I fall asleep envisioning smelling like the baddest bitch alive in the time of Judy Garland’s Trolley Song.

The bones of any Chypre are essentially a bergamot opening, modified with any number of floral or fruit forward hearts, and a base of oakmoss or anything leafy and earthen. You can, as previously illustrated, play with this structure a great deal, but much like a symphony, the more you change around, the more you risk compromising the unique and characteristic effect it creates. When people say something “smells like perfume” - before the last 40-some years they usually meant it smelled like a Chypre. Now of course, they might mean a number of other ultra-common ‘types’ with less real defined history - usually musky florals, peppery ambrette, or dry acerbic sandalwood. The concept, however, is the same. A few landmark fragrances reach critical mass of ubiquitous popularity, and copies stop being “dupes” and start becoming interpretations. The second most notable iteration of this process was Fougère Royale by Houbigant, a leafy and herbal concoction that became so popular with men it typified an entire genre of scents we now say simply smell “colonge-y”, notably influencing Guerlain’s equally historic androgyne men’s fragrance Jicky. Both historical processes rely not only on the highly appealing smells of luxury fragrances themselves, but also on viral word-of-mouth marketing, creating the luxury effect simply by winning the hearts and noses of the western world’s elite.

What strikes me about Mitsouko’s marketing in historical context is the great degree of storytelling involved in building a world for this product to live within. They would repeat this formula with Shalimar in 1925 to incredible effect. It was not just about signaling to customers that this fragrance used exotic ingredients, but that it itself was an exotic artifact from a distant land. I see this in Shalimar too, inspired by the legend of Emperor Shah Jahan and his beloved Mumtaz Mahal – it quite literally rests on the laurels of one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Taj Mahal. This idea even, that the world’s sights can be cataloged and displayed to delight the imaginations of wealthy bohemian travelers is one of the foundational fantasies of orientalism. I don’t mean to suggest that the entire enterprise of ‘world travel’ is inherently founded on colonialism, but let’s be honest, the practice of summering in Turks and Caicos or spending the winter season in the Himalayas is both a class signifier many can only hope to reach, and something that objectively wouldn’t be possible on such a large scale without colonial intervention into distant autonomous territories. There’s a indominable beauty here, sure, but I would go so far as to say Mitsouko and its ilk are precious to me not because of their Japanese-ness or their Indian-ness, but because of their French character displayed and contrasted against the backdrop of foreign lands.

I personally can’t stand this movie, but is Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation even supposed to be a movie about Japan? I would say it’s definitively about Americans, who are only able to take stock of their own cultural wasteland and personal crises when they’re laid bare against an altogether foreign and nauseatingly distant setting. This is a really common trope, and one I think has existed for centuries - especially in wake of the West’s very self-involved fascination with Japan. It goes back to some of the foundational texts of orientalism, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, for example, which used egregiously racist caricatures to lampoon uniquely British follies following U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival to Japan in 1853 and the loosening of self-imposed cultural isolation (sakoku). For the first time a fetishized, even eroticized cultural landscape was up for grabs, and its exclusivity was a fertile breeding ground for costly exports altogether strange and desirable. This plays into the political climate of Japan itself, a nation with a complicated and often violent imperial past. Modern theorists both in and outside of Japan have expounded upon this indeterminate state of Japanese identity, both assailant and victim, dominant colonizer of most of East Asia, yet brutally and immorally razed to the ground by American interventionism in the 20th Century. Having forced its own preciously guarded cultural tradition onto its neighbors, often at the cost of brutally stamping out and suppressing other local traditions, Japan has for most of modern history regarded itself as culturally and intellectually superior. Postmodern cultural theorist Hiroki Azuma in his book on Otaku claims that attempts at capturing a “pure” or “traditional” incarnation of Japanese culture in the modern day are themselves intrinsically tied to American intervention, and the utter humiliation of Japan on the world’s stage via the cruel and abjectly unjust Atom Bomb attacks by American military in 1945. Azuma claims: “lurking at the foundations of otaku culture is the complex yearning to produce a pseudo-Japan once again from American-made material, after the destruction of the “good old Japan” through defeat in World War II.” This idea of a pseudo-Japan, or a national identity constructed via refractions of its conspicuous consumption abroad has its roots in 19th century nationmaking, and plays flagrantly and fragrantly along lines of beauty and definitions of luxury. This is all to say Mitsuoko’s marketing does not exist in a vacuum, and it should not surprise the educated consumer that the smells of an idealized pre-globalized Japan continue to influence our market today. In every ‘serene hinoki’ scent, there is an ounce of cultural capital communicated by a very long history of artistic relativism. Mitsouko strikes me as unique and notable inasmuch as it touts this capital so blatantly, and applies it to the world of luxury perfume in one of the market’s earliest and most successful advertisement campaigns. Now, Mitsouko is a weird kind of artifact. Completely left behind, it sells mainly to collectors like myself and nostalgic souls with indelible connections to women who once wore it daily. Nevertheless, I treasure my own bottle and wear it frequently. It’s a brooding, sophisticated sort of scent profile that reminds me less of my aspirations to visit Japan as a tourist one day, and more of the things that make my life worth living here and now.

The vintage formulation parfum of Mitsuoko can be bought online, and a bottle of the modernized and still entirely beautiful version is still available at Guerlain’s web store.

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

It is one of the more uniquely human impulses to catalog. One of my favorite books of theory, Hiroki Azuma’s “Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals” defines a new type of media consumption predicated on ‘Otaku’ or obsessive fans of various types of new millennium Japanese media. Azuma’s view of Otaku is highly critical, describing this new mode of consumption as inherently ‘Animalistic’ - trading the primacy of authored works for mere categorization of derivative types. The modern mode of consumption, therein, is never able to consider anything on its own, and is in a constant compulsive state of referential comparison, holding the self-authored work on par with countless fanmade derivatives: a wholly postmodern and degenerative way of turning reading or watching or listening into the automatic construction of Relational Databases. Other scholars in and outside of Japan, following Azuma’s theories, have grown to soften their attitudes towards this type of consumption. Like it or not, however, I think in 2025, nearly 25 years after Azuma wrote about the fandoms behind media like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Cardcaptor Sakura, Japanese media has taken over the world, and in a more broad sense, people have become Otaku, or hyper-obsessive fans about so much more than just Idols and Anime. I am an Otaku for lots of things, some more embarrassing and traditional than others, but if nothing else, I am not as much of a perfume collector or ideally a perfume critic as I am a perfume Otaku. I would still buy it in secret if it stopped being cool, and my love for perfume has overshadowed and defined a number of IRL relationships with friends, family, and lovers. It’s been more of a problem in the past, but my urge to catalog is still as sharp as ever. That’s why, during my favorite time of year, I still find time to break away from Lessons and Carols church services and eating English Toffee to rank my favorite and least favorite perfume releases of the last year. Like last year, the obvious niche perfume boom has given me a lot to celebrate. I won’t waste anymore time. Ladies and either gay gentlemen or a few uncharacteristically idiosyncratic heterosexual gentlemen probably on the spectrum, these are my favorite perfume releases of 2025…

BEST OF THE YEAR

Dandelion Butter, Clue Perfumery

This was a clear standout, and really a release that defined a good portion of my personal year in terms of just how often I wore it. Like a few other fragrances here, I wrote an entire review and broader interview with the team behind Clue Perfumery about this scent, so please refer to that for my more elaborate feelings on the scent. Suffice to say here, that as nearly half a year has gone by since its Summertime release, I still feel this perfume is one of the most inventive and delightful things I’ve smelled in a long time. I think the broader category of what I could call ‘weird gourmands’ - rice, milk, nuts, etc - is incredibly in vouge, Dandelion Butter feels wholly divorced from the trend cycle, and moreso connected to a nostalgic and gritty sort of childhood play. Its inspiration, a nonsensical childhood game involving real dandelion stems, taps into a sort of underground information economy of old wives tales and 20th century children’s games, and thus feels decisively before the internet age - in which kids were forced into authoring their own kinds of fun instead of defaulting to the adult developers of Roblox or Fortnite. The smell itself reflects the same warped childhood perspective that inspired my favorite Clue scent, With the Candlestick. Refrigerated, high-salt butter in slab form, grassy pollen stems, and dainty yellow blooms abound, and the drydown yields to a sweet sap that recalls tonguing honeysuckle in the outer bounds of the park your elementary school went for recess. A true pleasure to wear, and something absolutely worthy of cult status in the niche fragrance community. Get your hands and nose on it whenever it’s in stock.

Byronic Hero, Serviette

Another fragrance I’ve written about, and that’s also received press writeups from people far more influential than me. To suffice, this is the peak of Trey Taylor’s unique perfume style: accessible rounded edges, marketable eccentricity, and deeper-than-it-seems class conscious mingling of the profane with the sacred. The defining feature here is a pretty realistic diesel exhaust note. Capturing that addictive sort of gas station smell, and mixing it with a saffron-rose-oud combo that evokes some of the more popular designer niche oud fragrances. It’s not wholly dirty, and has the same sort of alt-sheen to it as something like Black Saffron (a sweet leather styrax take on saffron I count as one of Byredo’s best). Wear this to the club, and let its distinct and unflinching sillage start conversations as easily as it frightens asthmatics.

Heliodose, Marlou

I do think Doliphor, the second fragrance release this year from enigmatic provocateurs Marlou is the more unique and lauded fragrance among these two, but somehow Heliodose ended up being my secret favorite. The second collaboration with perfumer Stéphanie Bakouche, this attempts to translate the characteristic ferality (and fecality) of Marlou’s DNA into a floral fragrance. Needless to say, this is not at all what I was expecting. I imagined an animalic floral in the vein of their classy and very lovely Poudrextase, or even Eris Parfums’ stinky sultry Night Flower. Heliodose, in contrast, focuses on the oft-maligned hedione molecule, and elevates it to a hyper-sweet tropical zenith. Maybe the most accessible Marlou, this evokes the almond-tiare summertime sheen of Serge Lutens’ La Dompteuse Encagee. I get milky, fleshy, obscene white florals, that shine with an almost plastic-toy perfection. It’s pretty simple, but laden with pissy indoles. Not even to the extreme that my beloved Olene turns heads - this indole heart resounds with a shallow sort of femininity. If all the other Marlou perfumes smelled like 85 year old women and were virally worn by beautiful 20-something girls, this actually smells like a 20-something girl, but probably won’t be worn by them. Sensual, but in an entirely new way for Marlou. If these are the fruits to expanding the palate of a very tightly controlled fragrance series, count me in.

Come, Bogue

I hadn’t tried any of the infamous fragrances from Bogue before this, but Antonio Gardoni’s radical animalic work has come highly recommended. In a similar vein to Marlou, he is known for hyper-stinky perfumers perfume fragrances, and this time, has made something comparatively quite sweet. Suggestively titled, this is a sticky tropical floral enshrined in honeyed civet and medicinal helichrysum. The civet here is instantly recognizable, dated and regal in the same vein as Michael Jackson’s signature Bal A Versailles. What distincts it is a thick, sweet honey note that warms the nose in harmony with the helichrysum, and renders the animalics here much more approachable to the uninduced masses. Undertones include vanilla, ylang ylang, and grassy immortelle. Staggeringly layered, this unfolds over many hours on skin, revealing green nuances of wild patchouli, tea, and musk. Wear this to a free love commune in rural Virginia in the 1960s, and find new and inventive ways to have awful unprotected sex on psychedelics.

Zuko, DI SER

DI SER is perhaps the peak of modern Japanese perfumery in terms of the sheer quality of its releases, but often sticks faithfully to a citrus-forward palate, occasionally dipping its toes with success into dark oud. Zuko marks a departure into the world of incense, and presents the accord in a novel manner wholly divorced from Western culture. This is the farthest thing in the world from Incense Avignon or any other requisite churchy smell, and highlights the ultra-camphoric smell of Zuko, a fine incense powder used by monks that also served as the inspiration for my all time favorite discontinued Diptyque fragrance Kimonanthe. DI SER’s take is equally medicinal as Kimonathe, but offers up a more faithful rendering of apothecary ingredients like tumeric, cinnamon leaf, and clove. What comes through most prominently, however is eucalyptus-borne camphor. Like a hefty scoop of Tiger Balm, this wears less like a perfume and more like a remedy. As a professed fan of perfumes people often tout as unbearably medicinal, I was hooked. There is no ash here, but rather a grated sort of spice that purifies the mind and body. Bring this with you to practice Aikido, and rub it on your pulse points whenever you start to come down with a cold.

Olm, Zoologist Perfumes

This is a curious artifact. Composed by Spyros Drosopoulos, the Greek surgeon turned perfumer behind Baruti Perfumes, this slippery little fragrance is a far cry away from the bold gourmand powerhouses that built up his original brand. As much as the packaging can sometimes be a little reddit, I like the Zoologist series because it often involves commissioning perfumers with their own brands or established practices to make something a bit more weird and animalic. This take a slightly different avenue with a similar spirit. Much more of an earthy-vegetal fragrance in the vein of Scottish perfume house Early Modern’s cult hit Celadon. I get a distinct umami impression of algae, but also a very damp watery sort of sediment-clay accord like the highly underrated fragrance Lake Bottom from Folie a Plusieurs. The website itself lists a '“Water Cave Accord,” which I think does a good job of summing it up. There is a bit more traditional ISO E Super base that gives it some oomph, and does a good job of adding to the slightly unsettling sort of alien sheen created by wearing this fragrance on skin. I don’t get the other stated notes of amber and sandalwood, but describing the base as “oily musks” is a delightful little turn of phrase that I think is followed up into the drydown of this fragrance’s wear. I would wear Olm from Zoologist Perfumes to hibernate in my bed for a few days at least, emerging slowly but surely from my covers like a wriggly prehistoric creature climbing onto dry land.

Cereale, Agar Olfactory

Speaking of prehistoric and weird creatures, this release from Chicago-based Agar Olfactory was launched right at the end of last year, but had such a meaningful impact on my scent rotation this year that I feel it wholly worth including. agustine zegers (styled in lowercase) has had a big year this year, to say the least. What went from a very precious sort of Chicago insider’s secret has blown up on the weird girl niche fragrance internet scene. I now see screenshots of their provocative notes lists on random corners of the internet, and find them stocked at a number of premier scent retailers in NYC, North Carolina, and beyond. Moreover, zegers has publicized a parent venture to Agar Olfactory, dubbed the speculative scent lab. Very much made in the collaborative, artistic vein as Agar, this project eschews optimizing retail profitability in favor of hosting a number of fascinating workshops at the intersection of ecology and olfaction, and custom smellscaping in the service of collaborating with artists on scented installation work. In a sales environment in which an ounce of virality usually causes an outpouring of big business capital, it’s truly meaningful to see zegers use their success to double down on the countercultural spirit of what made Agar Olfactory stand out. Their most recent release, Cereale, does just that. Inspired, as all their fragrances are, by a potential iteration of ecological apocalypse, the imaginative copy describes rye and bran monocultures threatened by a novel infection. This perfume, they write, is what food scientists develop to appease the taste for bread still prominent among popular culture. One of the most viscerally shocking fragrances I’ve smelled in recent memory, this is nothing like the delicate rose-water sourdough found in similar Chicago-based bread perfume purveyors. This smells to me, exactly like a bowl full of warm water and active dry yeast. It isn’t even a baked bread perfume, it is a baking perfume itself. I get creamy lactone butter notes, atop a walloping from fermented yeasty dough. What’s adds to this perfume’s unique aggression is how insanely strong it is. A few sprays instantly turn any room into back of house at a Panera Bread, and on clothes it lasts so long I smell it on them after running them through the laundry. Somewhat of an impish little sister to Selperniku, which is another oddball butter scent with uncharacteristically powerful performance. Wear Cereale to terrorize stay-at-home moms on the subway, or to carboload at 6am before running a half marathon.

Vernus, Jorum Studio

I really didn’t hear much chatter about this perfume online, which is a shame. Released as a limited springtime exclusive for Scottish genius Euan McCall’s Jorum Studios, this is the polar opposite of a fresh, dewy tulip scent. Rough, dirty, and edgy, this is primarily a narcissus scent, which is among the more challenging floral notes in perfume. It used to be one I regarded with a small amount of fear. At its worst, it is incredibly screechy and hay-like. Thanks to a wonderful ultra-dusty floral-loving close friend of mine, however, I’ve given narcissus a new lease on life. Vernus is undoubtedly a narcissus and daffodil soliflore with incredible dimension, getting to the essence of two very adorable but unexpectedly musty floral notes. Like lazily digging your fingers into dirt, it opens very tart and almost sour. A visceral sort of bright yellow and brown, you smell the entire flower from root to stem to bloom. I swear there’s almost a charred meat dimension to this floral perfume, it’s that fleshy. An extremely high dose of Jonquil absolute is really what defines the profile of Vernus. An almost peppery-honey mixture, it speaks to the sweet arrival of spring with uncharacteristically warm tones. Wear this fragrance in April, or whenever you want to remember that one unfortunate time you got so happy about the end of the cold season you skipped through a flower field so fast you fell flat on your face.

Sorabji, January Scent Project

I was excited about a new release from Providence auteur John Biebel for a very long time. He’s been in a very long process of rehauling his bottle and storefront design, and I’ve certainly missed smelling things from his hyper-unique point of view. There isn’t a single JSP scent I don’t find technically interesting, but his newest, Sorabji, is uniquely approachable compared to some of the more heady concepts like the sharp herbal lilac/tumeric/apple experiment Vaporocindro. Inspired by the works of English composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, this fragrance softly hums with warmth and spice, wearing like an amber perfume tinged with those specific kind of candy lollypops with scorpions in them. Based around the interplay between osmanthus, black tea, and apricot, I was perhaps projecting my experience of more Asiatic-oriented osmanthus-apricot fragrances like Kimonanthe onto my expectations for this release. The resulting smell, however, is closer to the warm library suede of Kafka on the Shore. Bolstered with a red Morocco book leather accord, my nose picks up chili pepper, tickling cooking spices like tarragon, and a hearty dose of osmanthus. Where there is apricot, it moreso adds a hazy sweetness, wearing into the drydown like a vanilla-amber on my skin. I truly feel this is a great scent to gift someone to introduce them to the world of experimental perfume, as it’s made from exclusively strange ingredients you won’t find on designer shelves, but has an addicting sort of sweet ting to it that makes it a beguiling and wearable signature. Buy this for the person in your friend group who loves an NPR subscription and a good cup of spicy instant ramen, and watch the compliments from its extrait-level sillage roll in.

Max Richter 01, Comme des Garcons

You’ll learn this later, but beloved alt-fashion house Comme des Garcons’ fragrance release schedule has been very hit or miss this year. Needless to say, I wasn’t expecting to like this one, but it’s a hit. Another experimental musician collab, this fragrance draws from smells familiar to a musicians’ studio: graphite, piano wood, magnetic tape. What I smell is somewhere in-between the mellow coffee musk of Odeur Du Theatre Du Chatelet Acte 1, and the more marketable varnish-accord skin scent Zero. In a sense, it does something both of these fragrances try to do in their own ways: evoke the intimacy and atmosphere of artists at work, including the more unseemly smells of their materials. Max Richter 01 does this with a very realistic metallic pencil lead smell, mixed with a sleek black pepper wood base that feels marketable to Rick Owens bros who are willing to drop money blindly on something like this. I don’t get a ton of other notes here, but the sort of art class wood effect feels approachable and not horribly indebted to the current trend cycle, so I think it works. There’s enough here to differentiate it from other releases from the house, and if anything I think it does a better job fitting into the Odeur series, of which its bottle seems reminiscent.

Centerfold, Hollywood Gifts

The debut from Nose Candy podcasteuse Maddie Phinney, I’ve written a lot on my blog about this perfume in the past. Needless to say, I think it's really good at doing the kitschy poptimist gourmand thing lots of more established perfumers (see the final entry on this writeup) are trying to do right now. A photorealistic cherry ChapStick accord meets amaretto and boxed chocolates, wearing on skin for an entire day and evoking memories of cool older girls in High School who smoked stolen cigs behind their parents’ back and had trashed cars full of tabloids.

Whoa, Frankly

This is a hard one to find, but really fun. Born from design studio I Know You Know, Whoa’s bottle is an art object in and of itself. Inspired by delirious tones of California in the summertime, this is a pineapple fragrance with a unique nail polish accord. It’s not necessarily front and center of the composition, which is very wearable. I think of this as a sticky juicy sort of grapefruit-tropical hybrid, with an acetone artificial base that wears similarly to a mainstream CDG fragrance. Of all the fragrances on this list, I do think I’ve worn this one the least, but it has a time and a place from the months of June through August. Extra points should be awarded on the basis of having a gorgeously designed bottle, though I do get the sense from the other fragrances in this line that the aesthetics of their release may have even been too prominent of a concern. As far as design studio perfumes go, though, this one will do just fine.

L’Etoile Mourante, Sylhouette Parfums

Of everything I’ve put in this list, I was the most wowed by this weird little perfume from Vietnam-based provocateurs Sylhouette. I haven’t smelled as much as I’d like from them, but it’s safe to say pretty much everything I’ve encountered has been cutting edge and hyper-experimental. Explicitly dedicated to the victims of the Genocide in Gaza, Molotov Cocktail was a truly breathtaking metallic fragrance, with accents of blood, burned leather, sweat, pepper spray, and vodka that would make fragrance bros who hype-up the utterly mediocre Inexcusable Evil turn up their patchy pubescent mustachioed noses. L’Etoile Mourante is something entirely different, a quiet, aching sort of fairy that wiggles quietly into the grey matter in your brain. I see loose comparisons only to two very hard-to-find gems: Serge Lutens’ Bas de Soie, a fleshy hyacinth in the noble tradition of No 19 - and the ultimate discontinued unicorn from Byredo, Seven Veils. Like Seven Veils, L’Etoile turns the spotlight on carrot seed: a suede-like vegetal peppery sort of smell that cuts deeply into the nostalgia glands, evoking simmering stews and old world glimmer. Fantasy accords like “star dust” and “cosmic smoke” read to me as sultry orris and black pepper. The principal floral accord here is Blue Wisteria, a highly delicate hanging floral with dewy green budding accents not unlike Jo Malone’s grandma’s favorite handsoap. There’s something elegiac about this perfume, Palo Santo and smoky incense undertones lend a severity to the pretty floral-spice opening. There are no real similarities between the notes, but the quiet register in which this perfume speaks reminds me of my prized signature scent Passage d’Enfer. Astoundingly delicate, this wears on skin with a subtlety that can truly be thrown off by something as commonplace as the ambient smell of a room. This perfume is best experienced outside, perhaps right after it’s rained the kind of long-awaited summer rain that turns cracked soil into feed for earthworms. Long, wriggly, and nothing other than that which they are. An unapologetic and tiny sort of natural beauty the entire food chain has grown to depend on.

Sister Hildegard, Pearfat Parfum

This one also surprised me, because Alie Kiral’s work for Pearfat is always extremely inventive, but it often features a quirky sort of warmth and wearability. This perfume on the other hand seems quite difficult to wear, and has am inherent strangeness to it that really caught me off guard, but has endeared me to it all the more over time. Inspired by one of my favorite saints, the polymath and abbess Hildegard of Bingen whose musical and theological work has managed to break free from the exclusive confines of Christian worship into the cultural mainstream. Celebrated as a strange sort of feminist icon, her work transcends gender, class, and often even religious piety - speaking to the strange sort of dignity of the soul and calling listeners into mystic realms of union with the divine. Kiral’s tribute eschews the too-obvious choice of making a capital c Church Incense Perfume, focusing rather on Bingen’s love for the Viriditas of the natural world. The first and most prominent note to me is cyclamen, a watery crisp vegetal note I associate with an odd little gem from my benefactors at Diptyque called Eau de Lierre. It prevails into the drydown, wearing as if you’d romped through the small overgrown cemetery behind the cathedral walls. This is also a lactonic scent, however, and a prevalent tepid milk quality evokes The Nursing Madonna and the odd maternal visions of St Bernard partaking of the Virgin Mother’s breastmilk. Underlying accords submit themselves to the union of green and milky overtones, but I do detect a vague sort of smokiness as well as the punch of juicy orange. A fantasy accord Kiral describes as “flecks of dust against stained glass” – I don’t entirely smell the full vision here, but there is something really strange and evocative about this perfume. I honestly see another potential comparison to the very misunderstood Secretions Magnifiques from mainstream provocateurs Etat Libre d’Orange. It garnered viral fame for supposedly being unwearable, for smelling like blood and cum mixed together in a tribute to the most disgusting viscera of what makes people people. I don’t entirely think it lives up to this claim, however - and to me it wears on skin as an almost-tropical sort of seaweed iris and milk fragrance. There’s a similar sort of fleshy salty quality here though that would probably be enough to make someone not already entrenched in the world of weird perfume pretty off-put. Luckily this is a limited edition scent from a indie retailer that exclusively appeals to weird girls looking to smell like memories or twee concepts, so it’s been able to find a tidy little audience of freaks to nestle onto. Wear this perfume to 12pm Thursday mass with only three or four people in the church, and wander aimlessly around the campus afterwards until you start to hear voices.

Spring Festival, d’Annam

There’s been a lot of hype this year about perfumes from Vietnam-based d’Annam, all inspired by different aspects of Asian culture and released in small series dedicated to specific countries. I do really enjoy their coffee scent, and I was partial to the more premium offering from their Japan line. That said, I do sometimes feel they miss the mark with some of their concepts, and not everything they release wowed me. That said, I was interested in the Chinese-themed collection released this year, and while I was only able to sample one of the options, I liked it a lot. Spring Festival or Chinese New Year is the yearly center of the Chinese celebratory calendar. The fragrance created to commemorate this occasion is quite unique and evocative, centered around a Candied Hawthorne note inspired by Tanghulu, a skewer of fresh fruit covered in sugar often served at New Year’s festivals. Citrus notes of mandarin take a backseat to a smoky medicinal sort of sugar and plum blossom mixture that maybe doesn’t feel uniquely Chinese, but certainly evokes various East Asian sundries and tonics at large. The drydown is powdery and sweet, perhaps from the stated notes of Red Dates and “Red Lanterns” (Something paper-adjacent? What a bold fantasy note to include…). I think of all the scents included here this is the least effective at living up to its very specific concept, but I will always love any fragrance that bolsters up medicinal, powdery, and fruity smells into a lovely sort of salve. Wear this in Chinatown to smell like you know where to find the best Tang Yuan glutinous rice balls in town.

Eshal, Neela Vermeire Creations

This scent is truly gorgeous. Contributing a fresh take on the tuberose soliflore, an extremely crowded market already, this scent is defined by a bold injection of turmeric. Tepid, spiced, and herbal, the tuberose here is far from milky or opulent in a classical sort of way. I see a similarity to Dominique Ropion’s “brutalist tuberose” scent for Regime des Fleurs. In an effort to distance himself from having created perhaps the most iconic niche tuberose perfume of all time, defined by its headiness and plush sensuality, Ropion has gone on to make fragrances that cast tuberose in a dry, verdant, or spiced resin cast. To be honest, I’ve found this approach to have mixed results, but here, another master perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour seems to have taken this playbook and excelled with it. Another man somewhat burdened by his most iconic scent compositions, this fragrance smells like the (honestly better) younger sister to his own private label tuberose Jodhpur 6AM. Zesty, exotic, and dry, this fragrance opens with a similar sort of lime to Moonmilk. The center is indeed tuberose, however, which reads less like White Diamonds and more like green waxy tubers and stems. Vibrant and fresh, this is a tuberose that eschews Eurocentric ideals of ballroom white florals, and smells like Indian tuberose in its holistic environment.

Étude in Black, Universal Flowering

Courtney Rafuse has been moving pretty under the radar for the last year or so, releasing only collaborations with other creatives or businesses, all while navigating the various pitfalls of being a Canadian brand shipping frequently to the tariff-laden isolationist USA. Needless to say, it came as a welcome surprise to see two new bombshells saunter their way into the Universal Flowering core collection. Released quietly and alongside a broader streamlining of her bottle and website design, Étude in Black and her brother Big Night certainly prove that Rafuse has still got the touch. Big Night is a bold pineapple mélange in the vein of the criminally underrated Music for a While, or DS&Durga’s clubbing fragrance Black Magenta. The centerpiece here is a gritty sweet vetiver, not unlike the ingredient used in the ginger-forward Poems One Through Twelve. Where Poems leans sweet, Big Night is tart and sour. Like Jimmy Buffet’s hotel in the Margaritaville resort after calling over several hookers, this is sleazy, charming, and sort of masculine in a weird off-kilter dad way. That said, Étude in Black was my favorite of the two, and immediately garnered itself an impulse bottle buy on the basis of its sheer uniqueness. Rafuse always couples her scent creations with evocative associative poetry, and Étude is no exception. I found her description here so meaningful I feel it worth repeating in its entirety below:

The roses arrived at noon. I don’t recall the impact, only the machinery of its reception. Chrome shears dulled by tap water, the too-tall vase, a note of brutalist prose. This is how it always starts. With a feeling, yes, but more so the things I decorate the feeling with in order to engage in the ceremony.

This is not just a story I tell myself. It’s simply an excavated surface I have to tend to. Pruning a bush with the focus of a surgeon, making the essential cuts that angle at growth. Hours arranging a room like a calculation of chance. This is not just a ritual!

So I left the roses in the vase. I didn’t trim the stems. I didn’t change the water. I watched them mainline their own filth to a familiar, clouded end. How perverse, witnessing a thing so alive delight in its own consummation. Is letting them just be the most violent instruction? The now black petals, dutifully dropping onto the polished wood, are the only appropriate response.

This is a rose perfume, I suppose - but one completely turned on its head. Rose is quite a hard note to convince me of, as I often feel rose perfumes rest to heavily upon their own laurels so to speak, doing very little to expound upon the same few recipes for popular success invented in the 20th century or even the 21st. That said, this fragrance is clearly conceptually interested in the aesthetics of decay and of delirium, which I find it evokes quite handily. I barely get rose as a flower here, its listed in the notes as “rose liqueur,” and the opening of this perfume has all the sparkling boozy effervescence of a good Poinsettia or even a Rose Cocktail. Plasticine juicy strawberry adds a playful femme veneer, like Fraaagola Saalaaata’s older sister who during the long winter of ‘77 was involuntarily committed to a mental institution. Even beyond its booziness, this scent evokes soirees and juicy red fruits at wintertime gatherings. Into the drydown, however, two notable accords emerge. One is candle wax, a dramatic sort of smoky-waxy sheen not unlike the accents of one of my own most worn scents of all time With the Candlestick. Hinoki and rosewood combine into a nondescript industrial woody veneer, like the sheen of a wooden bar counter or a well-worn antique chair with long unkempt fingernail scratches along the side. Candle smoke, incense, and powdery cocktail glitter turn this rose into a Plato’s Cave reflection of the flower. This is rose-flavored, not actually a floral fruity scent. This evokes all the finer trappings of a princess dissatisfied with the insanity-inducing confines of her station. Wear Étude in Black to unnerve people at your office’s holiday party, or to whittle down the days while shut in your room on 19th Century rest cure.

BIGGEST DISSAPOINTMENTS

As perfume giveth, perfume often taketh away. With the explosion of niche perfume comes the marketing of 2-3 hundred dollar bottles of snake oil, Eaux de Parfums you quite literally do not need and high-budget ad campaigns try to convince you will make others like you. Some of these perfumes were things I was really excited to smell, but was really let down by. I generally try to stay away from independent perfumers who are trying their best and maybe just didn’t connect with my audience niche, but big box niche retailers are always fair game. Let’s begin.

Brown Flowers, DS&Durga

I feel based on its advertisement campaign this perfume was supposed to be Wes Anderson Annie Hall drab-chic core as a smell. Leave it to the (often lovable) hipsters at DS&Durga to try and make a perfume that smells ironically boring on purpose. I wish it even did that, to be honest. David Moltz is usually pretty deft with floral notes, and I’ve enjoyed a lot of his past stabs at white floral perfumes, including some great ones they felt the need to discontinue. That said, Brown Flowers was basically just a dusty sort of coffee-jasmine hybrid, and didn’t really feel vintage to me much less something that speaks to current niche scent interests. Maybe my biggest problem with this perfume is it’s not brown, and not even grey. This is much more of an orange springy sort of white floral, that would maybe be better off marketed as an April exclusive or one of the elusive and often very unpredictable Studio Juices. I don’t even hate this scent, I was just hyped up so much by the marketing and found the scent itself to not really relate at all to its inspiration. Maybe throw in some sort of powdery animalic base, make it actually reminiscent of the 1970s. Whatever, a shot and a miss is something Moltz is certainly capable of brushing off, and I’m still excited to keep up with their packed future release schedule under the auspices of my own generous employer Manzanita Capital.

Odeur 10, Comme des Garcons

This one actually made me mad. The Odeur series represents some of the most experimental stabs at designer niche perfumery, and I consider scents like Odeur 53 a masterpiece. This perfume is literally just Byredo Blanche for people who think they’re too good for Byredo Blanche. Barely even off-putting, just a fresh laundry sort of modern aldehyde skin scent, not buttery, not spiced, just clean. I never thought I would see the day that Comme des Garcons caters to the clean girl market. Sad!

The Essence, Francesca Bianchi

This one is a bit of a weird artifact because I don’t think it was necessarily meant to stand on its own as a perfume. This was the great Italian perfumer Francesca Bianchi’s attempt at capturing the general base notes common to most of her existing fragrances, to wear as a sort of ‘enhancer’ for other fragrances. I suppose she does a good job at capturing this, but to be honest I don’t find it terribly compelling. When Bianchi is at her best it’s often what she can add to this basic sort of violet-civet structure that makes her perfumes great. Maybe this was an attempt to compete with Molecule 01 type basic skin scents, and in that case I don’t really think it works. Moreso, I think this bit is kind of played out in 2025, and I’d like to see Bianchi working to give her audience more, not less. In the wake of Glossier You terrorizing girls and gays across the world, I think perfume that distinctly smells like you are wearing perfume is the new vogue. If I wanted to seem like I wasn’t wearing perfume, I would just not wear perfume. Which of course, I would never do.

Alto Astral, Byredo

These days I’m mostly done being reflexively mean to the enfant terrible luxury niche perfumers at Byredo, only because by my own suspicions they’re likely on the brink of bankruptcy. That said, this new perfume is just objectively a bad attempt to capitalize off the success of their aldehydic laundry scent Blanche. I was somewhat hopeful to see aldehydes on the menu again, because while I don’t think it’s terribly inventive, I do have to hand it to Blanche for making young women crave aldehydic scents again, and to break past their knee-jerk reaction to call anything aldehydic “old lady-like” because of its connections with Chanel No. 5 and the usual suspects. It’s funny to me that “clean, fresh, laundry scents” are very in with the masses right now, but only if you market them without mentioning they include some of the very same ingredients that made classic perfumes of the 1920s-50s really pop. There’s a sort of recursive beauty to knowing that women are deathly afraid of aging and by extension don’t want to smell like their grandmothers, but also have noses that respond to the same core ingredients their grandmothers did, making them more alike than either would probably assume. Needless to say, Alto Astral has none of the historic connotations of aldehydes, and instead sublimates the note to a suntan-lotion style vanilla coconut note that reminds me of sugary ambers like Baccarat Rouge and its countless imitators. It’s actually quite the opposite of a grandma scent, this perfume was designed to please a teenage girl and all those whose olfactory tastes haven’t evolved from that stage of life onward. If I wanted a tropical scent I would get a tropical scent. If I wanted a clean soapy scent, I would get a clean soapy scent. This perfume tries to do both and ends up accomplishing neither.

Kurky, Maison Francis Kurkdjian

I honestly feel sorry, because I do think that Maison Francis Kurkdjian has made it onto my biggest disappointments list every single year I’ve made them. I don’t hate MFK, despite my indications, and the Grand Soir series is lovely. I’m so glad they brought back Absolu Pour le Soir, even if it is updated to modern guidelines. That said, this new release is literally the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen hit the Neiman Marcus shelves. Even when Frederic Malle did the whole playful childhood nostalgia thing, he did it with an ounce of class. This not only looks like a perfume for seven year old kids, but it smells like one too. I understand the whole getting in touch with your inner child thing, but my inner child isn’t spending 265 dollars on a fruity musk fragrance that smells like off brand children’s shampoo. I know Quest International Flavors and Fragrances wasn’t paying that much to commission brainless fruity gourmand scents back when you used to push perfumes for them. Please learn from this Francis, for all our sakes.

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

Enter Mary Eleanor Wallace of Logan Square slow fashion staple boutique Tusk. Conceived twelve years ago as an expansion to an online shop side hustle, selling curated items of experimental jewelry, locally made clothing, and hosting a number of artists’ exhibitions. I personally have found some wildly inventive pieces in my closet through Wallace’s careful curation, and have always valued the degree to which everything at Tusk - from the small store space to the items held within it - is carefully and mindfully considered. Wallace now maintains the store space in addition to her work as a nurse, in a busy multidisciplinary practice perhaps comparable to William Carlos William’s work as a pediatrician. A far cry from mysterious West Loop gallery spaces that open up under quiet funding from wealthy Finance husbands or Wikipedia-Article-having parents, Tusk is something decisively useful, and very transparently placed in the trepidatious balancing act of a real working artist’s life. In my past experience, when things happen at Tusk they are always collaborative, and always far more invested in creative short-term artistic Happenings than stretching things out past their natural lifetime into commercially marketable branding. Needless to say, when I first heard Wallace was in the process of collaborating with Laura Oberwetter to produce a fragrance, I was extremely invested in experiencing it. I’ve written extensively about Oberwetter’s work as a perfumer for Clue Perfumery before, and to summarize - I think she is a deftly skilled autodidact nose, who is at her best helming idiosyncratic and consciously kitsch projects revolving around nostalgia. Having also spent her childhood in the American South, Wallace recounts on her own Substack the initial memories that lead her to forming Oberwetter’s bespoke fragrance for Tusk as a magnolia soliflore.

Growing up in Alabama it was rare that I was not around a southern magnolia tree. They were in our yards, my grandmother’s yard in Tuscumbia AL, lining streets, public parks, along the highways, in photographs. They can rise to be 150 feet tall, their massive dark green leaves creating a covered canopy underneath. I spent very many years under the magnolia trees in my life. Underneath them I was in my own world, my own magnolia club.

The perfume itself was initially previewed last summer, in a magnificent sort of bare storeroom showing that involved Wallace hanging countless magnolia leaves from the ceiling brought in a comically large suitcase from Alabama, and encasing a small amount of the finished formula in custom cloche vessels designed by Chicago glassmaker Henry Gross. Encountering the fragrance initially in this hyper-curated space felt achingly precious, and at the time, having dabbed a small amount of the liquid on my wrists walking aimlessly around Logan Square, I felt an unexpected sort of emotional malaise about having traded the gorgeous but politically and emotionally tense natural landscapes of South Carolina for a luxury retail job in a big city. In many ways I felt decisively out of place during my formative years as a visibly queer Jewish child in a suburb town of ‘yes sirs’ and ‘yes ma’ams’ - and remember having basic angsty teenager dreams fueled by precocious Joy Division records and indie sleaze idols of moving to London or New York, away from my parents and five thousand blonde women in Lily Pulitzer named Bailey Grace. But into my late twenties, having now worked out a lot of the finer points of my identity and unexpectedly finding Jesus in a mainline Protestant church, I miss how immediate and familiar life feels down there. Things don’t feel quite as modern, there are parts of town that feel as if they are unstuck from time, floating aimlessly between violently grotesque and beautiful histories. At once prehistoric and effortlessly sincerely kitsch.

Needless to say, Tusk’s finished perfume, dubbed ‘Magnolia Grandiflora,' is a small little morsel of wistful fantasy. Decked in delicate linework from Chicago-based painter Lilian Martinez - its design eschews displaying any sort of name; just the outline of a magnolia flower in bold verdant colors. Wallace spoke to me before its release about the almost candy banana fruit aspect of the magnolia blossom that often gets overlooked in traditional almost gardenia-adjacent soliflores, and this opening portrays that sort of unique effect handily. I get traces of the neon yellow/pink opening of Filigree & Shadow’s bubblegum co-cola asphalt LAUGHING WITH A MOUTHFULL OF BLOOD, set against full bodied camphoric white florals like Carnal Flower or Moon Bloom. My typical association with magnolia that distincts it from sister smells like tuberose and jasmine is a citrusy sort of effervescence. Frederic Malle’s Eau de Magnolia portrays this faithfully, even if it is boosted with outside citrus notes into sport cologne territory. I do also detect this sort of bergamot base in Magnolia Grandiflora. I truly have very few notes on the photorealism here, it smells uniquely and affectingly of a hot summer breeze wafted through tall magnolia trees, resplendent in their different states of bloom and decay. It wears delicately on the skin: the fruity opening yielding into a bare bones floral drydown that lingers on the skin like a memory. There is an undercurrent of one of the less-sweet citruses like bergamot or yuzu, but it never overpowers the assembly of a larger white floral accord. It takes a lot to get me to comment on something like this, as I don’t often find it particularly worth discussion - but nonetheless it speaks to Wallace’s attention to detail that even the atomizer to this small collector-friendly bottle sprays a ultra-fine mist. It wears delicately on skin for a few charmed hours, dissipating in a sun-kissed cloud of unknowing as if only a dream.

Apropos of nothing, what I think people miss about the tradition of Southern Gothic as a creative genre is the vivid sense of the sublime imbued into the environment itself. In her explicatory guide to young writers, Flannery O’Connor describes the American South: “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God." I think of the climax to “Parker’s Back,” in which the protagonist suffers a moment of overwhelming religious fervor during an accident on a farm. As if itself sentient, a large tree “reaches out” to him on a tractor like Christ’s open hand extended in the icon of the harrowing of Hell. The flames engulf the large tree, like Moses and The Burning Bush, and Parker is utterly overcome. It’s not specified, but in my mind this was a Magnolia tree. What other species could be so big, so beautiful, and so utterly up in flames.

Two or three mornings later [Parker] was baling hay with the old woman’s sorry baler and her broken down tractor in a large field, cleared save for one enormous old tree standing in the middle of it. The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree. She had pointed it out to Parker as if he didn’t have eyes and told him to be careful not to hit it as the machine picked up hay near it. Parker began at the outside of the field and made circles inward toward it. He had to get off the tractor every now and then and untangle the baling cord or kick a rock out of the way. The old woman had told him to carry the rocks to the edge of the field, which he did when she was there watching. When he thought he could make it, he ran over them. As he circled the field his mind was on a suitable design for his back. The sun, the size of a golf ball, began to switch regularly from in front to behind him, but he appeared to see it both places as if he had eyes in the back of his head. All at once he saw the tree reaching out to grasp him. A ferocious thud propelled him into the air, and he heard himself yelling in an unbelievably loud voice, “GOD ABOVE!” He landed on his back while the tractor crashed upside down into the tree and burst into flame. The first thing Parker saw were his shoes, quickly being eaten by the fire; one was caught under the tractor, the other was some distance away, burning by itself. He was not in them. He could feel the hot breath of the burning tree on his face. He scrambled backwards, still sitting, his eyes cavernous, and if he had known how to cross himself he would have done it.

Magnolia Grandiflora can be purchased exclusively at ’s Chicago storefront, open weekends 12-6pm at 3205 W Armitage Ave or by appointment.

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

Lena Dunham’s serialized millennial magnum opus Girls entered into my life suddenly, like an awkward two-month fling filled with messy mutual obsession, slow eye-contact sex, and one person ghosting the other at the end of the summer. I didn’t really know what I was getting into when my roommate and I watched the pilot, only that Marnie’s character had given rise to a number of really funny internet memes, and that most people either loved it or hated it. As someone well-versed in loving twee media that catches ire for being too navel-gazing and unrealistic, it didn’t take me long to be won over.

As a creative, Dunham’s career was irrevocably marked by her extremely intimate, often cringe-worthy commitment to exhibitionism, and the national smear campaign by what would become the nascent Pizzagate conservative young male Internet mafia, whose knee-jerk disgust reaction to a fat white woman talking about her sex life candidly was to throw death threats as liberally as a drunk guy in Appleton, Wisconsin throws darts trying to impress his Hinge date at TGI Fridays. I don’t always feel as connected to Dunham’s later work, and I completely understand why, as a public figure, she is just as divisive and controversial as her on-screen counterpart Hannah — but, if nothing else, it is undeniable that galvanized by the success of Tiny Furniture (2010), Girls was her closest and most triumphant attempt at capturing the cultural zeitgeist of young American women in the nascent 2012 Obama era. It’s a time that’s definitely too easy to romanticize: the end of the nation’s brutal terrorization of Iraq was bleeding into a general spirit of innocent, sheltered progressivism that grew into the peak prevalence of hipster electroswing mania. I think of lighting-in-a-bottle, early-career MGMT playing “Time to Pretend” to a tiny audience on a grainy digital camera. If you put on a dangly owl necklace and distressed skinny jeans in Brooklyn, in the rosy visage of nostalgia, they practically handed you the keys to the city.

Needless to say, I blew through the show and was left extremely touched, and often ashamedly infuriated, at the immature, awful behavior of the characters, coupled with how I secretly saw my worst impulses in response to the challenges of young adulthood reflected in them. If my beloved Sex and the City is about positively identifying your journey to maturity in a gang of four hilarious thirty-somethings, Girls is very consciously about negatively identifying your regression into impulsiveness in four emotionally stunted twenty-somethings. Some things are exaggerated, yes, but Girls sees Dunham’s shocking and characteristic candor turned onto the rites of passage of American, decisively upper-middle-class white girls navigating life in NYC on their own. I could write an entirely different thinkpiece on whether Girls should be called a “post-feminist” work of television, and more so, what that descriptor means for art made in the 21st century. This problem exists with Sex and the City, too, but I do think Girls is more intentionally engaging with the social reality won for young women by the tooth-and-nail advances of the Second Wave, and neither rejects nor confirms any of those progressive tenets wholesale. At its best, however, the show is unflinchingly bleak and merits value by connecting to embarrassing, awkward, and shameful snippets of how women use a relatively newfound generational independence. There are many episodes I love that didn’t make the cut, but in short, I think the set of these five episodes embodies how hilarious, upsetting, and tender Girls can be.

No. 5: Welcome to Bushwick A.K.A The Crackcident (S1E7)

This was the exact moment I began to understand the cosmic forces that hold this show together. Sex and the City’s action is predicated on routine. There is a standing brunch date the girls can use to expound on the current monster-of-the-week guy that’s entered one of their lives, Carrie will always be overspending at Barney’s, they all have relatively stable jobs, etc. It is exactly the opposite in Girls. The only thing these four have in common is that their lives are all a complete mess. The first time we see them together in one place is here, at a grimy warehouse party in Bushwick — where Shoshanna accidentally does crack, Marnie pines over the boy she dumped a few weeks ago, Adam adorably dances with his lesbian friends, and Jessa is loosely involved with a lonely older man for the first of many times. This episode is also notable as the inception of arguably the best relationship in the series, where Ray takes Shoshanna’s virginity after wrangling her home safely. I could say a lot about their trajectory throughout the show as a “the one who got away” couple, but it’s safe to say that in Season One, they’re still very sweet together, and it makes me happy.

The wider storyline comes to a head at the end of the episode, with the revelation of a key piece of Adam’s character: Hannah had no idea he was a teenage alcoholic, and has been working hard in AA for years. In many ways, early to mid-season Adam is the moral center of the show, because he is consistently the only person who makes an active effort to get better, and is the only person who can recognize the thinly veiled cries for help in a mutual bucket of crabs environment in which everyone is content to let everyone else around themselves flounder in dysfunction. I think a tiny but meaningful glimpse of Adam’s character at his best is when he drives Shosh and Hannah to pick up Jessa prematurely from rehab, and is the only one to matter-of-factly remark that it is absolutely a bad idea to enable your close friend to jump ship on treatment and fall back into life as an addict. Adam is absolutely messed up in his own special ways — he’s violent, he’s troubled — but he has a history. Much like Jessa, these points don’t necessarily excuse his behavior, but they ring a far cry away from the very privileged and supportive household environment that bred neuroses like Hannah’s. The episode ends with maybe the best jump cut of the series. During an explosive fight in which Adam gets hit by a car, he shouts, “What do you want? Me to be your fucking boyfriend?” — cut to Hannah and an injured Adam in the cab home, Adam covered in bruises, and Hannah with a childish smile. Thus begins one of the most storied relationships in the show. Adam and Hannah are officially a couple.

No. 4: Japan (S5E3)

I don’t think you could make this episode today. Not because there isn’t an easily lampooned market for American-oriented “cool Japan travel,”, but because Japan in the American imagination was such a different kind of Orientalism in 2015 than it is today. Both are rooted in a similar infantilization and techno-futurist idealization, but now everyone is obsessed with pretending they’re somehow getting the inside scoop on what’s “really traditional” — as if to seemingly all dunk on each other for their lack of cultural literacy. This episode, which mostly devotes itself to Shoshanna’s chaotic life after moving for a marketing job in Tokyo, has all the explosive superflat-meets-Funko-Pop design stylings of the early Internet. Shoshanna is patient zero for the Tokidoki Girl renaissance, which was maybe the first thing to loop cooler American girls who turned their nose up at the actually nerdy Vocaloid-tuning fujoshi into the realm of global Japanese culture.

I’m not shy about the fact that Shoshanna is my favorite character in Girls, and her characteristic peppy but wry social Machiavellianism is on full display in a city very accustomed to office ladies working long hours and dishing out bright pink, overly insincere greetings. The main point of note here: the flowering romance with Yoshi, her protective and innocent coworker, who rescues her from a seedy sex bar in the Ginza district. They all but share their first kiss with Shoshanna in programmer socks and a maid outfit, and wrapped up in the fantasy of living abroad, she virtually abandons her upwardly mobile and utterly boring long-distance boyfriend back home. What makes the Japan episode fun is not that it showcases a complete departure from the show’s routine, but rather that, immersed in a culture she only seems to engage with at a surface level, Shoshanna seems most like herself here. Like many Americans, she went to Japan in search of fantasy, and in doing so, only pushed herself closer to the parts of her life she was trying to avoid. Like Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku Lovers perfume line, the glimpse we get at Shoshanna’s life in Japan is bright, mass-produced, and extremely disorienting to look back at in hindsight. Bonus points for watching her Japanese slowly get better over the course of the episode. Yoroshiku onegaishimasu!!

No. 3: Video Games (S2E7)

Jessa is a difficult problem for this show to solve. At times, she’s been on the brink of dangerously manic overactivity that holds lasting consequences for the entire show, and sometimes she’s completely absent from the narrative with very little explanation. Jemima Kirke’s character acting (and sublimation of her own personality into her character) is second to none, save for perhaps Adam Driver. Season Two, Episode Seven, “Video Games” (Lana reference?) is among the most vulnerable moments for Jessa on screen. Prompted by an unexpected invitation from Jessa’s estranged father, she brings Hannah on a train upstate to meet his present-day dysfunctional family. It is immediately clear that Jessa’s hyper-independence was a forced consequence of just how immature her father is. He frequently leaves them to walk back from various locations with no indication of when he will return. He is emotional, vengeful, and tied to the whims of his new, completely insane, but well-meaning New Age-devotee wife. Strangely, this is kind of an episode about Hannah, in which her sheltered and very much coddled sensibilities conflict with a home environment that is not built to revolve around her upper-middle-class, only-child whims. I think about her, in a moment of clarity, reaching out to her parents to express an awkward appreciation, only for her mom to blow her off, presuming she’s leading up to asking for money again.

The crux of this episode is Jessa and her father’s conversation on the swingsets, where, after turning back her accusation of not being someone she can rely on, Jessa snaps back: “You shouldn’t have to. I’m the child. I’m the child!” It relies on one of the central theses of the show: everyone is just a scared little kid doing their best to cope with uncertainty, and yet the people these people haphazardly choose to bring into the world deserve so much better than what they get. While Hannah is busy kind-of-having sex with an off-putting high schooler, because that’s just the kind of person she is, we’re left stuck with the weight of Jessa’s knee-jerk avoidance. Just like her father, she chooses to leave the people she loves without a trace. Only later on do we learn she had brought herself to rehab. It’s a bittersweet choice. She assumes the role of the people who hurt her in order to make a genuine attempt at healing. It was a show decision no doubt informed by Jemima Kirke’s IRL pregnancy, but one that really does make sense. The episode itself is as funny as any other, but has this very specific grown-up ennui that makes it one of the defining moments in Jessa’s character arc — one that, ultimately, I do think gets one of the more conclusive and satisfying endings, especially with regard to her relationship with Hannah.

No. 2: American Bitch (S6E3)

I do think this is probably the most important episode of Girls, and the one that is best regarded as a standalone work of television. My own personal reaction aside, it’s insane that this was released mere months before the infamous exposé of Harvey Weinstein in 2017. “American Bitch,” another one-character focus, this time on Hannah, begins in media res, with Hannah having written a disparaging op-ed about a very important writer named Chuck Palmer for what is implied to have been a pretty unimportant Internet magazine. Having invited her to his ritzy city condo personally — under the air of transparency to settle her misgivings about his character — the entire episode is essentially an exchange of dialogue between the two.

What is so brilliant about the episode’s structure is how the audience’s own prevailing feelings are manipulated via Hannah’s subtly shifting opinions on this well-read, manipulative, and pathetically charming man. We begin in explicit tension: Hannah sees him as a creep and a sellout, and Palmer acts as if he sees Hannah as a spunky but naive younger writer, blissfully unaware of the familial strife Hannah has brought into his charmed life by spotlighting multiple allegations of grooming from younger fans of his work. In the present-day political climate, we go into this dynamic already expecting a conclusion. He’s an asshole, Hannah won’t budge on her condemnation of him, and we are just here to watch the comedy produced from rubbing these two diametrically and equally narcissistic characters against each other. But 15 minutes in, that isn’t what happens. Hannah, rarely at her most astute and empathetic, wanders around hypothetical corners with him and falls into a broken camaraderie built on two neurotic writers with abysmal self-esteem and an awkward sexual interest. Palmer makes his case (seemingly) clear. These women all threw themselves at him, and perhaps only a little bit knowing better, he briefly indulged their whims as intellectual equals — taking them at their word and not digging deeper into any underlying power dynamic. It’s a defense that seems scarily familiar to anyone who runs in any close-knit, contemporary subculture. And all of Hannah’s initial doubts about this narrative are gently eased by cheeky exchanges of first-edition, signed Philip Roth books (get it?) and pejoratively negging praise.

What’s scary about this episode is how good this gambit gets you. You really do begin to think about this episode as a redemption arc for the flawed-older-man writer archetype. You think that Dunham might indeed be arguing for a rehabilitative inclusion of so-called “cancellations” into public life, following lofty leftist standards like restorative justice. And then, so smoothly you barely even notice it, his penis is poking out of his jeans. Hannah is shocked back to reality and immediately disgusted with how subtly she had allowed herself to be manipulated. Like a cartoon villain, Chuck Palmer smiles. Having now tentatively touched him, lying in bed together, she has allowed him to place her into this strange gray area he’s unwittingly used against young women for years. Any future recounting of this incident would immediately make this story about her. She would be the clout-chaser, the wide-eyed ingenue, only ever loosely credible and only capable of wielding any real power against this man at the cost of driving her own cultural reputation completely into the dirt.

Just like that, his daughter is home for music practice, and Hannah sits frigidly next to his ex-wife. Awkwardly defeated in the mental game of chess and present now as simply one of many women in such a scenario, Hannah’s character feels utterly flattened; collapsing, even, the longstanding gray area between Hannah as a fictitious character and Lena Dunham’s own history as a woman. It’s a hollow and eerie ending to an episode drenched in subtlety. It’s crazy to watch this episode in the wake of how violently a similar modern-day Gen Z intellectual counterculture seems to have turned against this era’s #MeToo movement. I think what many of these women who derail the so-called cultural consequences of mass market cancellations seem to gloss over is just how much damage this very specific gray area is capable of doing to the minds of young women. It’s a list of priorities that, to me, feels profoundly selfish, as would befit a scene that attempted to make the “scary uncle at the family reunion”-type of alt-right beliefs chic and for hot girls. Needless to say, as a woman, you can only watch so many Woody Allen reruns until the penis is pointed at you. And like Sleeping Beauty’s cursed spinning wheel, it’s going to be harder than you think to stand firmly with your common sense, and not prick your finger on something that will lock you in a deep, dreary, prince-charming-dependent sleep forever.

No. 1: Flo (S3E9)

This is definitely not the best episode of Girls, but I do think it’s my favorite. Its main plot point concerns a very common scenario in the emotional lives of twenty-something women: Hannah’s grandmother is dying, and the women of her family have to pick up the pieces of a woman they only knew to varying degrees of familiarity, all while navigating the difficulty of their own distant relationships with each other. Fun cameos are Hannah’s cousin, who aspires to med school greatness and clearly sees Hannah as a black sheep fuckup, and her religious aunt, who never married, taking on much of Flo’s care and advocating contentiously for her belongings. We get great one-liners from Hannah, darkly wishing her cousins could have been the kind of close relationship that stems from all being molested by the same person. She and her cousin Rebecca don’t ever really come to understand each other, but rather are simply able to acknowledge the shared necessity of working alongside each other in a moment of acute crisis. The scenes of Hannah’s mom, Lorraine, arguing with her two sisters function in a similar manner. The episode is ultimately brought to a head with Rebecca crashing her car while texting and driving, and Adam heroically rushing into the hospital when a fine-but-bruised Hannah hilariously texts him only “CAR CRASH.”

Lorraine, a profoundly underrated character, then gives Hannah one of the most infamous lectures of the entire show. After Adam selflessly lies about an engagement to Hannah on her grandmother’s deathbed, Lorraine takes Hannah aside and muses, “I don’t know him very well. But I see certain things. He’s odd. He’s angry. He’s uncomfortable in his own skin. He bounces around from thing to thing… I don’t want you to spend your whole life socializing him like he’s a stray dog. Making the world a friendlier place for him. It’s not easy being married to an odd man. It isn’t.”

It’s a dour moment in what seems like a pretty good stretch for Hannah and Adam’s relationship. As someone who really did think they were going to be endgame for most of the first three seasons, this was the exact moment I began to see the grand arc of their ill-fated dynamic. After all is said and done, and the family reaches something close to closure with the end of Flo’s life, Hannah gets a call on her way back to New York. Her condition has miraculously improved, and she’s going to be discharged the next day. It’s a jarring comedic ending that speaks to just how confusing real life can be. Hannah gives a half-smile and walks into the city crowd as a bare-bones twee girl cover of Warren Zevon’s “Don’t Let Us Get Sick” plays us out. As emotionally intense as this show can be, it’s only made me cry once — and weirdly, for reasons I don’t completely understand, it was right here.

At its best, HBO’s Girls reflected a very messy truth about my own life back to me — that growing older was a far cry from the linear progression I assumed it would be, and that ultimately, we’re all just fragile, sniffly, blubbering, hurt little creatures trying and frequently failing to love and be loved in return. It would feel deeply embarrassing to end with a reference to AJJ, a crust punk band with a now-retired racially insensitive name, if it weren’t so on theme for the characters in the show. Both as this band fits their novel hipster taste, and this specific song, “American Garbage,” describes the way in which their young female and female-adjacent audiences have used these characters to identify the gross, ugly human parts of themselves at their worst. If there is going to be a long-foretold indie sleaze revival, it must come at the cost of completely eliminating the novel concept of cringe from our cultural and interpersonal vocabulary. “If I were one of the girls,” the song goes, “I would be Shoshanna. Confused and rude, such a special kind of way to be cruel. Confused and rude, confused and rude.”

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

The first scent, GLASSWING, (stylized in all caps) takes its name from the glasswing butterfly. Tortoriello notes her inspiration from the deceiving physical strength of these delicate and colorful insects, often associated with freedom or independence. Right off the bat, having a prominent lilac note in the first perfume you create and release to the public is really bold. I consider myself something of an expert in this elusive periwinkle bloom, and often find because it renders no serviceable extract from natural harvesting (a quality associated with ‘mute’ flowers in industry terms), creating an accord of lilac from unrelated natural and synthetic materials is often quite challenging, and shows your hand as a perfumer as directly as a still life sketch proves a charcoal artist’s technical skill. Needless to say, on a scale of Demeter Lilac (offensively off-target) to En Passant (its beauty frequently brings me to tears), I am pretty impressed. In a previous dispatch more than two springs ago I claimed that because of the inherent subtlety needed to pull off such an ephemeral flower, women are uniquely disposed to create the best lilac scents. Essentialism aside I generally still feel this way, and even beyond En Passant, all of my favorite lilac perfumes are made by maybe some of the coolest girls in the world. Summarily the lilac found here only confirms my chromosomal suspicions, and even while it’s blended with brighter notes of mimosa and raspberry, it wears with the watery almost smartie-chalk sweetness I know and love. This is a hyper-bright, almost coquette scent in the likes of something like Odette - GLASSWING smells of sparkles, mirrors, bows, stone fruit, and gummy candy. What delineates its own unique nature as a perfume is less photorealistic soliflore qualities, and moreso a general feeling of brevity. There is maybe a fruity body mist quality about it, and I could very easily see this scent as an unexpectedly charming find you pick up for $29.99 at a TJ Maxx in heaven. My mind first went to Wavey Tulip from SYD Botanica, or to a lesser extent Fox In The Flowerbed by Imaginary Authors: both airy florals that straddle the space between mountain air and salty beach waves, from the midlands to the coast. The first note that hits my nose is sharp, almost abrasive honeydew melon, which adds a stereotypically feminine air to the underlying florals, enhancing their sweetness and rounding out their sharper edges. Vague impressions of hyacinth and pear evoke the easy-wearing likes of English Pear & Freesia, something that feels less wrought from the jagged natural world and moreso designed to be pretty. The scent remains fairly linear on skin. I find once the sharper notes dissipate, it wears as a watery sort of fruity floral for the reminder of its several hour lifetime. Wear GLASSWING to the butterfly enclosure at the Lincoln Park Zoo, or simply keep the transparent bottle in your purse to freshen up on days where you certainly feel stronger than you look.

My favorite of the two, HOLLOW POINT, is much more of a slicked-back resinous affair, not unlike the just recently discontinued Byredo Slow Dance. Titled after the tiny type of ammunition made to lethally explode upon impact, this doesn’t give tactical or machismo, but rather wears with an addictive sort of genderless tangy/fizzy myrrh befitting the word association in its description that reads “violin in syrup.” Again, I think the potential for entry-level niche appeal here far outstrips the relative obscurity of its release and cultural renown. I have waxed poetic many times about my love for aldehyde perfumes, and specifically aldehydic resins. This wears a lot less classically as ballroom fragrances like Iris Poudre that center aldehydes in a clear reference to No. 5 and other lovely ladies of its ilk. The Byredo shoutout here was not disparaging, however, because while I don’t often care for the sort of not-a-typical-perfume typical perfume schtick they try and honey-trap inexperienced cultural literati with, at their best as a house they are able to make aldehydes modern and appealing; relying on the fizzy, fatty, and syrupy undertones they can lend to deeper ingredients, rather than simply walking down the isle hand-in-hand with jasmine or rose as they are often wont to do. It is however, the addition of piquant nutmeg that I think really makes this perfume shine, as it adds a very unexpected but welcome savory quality I find appeals to a large swath of people, and very handily dodges any sort of tacit association with wintertime festivities gorgeous stinky spicebombs often find themselves flattened into. Maybe it’s also the undertones of plum that harken to sultry purple fruit numbers like (way better as a candle) Bibliotheque. Needless to say I’ve worn this fragrance in the presence of many people whose taste I highly regard, and I found they either assumed it was sold at a higher price than it is offered for, or was a new release from a far more established company than it is. I don’t get the other stated notes of lily, oakmoss, or patchouli, but find this serves as a very middle of the road and wearable fragrance for those whose hearts and noses live at the intersection of sticky liturgical incense notes and bright off-kilter openings. Something about the way this fragrance wears feels decisively dour, and slightly left of trad goth in a sort of preppy, affected, tryhard 1980s way. Wear HOLLOW POINT with a sensible wide-shouldered trench, and to crunch leaves underfoot in the faint beginnings of fall, listening to Eyes Without a Face through your Porta Pros on repeat.

Riverbero fragrances are available in 30ml bottles, as 2ml samples, or as a full-sized pair on the Riverbero webstore. Riverbero can also be found on Instagram.

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

That said, my chiefest concern with prioritizing performance has little to do with multiculturalism: it’s just boring. When I wear perfume, I’m wearing it for myself. As an act of divination, to set intentions for the day, to recall precious memories, evoke alter-egos, conjure ghosts. I truly feel this is the espirit de corps behind the large community that has been built around niche fragrance, and moreover, the reason why independent perfumers have been able to handily cut into the market shares and profits of larger more established perfume houses. They are simply catering to a stranger set of needs most larger companies didn’t even know existed. Now, more than ever, people are looking to fragrance as a world-building tool - a piece of a larger creative story. Big capital has even started to take notice, with acquisitions of once-DIY studios like DS&Durga, who built a large audience off small batch perfumes with heady and intricate historical/musical/artistic/referential lore behind them. If the use-value of perfume could easily be quantified forty years ago as a status symbol that announces the luxury and allure of its user to the general public, perfume has now become about something far more idiosyncratic and oblique. It is an over-documented phenomenon at this point. People proudly tout wearing their favorite fragrances with intentionally provocative notes of blood, sweat, and metal. No longer do young women universally come to perfume counters looking to smell sweet enough for their boyfriend to eat. There now exists a small army of unassuming ‘girls, gays, and theys’ smelling like niche animalic oud, and nearby commuters blaming the pungent fecal odor on the large imposing men who sit beside them.

Years ago I wrote about this phenomenon with a degree of suspicion, wondering how quickly this miasma of experimentalism for its own sake could be commodified, scandalized, and marketed by the scented powers that be. Multiple years into the dubbed “Gen Z Perfume Boom,” I can honestly say that the grift-y parts of this train of success have been relatively harmless, and the positive consequences of this populist shift of power and finances far outweigh the negative ones. I worry, though, that those giddily seeking to immerse themselves in this new way of talking and using scent, might in their haste forget to let go of all their past consumer assumptions. I completely understand, for example, why a party girl buying YSL Libre would be upset it didn’t project like she was told it would. I find essentially no artistry in the creation of scents like this, and they are explicit about their purpose - to attract. If it doesn’t follow through on that purpose, I’d feel slighted. This is where longevity gets complicated, because with popular niche houses or even independent creators, you have people entering the sales dynamic for different reasons. This is really the perspective difference at the heart of feeling alienated from those in my orbit who bely a perfume for “not lasting long enough on their skin” - they are evaluating it as an exclusive product, and I am evaluating it at least partially as art. They’re not even entirely wrong for doing the former. This industry is fueled by money, and even if we are to consider the consequences of some of its more sophisticated instruments as artistic, money is often a huge barrier to entry for this art. There are one to one parallels in the world of fashion. It comes off as uneducated to complain that a $2,000+ Issey Miyake Pleats Please jacket that’s made from one single layer of polyester doesn’t actually keep you warm during a brisk 40 degree day, but I understand the concern. It’s always about artistic and historical context, but in turn that context can never exist without the often unseemly industry mechanisms that keep artists fed and making more beautiful things.

So ultimately this is not a fiery condemnation of anyone who is disappointed that their $370 bottle of l’Eau de Hiver from Frederic Malle doesn’t last for more than two hours on their skin as you might have been lead to believe, but rather an invitation to this hypothetical consumer to think about their perfume from a different lens. The best analog I can offer is my love for the work of the classical Impressionist painters at the slow aching turn of the century. There is a massive financial industry behind the collection and exhibition of these masterpieces now, most of it essentially an irredeemable means for the rich to get richer by using hyper-liquid cultural assets as low tax-rate storage for large amounts of capital. But when I look at Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines, all of that washes away, and I am simply in awe. I don’t feel slighted that the textures are too gauzy, or the blues are too light - I am able to immerse myself in the textural wistfulness they serve to create, and find their unique value and meaning in their representation of ephemerality. I would urge you as a consumer to think of delicate perfumes from this perspective: as textural choices on behalf of the perfumer, resulting from the use of fleeting and uniquely beautiful aromachemicals to create distinct impressions. There is no making a perfume like Philosykos “last longer” without ruining Olivia Giacobetti’s hyper-realistic light green fruity tones with boisterous amber fixatives. Longevity is not always about concentration, and there is no hidden switch a perfumer adjusts to decide how long a fragrance lasts or how effusively it projects. These characteristics are exclusively consequences of specific musks, and the inherent potency of the base notes used to create the smell. To increase a perfume’s performance is always to inherently reformulate its scent profile, and no matter how many “intense,” “absolute,” or “parfum” flanker editions of popular fragrances are made, this truth of perfumery will always remain. You are simply being marketed to in a new way. Learn to internalize this fact, and appreciate uniquely well-designed niche fragrances for what they are, not what they aren’t.

I don’t think this philosophy can be applied everywhere, and as with any large sweeping statement made about things people care a lot about, there are many caveats and exceptions to this rule - but I am speaking specifically to niche fragrance that by its own evocative merits, has distinguished itself to the echelons of art for art’s sake. With perfumes like these, I do find it personally offensive to complain about a lack of longevity or an intimate sillage, because again, you should not be wearing them for the sole purpose of accruing compliments or publicly establishing sophistication. I hate to be this prescriptive about something that is truly none of my business, but this is my blog, and smell is literally my business. It makes me smile to hear customers reminisce about the fond memories our glassy eaux de toilettes evoke for them, or to recall specific feelings brought, sometimes even forcefully thrust, into their hearts by the fleeting and painfully delicate notes of these perfumes. I get why people’s first instinct is to reach for the most potent eaux de parfums, but you’re missing a lot of evocative beauty if you do. I’m not looking to be a “chick magnet” - I’m looking to make chicks (mainly myself) strangely introspective and wistful. If I can show someone a fragrance that brings them closer to themselves, that opens or closes a notable hidden portal in their psyche, I will have done my job as a fragrance critic and as a hardworking employee in niche perfume. Some of my favorite perfumes, scents I consider to be absolute masterpieces last only a few hours on my skin, and hardly get noticed by others in a public space. But when I wear them, that doesn’t matter to me. Likewise, I can think of many perfumes with interesting top or heart notes that are absolutely ruined by heavy-handed overuse of ambrocenide bases and proprietary molecules that give fragrances that “beast mode” longevity factor. I do think this comparative marketplace of performance is enabled by the sheer amount of options available to even the most disinterested and checked out of perfume customers. In that sense, I can’t fault typical consumers for deriving performance based value systems for weighing perfumes against each other. But niche perfume is a deeply abnormal market right now, and as previously mentioned, it shares many cultural distinctions with the world of modern haute couture. Not only would I say a perfume’s strength has no bearing on its merit, but also, despite a very vocal minority, a perfume’s strength does not always proportionally determine its success. I don’t even like this perfume, but Dolce and Gabbana were able to capture the noses of a generation with the brevity of Light Blue, and Jo Malone’s bestselling eau de cologne Wood Sage & Sea Salt doesn’t last longer than 30 minutes on skin. I’m interested in the cyclical trending of high sillages in perfume, and often find they typify ages of economic recession and existential dread, as methods of very vocally and performatively holding onto the fantasy of luxury. The post-war stability of the 50s-60s saw consumers opt for discreet musks and gorgeously delicate florals, then the turn of the 70s into the 80s brought about far more complex amber-based compositions appealing to orientalist fantasies of far away spices and scared wood. The lesson to be learned here is to not be scared of re-applying, of wearing four different perfumes over the span of a long day, and of embracing the freedom of changing your scent as easily as you can change your clothes. If everyone interested in collecting stranger, more delightful types of fragrances embraced this mindset of radical acceptance and nuanced consideration for perfumery, I think the landscape of niche perfume would be a lot better off. What really excites me is what my favorite perfumers could be doing with scent blends if they weren’t secretly worried at least a little bit about how strong it would turn out. In an era of more-is-more luxury, the best thing we could do for our olfactory creatives is to embrace a fuller palette - one that allows for minimalism and subtlety. After all, if you are afraid of perfume’s scent leaving you too soon, what you’re really afraid of is the smell of yourself.

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

While I have not personally burned the original candles (I would love to!) the success of the project has now resulted in two extrait-concentration parfums: the titular ‘stone,’ and the newer edition ‘cup.’ Having experienced both fragrances at my regular Pilsen haunt everything store, I felt compelled to dissect them briefly here. What I often find from newer perfumers, especially those who take their inspiration from the natural world, is an over-use of lower quality organic materials leading to a hazy but instantly recognizable “essential oil” kind of smell, that simply does not behoove itself to the realm of niche perfume. I am glad to say there is little trace of this fault here - both cup and stone are carefully constructed debuts that punch far beyond their weight class, and lend themselves exceptionally to contemplation and exploration. Pittard has also paired each of them with a signature tea blend in collaboration with NC-based Carytown Teas, which rounds out their sensory worlds in a delightful and altogether fitting manner. I have not yet tried the teas, and can only describe their atomized fragrances. I smelled stone first, and as such it will be the first creation I speak to.

Pittard’s own writing on her inspiration is highly evocative. “Stone began as an exploration into the sensory experience of stonehood — immersed in earth and growth, smoothed and nurtured by time. I wanted to capture the birth and death of the world around this steadfast natural form.” The first and most prominent note used here is mint. Not bubblegum mint, but a green-herbal freshness from actual mint leaf that feels bracing and medicinal. Pittard writes that this opening captures to her the feeling of working in her studio at wintertime. She is not the first to make the unconventional association between the coolness of mint and the colder months. A personal favorite perfume of mine, Winter in Manaslu by Himalayan inspired house Hima Jomo, is a bracing cup of mint tea that feels extremely similar to how this perfume opens and wears on skin. It truly does feel both remedial and calming, as if hovering one’s nose over a warm ambrosial liquid housed in a cold mineralic stone-hewn mug. That said I’m interested in how little minerality I smell here from a scent called stone. I like the idea of not taking a synthetic route, and representing moreso the abstract feeling of hardness, or stonehood as she says, rather than attempting to actually capture the faint smell one gets from huffing a rock. In the drydown a soft musky bed of geosmin and ambrette emerges, somewhat reminiscent of the patchouli in Le Labo’s Baie 19. It is a delicate scent, but delicacy is a virtue often underrepresented in a “more-is-more” beast mode fetishizing scent economy. I often find the most moving experiences I have with perfume are with scents that live fleeting ephemeral lives on my skin.

I very much feel Prittard’s intentions come through - I can fantasize now in the thick heat of July that this perfume is perfect for the few careful weeks as winter sprouts into spring. Think scattered snow that melts quickly overnight, taking things slowly to an uncomfortable degree, two hours or less of screentime, and five hours of sleep on a floor bed. Wear stone to get things done that require your full attention, and to discreetly set intentions for the day before you put on your deep green transparent mesh SS23 Ekkhaus Latta maxi dress and roam around the wide open Virginia woods.

‘Cup’ is different, but also the same. Sharing a vague tea-related theme, and of course drawing inspiration from the textures and smells of the forest, it sets its sights on deeper more unnerving territory. The opening is mainly a creamy and dense galbanum, which butts its leafy-flowered head against kitchen spices like cumin and allspice. The heart note is listed as Eastern Black Spruce, something that feels similar in part to January Scent Project’s ultra-damp woody Burvuvu. It’s not explicitly listed here, but I honestly moreso get a petrichor undertone here than I do in stone. Incense is a listed note, but I don’t perceive an abundance of it, save for perhaps an ambient smokiness that feels more evocative of woodfire or lapsang souchong tea than something used in a liturgical setting. If anything, I do notice more of a warmth reminiscent of steam than of fire. This is tampered with a dampness that reminds me distinctly of firewood that has been rained on and is too water-logged to use. Cup is certainly the bolder and more prominent of the two fragrances, but it still carries a sort of gentle tranquility about itself, and does not necessarily neatly fit within the established genres of “woody” or “amber-driven” powerhouses. If one was to think about the title cup in the same way Pittard previously considered stone, I find this an interesting and unconventional take on the essence of “cup-ness.” Where some might derive scents of beverages or liquor, I moreso feel a stability and assuredness here that echoes the use-value of a cup: something to hold, something to contain. While not explicitly stated as designed accords, the sum total of organic ingredients here evokes the lichen underbrush qualities of a scent like Morel Map, and very much feels connected to an imagined landscape in the hills of Virginia. If stone is winter turning into spring, this is decisively summer turning into fall. Cup smells like moistened woods blowing through teeming ploughs of forest reserves. If stone is inside looking out - tea and catching glimpses of snow falling through your wilderness studio window - cup is the outdoors beginning to encroach upon the sanctity of human-made structures. I won’t often professedly describe scents as quote unquote “witchy,” because I feel like that term gets overused for certain things that don’t actually smell like a dark magical brew. That said, there is something alchemical happening here, and the material referents for the way her materials smell do recall homeopathic remedies and homemade folk magic in equal measure. Wear cup when the leaves on the trees start to turn brown, and your world closes in with the shortening of daylight to encircle only those precious things most important to you. If stone is a sharp breath in, cup is a long breath out. While our sense of smell is clearly associated with inhalation, it can’t ever yield its fruits without an eventual exhalation. These two things need each other to exist. Stone and cup, breathe in, breathe out, repeat.

‘cup’ and ‘stone’ and their associated products can be purchased from Liza Pittard’s personal website, and from brick and mortar stockists everything, Feature Flora, and Stele in Chicago, Raleigh, and NYC respectively.

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

The notes are suitably strange and very much sensorial. The botanicals I get are a very coarse and fuzzy tomato leaf, alongside an adorable powdery-green reference to Amelia’s own name, “iris petals.” That said, the main players to my nose are two different abstract and wholly industrial accords: warm metal, and enamel powder. Kiral is no stranger to metallic accords, and they often pepper previous releases of hers like the arcade-themed Multiball and the plastic-leafy Kewpie Doll. Here, however, I very much am able to smell a distinct sort of warmth radiating out from the tinny metal notes, as if heated by a rotary drill and molded into a ring. My favorite and without a doubt the most unique accord present in this perfume is that of enamel powder. Into the drydown this is pretty much all I can smell: a very distinct almost sand-like sweetness buttressed by accents of playdough vanilla and pure plastic. It brings me right back to art school, where countless young people were going to town on various craft materials with dremels and saws in white walled rooms. I am very firmly a paint-my-own-nails mostly and get them done with gel if I want to treat myself a couple times a year kind of girl, but I am also very much reminded of getting SNS dip done at a nail salon. It’s a very unique mix of green and powdery that strangely reminds me of my favorite seasonal release from Pearfat: Only a Witch Cat. Designed for the Halloween season and themed after Obayashi’s 1977 psychedelic horror film House, that fragrance combines a strikingly similar vintage makeup powder smell with the herbal freshness of shiso leaf. They both feel, as Kiral will describe later on, sharp and astringent while also being warm and creamy.

What brings me back to this perfume, however, is the textural nature of how it wears. It is a deeply gritty experience, made from ingredients that often wear somewhat smoothly or combine in pretty ways. I do think it perfectly captures the aesthetic of Two Headed Star’s creations, inasmuch as it feels cute and sweet but in a very jagged, off-kilter, and homemade sort of way. Bringing the attention away from the finished product and into the act of creation itself, this perfume speaks of artists smelling like their own work. To satisfy my own curiosity about the composition of this fragrance, and to elaborate more on the intricacies of each of their own practices, I sent a few questions to Iris and Alie. What follows is the transcript of our individual interviews.

AR (Audrey Robinovitz): Can you elaborate a little bit on the enamel powder note? I love how gritty it feels to wear on skin, and I think you did an amazing job capturing a very non-natural smell that nevertheless feels so strangely specific.

AK (Alie Kiral): I loved working on the accord for the enamel and polish notes so specific to metal work and jewelry making - I’m so glad that the texture is coming across! I used some iris materials for a powdery, softness, but added some terpenic materials to give the accord some of that grittiness. Iris let me smell Tripoli polish when I visited her studio, which has a really beautiful waxy smell that I was super inspired by, so I also played with Sulfurol- a synthetic material that has this kind of leathery, crayon wax, uncanny smell. The combo of these makes for a kind of ethereal sparkly effect rooted in true to life metal shop materials.

AR: Do you yourself have any favorite perfumes by other people that you think do metallic or synthetic notes really well? I’m a huge fan of the tinny smell in Serge Lutens’ fizzy milk scent Dent de Lait, for example.

AK: Yes! I love Dent de Lait, that’s a great example. Mark Buxton’s work for Comme des Garcons often has that amazing synthetic hum to it. I also love Aqaysos by Pierre Guillaume - it has this crystalized wood effect that is genius and so sparkly. One of my all-time favorite perfumers, Bruno Fazzolari of FZOTIC also does this perfectly in Lampblack, with an inky note that is unforgettable and really captures the smell of fresh India ink.

AR: How many iterations did you go through for Little Star? What part do you think was the hardest to really nail down…

AK: I think all-in we made around 10 different versions - Iris had some pretty clear ideas from the start to work with and we always knew it should capture some scents of a metalworking shop. The hardest thing when collaborating with someone who isn’t a perfumer themselves is getting to the point where we’re speaking the same language - it can be so hard to describe what you like or dislike about a particular version of a perfume formula. Once it clicked, it really clicked though, and Iris had so many cool ideas, like the inclusion of some tomato leaf (one of her favorite scents) and using Virginian Cedarwood since she is from Virginia!

AR: Can you speak to some of your favorite raw materials to use in perfumery? Is there a specific material you haven’t gotten to fully display in a fragrance yet you’d like to really spotlight?

AK: This changes often, but off the top of my head today, I’ll say some of my favorites are shiso leaf, cade oil, jasmine, black cumin, and blood orange. I’m loving things that are sharp and astringent paired with really luscious creamy notes. I think I have a lot of recency bias with my favorite materials since they’re often ones that I am currently working with a lot! I really want to use Boronia flower absolute in something - it's crazy expensive so I would absolutely want it to be the star of the show, but it is very complex on its own with these wild berry and black tea facets. Both the expense and the dynamism of the material have made it hard to feature yet, but hopefully it will work its way into a formula soon!

AR: I want to ask this question to both of you: if Little Star was a person, what would they be like?

AK: Honestly, I picture Iris! This was a collab through and through, but Iris’s personality is really the soul of the fragrance. It’s soft and free spirited and very tender, while also being super playful. I helped guide the formulation, but Iris’s ideas are really what drove our direction. The uniqueness of each charm Iris made is so special and adds a bit of her to every bottle, too.

AR (Audrey Robinovitz): What was the process of developing this fragrance like on your end? Did you come to Alie with specific scent references, feelings, or just a general idea?

IA (Iris Amelia): Earlier this year I attended Alie’s valentines perfume workshop and made a fragrance inspired by my favorite movie Bottoms (2023), and from then on I knew I wanted to work with Alie on something special. I came to her with the desire to make something metallic and sweet, warm and curious, something that reflected our passions in unison. My biggest reference points in the beginning were Tom Ford’s Metallique and Ombré Leather, the first a warm and aldehydic summer fragrance and the second a fragrance that reminds me of sitting in my dentist's office while a hygienist cleans my teeth.

AR: Do you see a connection between how you made the charms for each bottle and how Alie designed the scent inside them? Were they made at the same time?

IA: Absolutely! We were doing a lot of parallel play, thinking and formulating and making in tandem. I would visit her studio and she would visit mine and we would show each other what we were doing in response to the conversations we were having. So while Alie was turning my fragrance novice musings into the perfume Little Star is now, I was working on the pear star charms that live on each bottle.

AR: Do you have any favorite fragrances outside of Alie’s work? Do you have any memories of having grown up around specific perfumes?

IA: Okay unfortunately I have the most basic answer imaginable but my favorite fragrance is Flowerbomb by Victor & Rolf. It’s sweet and girly and cute while maintaining a maturity level appropriate for a twenty six year old girl. Diptyques Eau Duelle and Nicki Minaj’s Pink Friday are also heavy hitters for me.

AR: What is some of the inspiration you take for your jewelry practice at large? What things inspire you most?

IA: My biggest inspirations are people. People on dates or in fights or in love or at work, people laughing and fighting and fucking and crying, people smiling and singing and and and and and! There is so much to explore and hear and experience and I love to do all of those things and then draw a smiley face about it.

AR: Which piece of yours has the most emotional meaning to you? Do you associate certain work with various times and places in your life?

IA: It’s hard to say anything other than Little Star, Alie and I labored over this for months and months to get it right and I’m so proud of what we accomplished. It was such an honor to collaborate with her and I take great pride in the work I put into this project. As a jeweler I’ve put my artistic practice on the back burner and Little Star has reinvigorated me creatively and for the first time since college I’m making work for my artistic practice and not just pieces of jewelry (that I’m very proud of and stand by!) intended for sale.

AR: I want to ask this question to both of you: if Little Star was a person, what would they be like?

IA: Ooooooo okay I do think the fragrance is a little autobiographical so in many ways it would be like me! It’s warm and inviting but loud and peculiar at the same time. Little Star is tender and sweet like the Madonna song she’s named after, but fun and feisty like Madonna herself. She’s definitely got some Alie in her too, proud to be niche and confident in its specificity.

Little Star is sold on Pearfat Parfum’s website, and is offered as a limited edition run.

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

When I heard that Phinney was releasing her first fragrance in association with LA-based t-shirt whisperers Hollywood Gifts, a dated sleazy ode to the fantasy persona of a semi-fictitious Playboy cover girl, I was all in. The tagline on Hollywood Gifts’ website is a quote from model and Playmate Dorothy Stratten: “It’s a fantasy. The girl in the centerfold doesn’t exist. She’s like a dream.” There are clearly Lynchian undertones here, but even moreso I see a clear connection to second wave political feminists like Gloria Steinem, or even the psychoanalytic theories of my favorite post-structuralists Kristeva et al. This is clearly a conscious embodiment of patriarchal fantasy, a hypertrophic play-acting at 20th century signifiers of surreptitious sex, luxury, and Tinseltown movie magic, and the erosion of a cohesive sense of self that comes with it. The olfactory signifiers of mass-market beauty products: chocolate, candy, cherry chapstick, all indicate the gap between promises of upward mobility to young women with very few options towards independence, and the drug-addled handsy pitfalls of glossy reiterations of high-octane businesses run on the inert potentiality of the female body. Immediately I go to perhaps my favorite series by my favorite photographer of all time, Cindy Sherman. Made in the wake of the institutional success of her Untitled Film Stills and named after the long landscape two-page photographic spread in the middle of a pornographic magazine: The Centerfolds (1891). Sharing the same title as Phinney’s perfume, these photographs are a temporal update from the Noir-era film stills that made Sherman’s career, and instead present huge two by four feet color renditions of then-contemporary pseudo-cinematic softcore scenes. Sherman once again stars as both model and photographer, assuming distressed or languid dissociated positions in moments of ambiguous exploitation. This is exactly the visual landscape I see Centerfold operating within: the smell of a woman who perhaps just got back from her job as a dancer, waiting on a heavily tattooed boyfriend slash promoter to storm loudly home demanding sex, lamenting the strange circumstances that brought her from a small town in doesn’t-matter Mississippi to Los Angeles. Maybe her mother was right, and she should have taken that position working at the local schoolhouse, maybe her congregation didn’t prayer circle hard enough over her head before she caught a redeye out to California…

This brings me to the scent itself. The opening is a blast of paper-sheer amaretto, not unsimilar to Hilde Soliani’s gorgeous Orgasmo. This is hardly one-note, however. There is a super fun more savory nut note Phinney describes as “Fancy Mixed Nuts,” which reminds me of the little bowl of snacks they serve at hotel bar counters. The most arresting accord, however, is an interplay between musk, styrax, and cherry, that smells exactly like the ChapStick name brand cherry chapstick. Plasticine airy and sweet, it takes me back to a time when I was too young to actually wear makeup, and I thought using the slightly melted cherry chapstick in my moms purse counted as licentiously dolling myself up. Into the drydown the styrax-musk cherry cloud continues, and I’m left with a sheer layer of waxy balm that feels like being sheepishly kissed all over by a slightly left of femme chapstick lesbian, a smell I selfishly covet like it were made of gold. There is a chocolate note that primarily takes shape in the opening, described as “heart-shaped box of milk chocolates,” but it feels far less like other more notable cocoa puff scents like Chocolate Greedy, and moreso like a general lactone milkiness that reminds me of those Dove brand milk chocolates that have stupid phrases written on the wrappers like “be authentically fearless,” meant to make up for years of misogynistic diet culture advertisement correlating women eating candy with being a very naughty girl. For her first perfume, there is a ton of sophistication here, and even though it employs tons of gourmand notes it never feels overly simple. I am reminded of the consciously girly cloud of powder and almonds in Goest’s abidingly lovely Dauphine. Almost humorously, it may moonlight as sleazy and cheap, but this has all the subtle hallmarks of a perfume made for people with more refined taste. If Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls was a perfume, this would be it - a tasteful, stylized, outside-in self-aware portrait of homosocial competition between women in vacillating states of campy empowerment and cynical exploitation.

I’m willing to accept I may be reading into this concept too deep, but I do think between the gorgeous sexed up vintage-style advertisements and the imaginative tangents fragrantica reviewers have been embarking on, there’s something special happening here. I’ve found this perfume extremely easy to wear to work and very long-lasting, commanding a warm presence on my skin and enticing those around me. Surprising to those aware of my general vibe, I don’t often opt for hyper-femme fragrances on my own body unless they are as self-aware as this one. When I was little, before I really knew what perfume was, I longingly looked up to older girls I knew in school-halls or older sisters’ rooms, who all seemed to have a sort of intoxicating heart-skipping smell to them, one at the time I just assumed came naturally from being older and way more pretty than me. Others have picked up on this, but there’s a really unique sort of dated smell to this that feels like a young child’s idea of what cool girls smell like. Modern women would of course find this tacky and woreish, and opt to douse themselves in toxic levels of “your skin but better” perfumes and gleefully buy the same reiteration of the dry pickle smell taken from Santal 33 and transposed into the new mindless Glossier flanker. Wearing Centerfold, however, takes me back to a time in which girls didn’t poop and your sister’s friend takes you back from school in the back of her trashed sedan, while you catch upsetting and confusingly enticing glances of her long highlighted hair and deep brown eyes through the reflection of the rearview mirror. I guess when all is said and done this is a sort of plastic cherry chocolate perfume with some passing similarity to Vera Wang Princess, and I am waxing poetic ad infinitum because I used to love that scent, but again, if this is the kind of thing you like, or even the kind of thing you used to like and now think you’re too good for, I think you’ll find yourself taken against your better instincts along for the ride as well.

I for one, am excited for the era of scent-critics turned perfumers, and am eagerly awaiting what Phinney decides to do next. As much as I am sometimes frustrated with the overproduction boom of people trying to market perfume to a new hyper-conscious group of collector prosumers, when it hits it really does hit. I personally think you should pre-order a bottle of this perfume, and maybe while you’re at it I personally think you should stop getting waxed and help bring womankind back to an era where Miss July could rock full bush on the dollar store magazine’s centerfold. It’s personally motivated yes, but it’s also what Hugh Hefner (PBUH) would have wanted.

Centerfold can be preordered through Hollywood Gifts. Bottles will ship in August/September.

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

It is in these contexts which I am considering the four perfumes that make up Serviette’s debut collection, four dainty 50ml eaux de parfums and a 2ml sample set that I think if nothing else, are absolutely worth your time and precursory exploration.

My immediate favorite, the suggestively named “Byronic Hero” is by far the least subtle fragrance in Taylor’s repertoire. Taking, as previously mentioned, a well known but tasteful genre: the rose-oud, and rendering it approachable and idiosyncratic. The main draw here is the stated diesel exhaust note. It is hardly airy and atmospheric like Chris Rusak’s AEOOJ (LMB), or aggressively metallic like Rubini’s Nuvolari. It more so reads to me like a cheese-like stink to accompany the spicy saffron-laden oud. I’m not always the biggest fan of rose notes, but here it’s the specific kind of oh-so-dramatically drippy jammy rose that makes me forget my many misgivings towards the queen of flowers. I see immediate similarities to the loud NoLiTa banger Notorious Oud from similar city kids DS and Durga. To me, saffron screams not only luxury, but young money. It is an essential wing of the decisively un-subtle Baccarat Rouge F-22 fighter jet that hasn’t let up on its nearly decade-long arial attack route on the clueless financially endowed women of corporate America. I am very much endeared to its use here, however. I could see this being the perfect perfume to turn heads at a lit-mag opening, but something I would equally want to wear at home on a rainy day. It is a suitable introduction to stylized oud for those looking to widen their tree tastes beyond the sweetness of sandalwood, but has that same sort of addictive coyly plastic astringency that made Vilhelm Parfumerie’s Faces of Francis one of my most worn perfumes of the last year. I think Byronic Hero does what Serviette does best, which is delicately tow the line between accessible and experimental in a hyper-stylized package that whispers longingly to be posted, retweeted, and shared. Perhaps not as moody as the name might suggest, I think it is absolutely full bottle worthy no matter your previous experience with oud wood or morbidly brooding poetry.

This was perhaps the most challenging entry in the collection to my nose. The opening was a very bare bones rhubarb, which I can always be convinced of. But then enters another fun fantasy accord: weed smoke. To be honest, my dad is a stoner and I am a catholic convert, so I don’t have the most experience or fond memories with cannabis. I don’t exactly get the skunk-like photorealistic essence of its smoke here, like I do in something like Filigree and Shadow’s amazingly skeezy YOUR LOVE INSIDE ME. Like Byronic Hero, this is more so a supporting herbaceous note for other more traditional accords, and here the accord is an almost fougère-like geranium and patchouli blend. Certainly earthy and green, I see only fleeting connections between its name, “Sour Diesel,” and its scent. I do absolutely think it possesses a sort of sour quality to it, which I think is very much appealing to the right person with the right, shall we say taste. I can see this wearing well on a tall man in distressed denim, it almost evokes the vibe of your older brother’s room in his teenage years. Not even just because of the weed, but because the watery sort of green notes somewhat recall similar herb based masculine compositions like Polo. If you’re the type of consumer to seek out orange wine on purpose, you might need to smell this. Not completely my style, but I think anything that can Trojan-Horse the tart smell of rhubarb into mainstream olfactory culture is something to be celebrated.

It took a second for this fragrance to grow on me, but grow it absolutely did. Ruche is perhaps the most difficult scent from the collection to nail down. It does not exist firmly within the boundaries of perfume I smell frequently. I loved hearing Taylor go on record saying this perfume started out as his attempt at constructing a naturalistic raspberry note. As one of my favorite fruits to eat, I’ve never fully been able to connect with raspberry on its own in perfume – as I think it often reads far more wet synthetic saccharine than dry powdery lipstick, as I would prefer it to. Here, however, I am far more impressed by seemingly mature undertones of creamy sandalwood and piquant pink pepper. This is a far cry from your average raspberry body mist, and instead evokes a sort of dandyish suited champagne charm. Indeed the first thing I thought of was the underrated fragrance Life of the Party by Clara Weale’s UK-based house Early Modern. They both evoke well dressed, spindly men, toasting endless glasses of fruity cocktails at undeniably reputable functions. Maybe the most immediately wearable of the four fragrances, I think there is a great deal more nuance here than one would expect at first glance of its notes. A base of galbanum keeps things green and not-too-sweet. This is a fruity perfume for people who like fruit, but shy away from its typical over-the-top representation in the mass market perfume counter. There is a through line of almost culinary bitterness here, that I somewhat see present in all of Serviette’s debut collection, creating the aforementioned impression of cultured maturity. All things considered, Ruche is an effervescent raspberry sandalwood scent that wears tepid and easygoing on the skin. If Jorum Studio’s enchanting Healing Berry is foraging feral wildberries, this is the most civilized possible version of the fruit.

This is the collection’s ace in its sleeve, and the one that clearly carries the most wow-factor in the currency of sample kit first impressions. I found the gorgeously titled Frisson d’Hiver (trans. winter chill) underwhelmingly delicate on paper, but once worn on skin, sprung to life in tones of aching musks and sweet white florals. Lily of the valley, my professed favorite flower of all time, is given centerfold treatment, but it is not necessarily a soliflore. I pick up supporting notes of creamsicle orange blossom a-la the super-sunny masterpiece Fleurs d’Oranger, and a cool minerality described by Taylor as an ice accord. My own mentor Matt Morris noted this before me, but despite its name, this is a deeply summery perfume. To be fair, I have yet to have the chance to wear it on a freshly snowed morning a-la a similar delicate winter floral l’Eau d’Hiver, but today, in freakishly humid Chicago June days, it cools me down like a fresh popsicle hewn from little white flower buds. Underlying the floral notes is an almost milky vanilla effervescence that reminds me specifically of Milkis soft drinks: not super sweet but mellow and almost yoghurt-like. I truly don’t think I could ever get tired of wearing something like this. It’s simple but smart, and brings a smile to my face as surely as spring flowers sprout up from underneath the snow. Other potential references are the viscously underrated Labdanum 18 from Le Labo - which wears like a silken pair of opera gloves, and certainly feels like Maurice Roucel reprising the sensual warmth of Musc Ravageur without any of the spice. Between this and Clue’s Dandelion Butter, I’m beginning to notice a microtrend of DIY perfumers trying their hand at floral gourmands, a type of perfume actually exceedingly rare, despite itself. It is here that I see Trey’s confessed mentor, my friend and longtime NYC-based perfumer Marissa Zappas’ hand most clearly. I am reminded of a similar sort of whipped cream florality I get from her amazing Carnival of Souls. As someone who used to be fairly vocally critical of gourmand notes, I am actually really excited by these types of perfumes. I think a fragrance like Frisson d’Hiver is sweet and inviting, but contains enough complexity to sidestep the body spray allegations and justify its price point.

What really charms me about how Serviette is presented as a brand concept is how far it feels from the aesthetic sensibilities of DIY. I think the current cultural moment is so inundated with autodidact perfumers that the aesthetics of having made something oneself are no longer novel enough to garner any sort of underdog sympathy. These are very cohesive, very professional looking bottles, that just so happen to have been made by one person in a single studio. If independent niche perfume is to feasibly compete with established designer and legacy niche houses, which I think it very much is currently doing, it need not rest too heavily on its own laurels. While I often do caution against relying too heavily on perfume houses who frontload eye-catching design to mediocre scent, vice versa, it is no longer enough to be able to make passably good perfume, you must be able to tell compelling stories alongside it, both in the realm of olfactory creation, and in the realms of visual product design. I think other examples of entrepreneurs and creatives currently dominating this game are many people I have already happily covered in my freelance career: Cherry Cheng from Jouissance, Laura and Caleb from Clue, Marissa Zappas and her new rebrand (with clear connection to Taylor), and among people I’m not actively friends with, houses like Stora Skuggan, Thin Wild Mercury, and FZOTIC. They all mix DIY fragrance sensibilities with a far more optimized visual presentation. I could, in joking theory, see any of these perfumes presented at a Nordstrom and not visually look out of sorts among abandoned bottles of Chanel Chance and endless YSL Libre flankers. It is these kinds of perfumes that make me genuinely excited to see the ten year industry consequences of the explosion of interest in perfume among a younger, more internet-savvy generation. With houses like Serviette at their disposal, I think the younger generation is well equipped to handle the onslaught of commodity fetishism lasciviously thrown their way, and to emerge celibate and victorious with a few unique bottles of something tasteful, nothing more nothing less.

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

AR: Audrey Robinovitz

CV: Caleb Vanden Boom

LO: Laura Oberwetter

AR: Thanks so much for sitting down with me to talk about your new release. It’s honestly crazy, I somehow feel like Clue has been a part of my life for years, but also very vividly remember Winter of 2023 when you first launched. I’m sure it’s been a crazy ride since.

CV: I was thinking about that piece you wrote for us when we first launched. I remember when it came out, I think we were both at home for winter break? It was around Christmas or New Years – but I called Laura and we were both freaking out.

LO: Yeah, it was crazy.

CV: We were so theoretical about things for so long, and were worrying if anyone would get the various threads we were weaving together.

AR: Totally, I happened to not be in Chicago when you launched, which was a shame, because I had definitely been active in the Chicago perfume scene for a while, and I really did feel like we needed what you guys were doing.

AR: Do either of you have a favorite memory over the last two years that really exemplifies what Clue has done for you?

LO: When we did ‘The Point’ screenings, where we played the film and smelled our perfume alongside it. The first screening I think was my favorite memory, because that was an event I wished existed so badly and it felt so good to see other people respond to that hunger that I felt, and be excited to show up and see it. I think we ended up doing four screenings, and by the end of the last one I was definitely feeling overwhelmed. But the first one was such a high. It really did feel like we could do the kind of things we always wanted to see and they would be received well.

CB: I might add too, one of my favorites was our launch party. It truly went so much better than we thought. It was thrilling to see so many random people just show up, and it felt like such a nice introduction for us. I like doing things in person. And another one was definitely our Slipper release: Like Mesh. I was such a doubter about it, and I totally thought no one was going to find it, or it would take weeks for people to become interested. But it sold out right away, and I was totally taken by surprise.

AR: I was shocked too by how quickly you guys sold out. It’s truly an ‘if you build it they will come’ situation, where people are definitely looking for niche perfume events in Chicago, but also a niche perfume house that really works in multiple more intellectual disciplines. It really feels like you guys are scratching an itch very few people have been able to reach.

LO: That’s so good to hear. It’s an itch that I've always wanted someone else to scratch, and working almost feels like a reluctant “I guess we have to do it.”

CV: That one felt exciting to me, because it felt like people were really invested in the work we were doing in a way I haven't quite seen before.

AR: How was visiting Lisbon for your Art and Olfaction Awards nomination? I’m sure that must have been an amazing trip.

LO: Oh, it was really fun! It was kind of funny too, because my whole family came, and then Caleb was there with us. So we were all just going on bike tours, we took a boat ride together. But everyone that was there from the IAO felt like celebrities to me. They were people I had only seen in prerecorded zoom classes, and it was so crazy to see them IRL under such surreal circumstances. Even to this day there are people we meet in the industry who I find out were at that event the same time we were. I almost wish we could go again and really truly meet everyone who was there.

AR: Well, hopefully you can come back for another nomination!

LO: We didn't submit anything this year, but the awards just happened. Maybe another time. We’re so busy right now.

CV: So much if it was completely over my head but I had so much fun absorbing it all. I remember someone was passing around pure serotonin, and it smelled like… a chlorine pool? It was in this beautiful ornate wood room, it was so hot, everyone was sweating like crazy, and it all just smelled unforgettable.

LO: It was so like, how did we get here. I have a little bit of that somewhere, I need to find it.

AR: They let you take pure serotonin through Customs?

LO: Yeah, I guess they did!

AR: It’s not related to your new release, but I have to say. I think Candlestick is my most worn perfume of all time. I’m an altar server at my church, and specifically, the moment after mass where I’ve just snuffed out all of the candles, and I have a little bit of pre-consecrated wine on my hands from handing off the cruets to my priest, that’s exactly how Candlestick smells to me.

LO: Oh my God, that's awesome.

AR: That said, I think Dandelion Butter is coming for my second favorite slot, it’s so easy to wear, and truly feels so nostalgic. It seems like nostalgia is a huge reference point for pretty much all of the Clue releases - are you particularly nostalgic people?

LO: I don’t know if I am? I do think I remember a lot from childhood, but I don't spend a particularly long time… reminiscing… I’m not often longing for childhood.

AR: It’s definitely a very confusing time.

CV: I think I might be more nostalgic than Laura. It’s often a reference point for me that comes up a lot. That said a lot of the things we reference are maybe rooted in past memories, but have also stayed around. Like Morel Map for example, we hunted for mushrooms as a kid, but we still do that now. I think this new one might be the most nostalgic by the books.

LO: I think for me, when we’re trying to construct something that might reference an experience that happens in childhood, a lot of the time I don't think the tone is overly celebratory or wistful. It’s a lot of analysis of how you interpreted those circumstances as a child, and how you would face things differently with a little more developed brain. It’s often a reflection on how little we knew back then.

AR: I see that a lot in Candlestick. I remember you mentioned it being a reflection on taking First Communion. And all things considered that can be a really scary situation for a child sometimes, with a lot of things going on that feel very confusing.

LO: Totally.

AR: I’ve noticed such a unique and beautiful consumer response to your fragrances, Warm Bulb especially. When I first smelled the collection before its launch, I could tell the mix of familiar and experimental accords in Warm Bulb would probably make it the bestseller. I remember you mentioning it was a last-minute addition to the line. What’s the story behind how it joined the debut collection?

LO: Yeah. So I had been working on The Point, and we thought The Point was going to be the third one. And it literally just was the first time I smelled immortelle. I was struck by how much it smelled like a warm light bulb, but at the time I just bookmarked it as something to come back to. But then I had ordered a bunch of musks that I think I was planning on using in The Point. One of them I opened, and again I was struck like wow, that's another warm light bulb smell. So I just couldn’t resist combining them, and seeing if that increased the effect, and researching how to push it closer and closer to that electronic buzzing smell. It just became irresistible and distracting. I also feel like it was filling a hole the debut collection needed. It just felt balanced. There wasn't really a conversation between Caleb and I about it, it was just like: this one is getting really close to being done, we should probably add it.

CV: Its really interesting watching Laura work, because it feels like how I've heard musicians describe their process, where you’ll have a melody or a riff that’s been going for years. You often hear artists talking about a certain track being intended for the debut, but they were never able to crack it. But then maybe this other song materialized in a week right before the album release. I like that, some things just naturally taking longer to mature.

AR: I feel like in my own practice, I feel like some of the most successful work I make is the work I make while I'm procrastinating on the work that I feel like I have to be doing. I have this big grand project, and in the meantime I’m like, I might as well just tinker with this little thing. And before you know it the little thing becomes the big project, and the big project becomes overshadowed. And honestly sometimes its really frustrating, but if you open yourself up to the process it's pretty funny.

LO: I can't wait until we've been out for so long that we can put out something we've been toiling on for years and years. I really want a hard nut to crack, one that's just baking forever.

CV: There’s a few that Laura had before we even launched that I’m still thinking about.

AR: Looking back on the creation of that scent, do you see a thru-line between Warm Bulb and Dandelion Butter? They both share really warm almost dusty vanilla-like tones to me.

LO: Mhmmm. That’s so interesting. I think that Warm Bulb and Dandelion Butter feel like sisters, but then we’ve had a couple of people call Dandelion Butter the sweet little sister to Morel Map. I don’t see it, but they both have the same sort of soft comfort I guess.

CV: Morel Map is closest in story definitely.

AR: One of my favorite things about Dandelion Butter is how the gourmand tones blend seamlessly with the floral notes. The “snapped stem” and “milky sap” notes come through so vividly it makes me want to start eating flowers. How difficult was it to keep that balance in creating the formula?

LO: The balancing is kind of my favorite part. I love finding harmony in scents. I was having a lot of fun – and this is also similar to Warm Bulb – I was finding the materials I had to use to create the floralcy of Dandelion Butter were flowers that felt gourmand in the same way that immortelle felt gourmand. There was just a lot of existing synchronicity in those materials. Honestly it was so hard to get actual dandelions when I was working on it, it felt like so much of my effort was spent on finding a lot of real dandelions so I could have something to reference in my work.

AR: That's fascinating. I feel like when I first heard about the perfume I was like, I need to go smell some dandelions, because I honestly wasn't too familiar with how they smell. But its a sort of musty smell? It’s also sort of gritty in a way that's really visceral and delicious. I feel like you did a good job capturing it. I’m thinking of a lot of other dandelion scents, like maybe the Perfumer H one was my previous reference? Tthat scent is pretty good, but the focus seems to be more on soft florals. Just generally, there's a focus on what something should smell like vs what it actually does. I feel this way about cherry blossom notes or peony notes. A lot of those flowers really don't smell like you think they do. Cherry blossoms barely have a smell, and if they do, it’s chalky and weird and not fruity and bright. I think you did a good job getting across that more realistic sense of a dandelion.

LO: Thank you so much. That was definitely the hardest part.

AR: This question is more to Caleb, but I’m sure both of you could answer. I’ve always loved how the design work you’ve done for Clue mixes really sophisticated references and techniques with childish whimsy. It’s cute, but never unserious. What inspiration did you take for the visuals behind this release?

CV: Have we talked a little bit about the folklore behind it? It’s a story we love, and have talked about just between us so much. It’s often a childhood tale that's passed between children. It’s funny. We talk to people, and its about 50/50 how many people have actually played the game we’re referencing before. And some people in places you wouldn't expect, like in Europe even, are very familiar with the story. So I think childhood whimsy is totally a part of it, but we wanted to capture that feeling of the scrawl and the messiness and the play without it feeling too immature. Some of the visuals we’ve thought about that might be tertiary, but still inform the public-facing designs were grass stained jeans, things like that. We looked at a lot of interesting stuff, some things I found on Ebay and got for Laura. This is from an old dandelion festival in New Jersey. I love the colors and the irreverence of it. A big part of the visuals for this have come from an artist we worked with, his name is Rasmus Nilsson. When we started this project I really wanted to work with a different illustrator for each scent, so that each time it could feel like its own little world with its own stylistic reference point. And his work really felt like it captured the whimsy and humor we were looking for, but with a real refined sensibility. And we were so excited, because he sent over literally hundreds of little sketches. He scanned his whole sketchbook and just sent over raw pages. Tons of little bits of lettering and doodles and scribbled dandelions. I was genuinely so surprised we could use all of these - because artists are normally so protective of their rougher processes, but I was so happy to be pulling from these messy, more in-process sketches, because it really felt like the feeling I wanted to capture. Not all of that work is out yet, but its definitely going to come out over the release of this perfume more and more.

LO: We were really so lucky, it was just like a peek into his head.

AR: And I love that archival reference you found online. The little guy here is giving. It’s so you guys.

CV: And at our launch event in Chicago at Tusk, a friend of mine is going to make drinks based on the recipes found in that old book. I'm so excited.

LO: It really does feel like between these references and the work Rasmus Nilsson sent us, we're sitting on a gold mine of material for this release.

AR: It’s definitely best to work from an abundance of material, and just have the work by subtracting.

CV: We have this video coming out soon, where I used a ton of his drawings to form the intro.

AR: Oh wow, that design reminds me of the negative etching of woodblock prints or something.

CV: I’ve loved his work for a long time, and am so glad he was interested. And the actual illustration we ended up using on the bottle, we went back and forth on it for a while, but the one we landed on its a little mini version of the story. The whole game is putting a dandelion under someone else's chin, and here in this little illustration there’s a little dandelion under the bigger flower's chin.

AR: OMG that's so adorable I never noticed that!

LO: It’s subtle, but we appreciate that. If it was any more on the nose, it would be too much.

AR: It’s funny that’s a great transition into the next question I wanted to ask. I have my new bottle of Dandelion Butter sitting right next to the original bottle of With the Candlestick, and it made me reflect on the ways in which your bottle design has subtly been refined. What were the decisions you made in making and improving upon your bottle design?

CV: Oh totally. When we started, we didn't know what we were doing at all. We quickly learned what we originally had wasn't going to work long-term. Is your original bottle even holding up still?

AR: It’s definitely discolored, but structurally it’s fine!

CV: The first batch of bottles we made was under 100 total copies for everything. At at a certain point we were just like, these things aren’t holding up. its tricky because in order to do a lot of what we’re doing you need to be hitting high minimums, unless you have a lot of money. And we don't have investors, and we’re not rich. We started from a little bit of money that we basically put right back into the process. We were trying to look for clever solutions when we started that allowed us to cut costs, but now that we have some profit we were able to print on the actual glass, and switch who we worked with for the caps, and really dial in the color and finish. Because the first ones were a little…

AR: Yeah that was the first thing I noticed, the new caps look so much cleaner.

LO: They're crisp now, and so milky…

CV: It’s hard, because without getting too in the weeds – there's basically only two places in the world that do stuff like this, and if we were starting with investment money we would have likely ordered tons of trials to evaluate them, but we were only really able to look at a blurry picture on WhatsApp and be like… yeah, I guess that’s good. I want to redo everything eventually. We’re going to redo the boxes soon, but it’s always an iterative process for us. The main idea is still there, but the new ones are definitely better. We honestly just needed some more money to get it to that point.

AR: More specifically, behind the inspiration for Dandelion Butter - did either of you play that childhood game when you were young?

CV: Oh yeah.

LO: Caleb did. When he first explained the story to me, I honestly thought it was just something that happened in his school. But the more I sat with it the more it felt familiar, and to this day I can't tell if its something I actually did experience when I was a kid, or if I was just able to tap into these memories that everyone else was having. There’s something so intuitively familiar about the game, which is odd because its so illogical. There’s nothing there that actually makes sense, so there's no way it would be stuck in your brain unless it happened to you.

AR: It was definitely pre-internet too, so its not like kids could have been looking up the game. it was spread through a sort of oral tradition.

CV: We started out just researching it for fun, and there’s not that much out there. It doesn't show up in movies, we haven't really found it much in literature.

LO: It’s in The Virgin Suicides.

AR: I was going to bring that up!!

LO: I just so happened to be listening to the audiobook while I was filling bottles, and it honestly stopped me in my tracks, because that was the first time I had heard anyone else refer to it.

AR: The Jeffery Eugenedes book is interesting. I was a huge fan of the Sofia Coppola movie when I was younger, then I got really into comparing the movie with the book to point out subtle creative choices Coppola had made. I think Eugenedes gives himself way more license to fill out his world in the book. Sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.

LO: The book is really fun. The way that the Dandelion Butter game is so stylistically typical of the whole book, its written in with such a malaise. Like they’re lounging in the grass, asking if Lux likes butter. It’s such a subtle reference. It’s kind of a prattling description of summer in the suburbs.

CV: It’s kind of weird, because you feel like it would be out there more. I definitely have lots of good memories of doing it as a kid. I mean, do you?

AR: I didn’t personally, but It does remind me of the different ways children in my hometown played with flowers. When I was growing up in South Carolina, we took honeysuckle and ate the stamen and sap like candy. I feel like that was my version of interacting with flowers. It was barely even a game, you just ate them and were like “yayyy.”

LO: I think dandelions particularly, because they’re weeds no one is precious about and adults don't yell at you for touching them… We’ve had people come to us with other games they played with the flowers… Like one that goes “Mama had a baby and its head popped off!” Which is just when you would pick it and pop off the cap. I don’t really know what it means.

AR: I feel like the only dandelion game I remember is you just blew them and you made a wish.

LO: There’s a similar thing where you blow on it and the number of seeds left is supposed to tell you the time… I don’t know if it works but–

AR: It’s definitely a participatory flower.

LO: It really is. They’re so abundant, they’re just always there.

CV: I feel like it’s almost just like a toy at the ready. Laura and I were talking about theories behind how it started, it’s in different regions of the world. One theory says it could have just started with one kid. And maybe he told his friend who moved away, and it traveled like a virus. Another theory could be that its just instinct, and it sprouted all over the world independently of itself. It’s almost natural for children to play with it and think of something.

AR: I’m reminded simultaneously of religion and memes. It’s both an inside joke, but also something where people are seeing the same natural world and developing similar theories on how to interact with it. Like differing religious traditions across the world that all point to similar places.

CV: I think that's another reason we got so excited about this idea. It feels like something that's in so many people’s heads, but decades old. A lot of people, when we tell them the story, they’re so surprised they remember it. And I love that. It feels like something that hasn’t been tapped into for a really long time.

LO: I got that book over there: “The People of the Playground,” hoping it would have an answer. Because when we were trying to find a cause for this, I got really into the study of children's games, like rhymes and clapping games. And that book is literally just a woman who sat on a playground every day for fifteen months and wrote down everything children were doing. And I think there are a couple rhymes about butter in there, but not the game specifically. It’s really funny how in a lot of cases, the same things are being said on lots of different playgrounds.

AR: Totally. When I was in school I read a lot of Winnicott. He’s really into children’s play as a very psychoanalytic indicator of maturation. The main work he did on the subject is called "Playing and Reality.” I think he mostly talks about how children play as a way to test out establishing psychic independence from the mother. Like it’s all basically just them making these little worlds, where sometimes there’s hostility or conflict, and testing out operating within them on their own. It plays a huge part in how they differentiate themselves from being attached mentally and physically to their caregivers.

LO: Totally, I read a lot about that. There’s also a lot about who rhymes and games help children who don’t have the innate social skills to have a conversation. So they can have these rules to follow. We were really interested in how specifically, this ritual provides such an easy excuse for a child to get close to somebody. And for a lot of kids, this might be the first time someone who isn't your family was so close to you. It feels so intimate, and really revealing of something greater than your preference for butter. Just because children are sort of emboldened to interact with each other by this script that doesn't really make any sense.

CV: Yeah, I mean the way I remember doing it as a kid felt very much like teasing, almost in a flirty way. I wonder if that game was some children’s first time flirting? Or interacting with someone they like…

AR: This is the question I wanted to ask you guys the most. It ties back into a lot of what we were talking about. What were each of you like as kids? I was a weirdly intense child. I spent a lot of time in my local public library, and I loved foraging for flowers. I spent a lot of time alone.

LO: That’s a fun question, I was just thinking about this. I wish I had an outside perspective, because I feel like I was just so… normal.

AR: Not to flex!

LO: I don’t know! I think I was really… My mom would get annoyed with me because I would get really obsessed with things and not let them go. And those things were like halloween costumes or decorating my room. I was on a swim team, and I was really obsessed with beating my times. I really loved the smell of certain items. Like Ban Fresh Cotton Deodorant, I was addicted to that smell. So I guess as normal as you could be while also being addicted to deodorant.

CV: The thing my mom always said is when I was a kid I was extremely polite. Like almost too polite. That was the feedback I always got when I slept over at other people’s houses. It was just a lot of like… “thank you so much for dinner!”

LO: You’re still like that, that’s so funny!

CV: I think I was a pretty social kid. I really loved trains. I liked making forts and playing with sticks.

AR: To be fair, I feel like making forts is one of the top three things to do as a child. It really did hit different.

CV: Totally.

AR: Do each of you have a favorite ice cream flavor? I swear this will become relevant soon.

CV: It reveals so much about me, but last week I was talking to someone about Blue Moon. I think it’s regional?

AR: I think so too. Because I was talking with a childhood friend about Superman ice cream, but the one I had in South Carolina apparently didn’t taste like it was supposed to. Because the one I had was definitely more like blue raspberry. And I think in the Midwest it’s actually its own unique thing.

CV: Woah! Supermint was like blue raspberry. Yeah, I’ve never heard of that. I’ve only ever had it sort of like vanilla. Which in retrospect was weird because it has such bright colors.

AR: Yeah when I had it as a kid it was totally like neon raspberry, but it didn’t have the actual Blue Moon flavor in it I think. We never had that in the south. I don’t think I've ever tried it.

CV: It’s really plain. I had a birthday party recently, and my mom used to make me a treat called Purple Cow, which was like a root beer float with grape ice cream. And for my birthday party I made it for everyone, and it definitely got mixed reviews - a lot of people did not like it. But I remember it being really good. I guess these are like similar stories resurfacing, like childhood games and childhood treats.

LO: I feel really bad about my stance on ice cream, because I don't really like it that much, and I don’t know why. But I do really like Affogato, if that counts. And the other thing I like, which feels a couple steps removed from ice cream, is the cream cheese base ice cream that Jeni’s makes.

AR: I love that one, it basically just tastes like eating cream cheese frosting.

LO: And cream cheese frosting is one of my favorite foods. So yeah, definitely that.

AR: Now do each of you have a favorite flower? What kind of combination would your favorite ice cream and favorite flower make?

CV: This is such a fun question.

LO: I think mine is dandelions! I like how humble and plentiful they are.

AR: I feel like cream cheese ice cream and dandelions is literally just Dandelion Butter. So that actually makes a lot of sense.

CV: I really like bleeding hearts.

AR: That’s such a good answer. What they lack in smell they make up in appearance.

CV: Oh yeah, I guess they didn’t really have a smell. We always had them in my yard, and they were so crazy to look at. There’s really nothing like it. Another favorite, it’s not really a flower… is Jack-in-the-pulpit.

LO: He’s always going on about Jack-in-the-pulpit!

AR: That’s such a Protestant flower name. I love it.

CV: It’s called that because, and you’re going to love this, when you look at it from the front, it looks like a little preacher inside of a box, if you lift up the top part.

AR: Aw that’s so cute! That’s a good plant, I’ve never heard of it before. I feel biased, but my favorite flower is definitely lily of the valley – it’s really difficult to do in perfumery, but they look like little fairy hats and smell like baby angel's tears.

CV: What’s your favorite lily of the valley perfume?

AR: Oh that's a good question. I think the original version of Diorissimo, if you can get your hands on it from Surrender to Chance or something, is immaculate. In terms of modern lily of the valley perfumes, Comme des Garçons has a good soliflore, it’s very bare bones. That new brand Serviette, I really like their perfume Frisson d'Hiver. It has a strong Lily of the Valley opening with a cool vanilla drydown. I smelled the debut line in New York at Stéle a few months ago. I was surprised. People in New York don’t seem to know about Clue as much! They’re not tapped in.

LO: That’s why we’re going on tour!

CV: Well just based on stats I do think that’s our highest market, but it’s also just a way more populous city, so it might not really show.

AR: Do you guys have a previous butter perfume you looked at for inspiration? To me, January Scent Project’s Selperniku is the definitive butter fragrance. It’s so gorgeous.

LO: When we were nailing down the final version, I did get a couple samples to reference. But like you said, the way something smells in real life and the way it always smells in perfume is hugely different, which is what we saw with dandelions. The way the smell in real life wasn't really the way we were seeing them portrayed by most perfumers. Butter was a bit different though. I got some Hilde Soliani, some others I can’t remember. But what was really exciting for me about this release was trying to capture a cold salted butter accord. I didn't want it to be too fatty or rich. There’s something about most people mixing a butter note with caramel or vanilla that pushes the smell in that rich direction, but we really wanted to capture the aroma of a cold salted slab of butter on its own.

AR: I think you guys did that really well! It honestly does not smell like anything else I’ve ever come across.

LO: Thank you so much! I honestly don't know that many other perfumes that smell like butter, so I would be interested to smell the ones you were mentioning.

AR: Onto some more abstract questions. If Dandelion Butter was a person, what would they be like?

CV: The dandelion wine guy on the vintage pamphlet. Not really but–

AR: Omg totally, let me look at that again. He’s so cool.

LO: No but really, I don’t want to say it would be a child. Because I don’t think it would be. That's sort of a line we’ve been dancing around with all of our visual work, and we’re working on a piece of music even. With all of these things we’re working from a world that is sort of specifically the flavor of idea that could only come from a child's brain. But we didn't want to have it be a juvenile, simplistic baby scent. So I don't think it would be a kid. I think it would be… a sweet, kind girl. Somebody with grass stains on their jeans, a really nice lotion on, soft skin, shiny hair…

CV: I think somebody that likes being outside. A very warm person.

LO: I’m thinking no sunscreen and freckles.

AR: Exactly. have you anthropomorphized your scents before? Your collection is like a cute little family to me.

CV: That's a fun exercise! I don’t think so.

AR: But you did it before a little bit, when you said Dandelion Butter was like a little sister to Morel Map. I can totally see them all as like… little people interacting with each other.

LO: I think the default we always go with is pairing each of the scents with a specific space, or a sound, or even a time period. And color obviously.

AR: I’m really fascinated with the idea of pairing perfumes with a time period. What time period are the Clue scents?

LO: Well with Warm Bulb, this is something we hear from customers all the time – it feels like its sometime in the not so distant past. The time of your grandparents who have an electric blanket that is a little more dangerous than the electric blankets we have today. Or lightbulbs that are way less energy efficient than the ones we have today. And With the Candlestick feels like… 2003 in a church.

CV: Yeah I do really think that there’s a strong connection between Morel Map and Dandelion Butter. I mean they're both these little magical things that come from the earth. They both sprout at their own unique times of the year, we seek them out and we interact with them both in the past and today. I really like that connection.

AR: I think Warm Bulb and Dandelion butter would be best friends.

LO: I could see them being two sisters. One likes playing outside and the other stays inside all day.

2ml decants and 30ml bottles of Dandelion Butter can be purchased from Clue Perfumery’s standalone website, and through affiliated stockists.

Established in 2022 by childhood friends — perfumer Laura Oberwetter, and designer Caleb Vanden Boom — Clue is an independent perfumery finding delight in unexpected places. Drawing upon surprising references, Clue’s work balances surreal vignettes with the familiar appeal of perfume. With a close group of friends and collaborators, Clue develops everything in-house. Every product produced has been designed, composed, formulated, bottled, assembled, and shipped by hand from Clue’s studio and lab in Chicago.

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.

Launched late last year with a cinematic set of photos and a chic reception at Stele, this diptych of two perfumes seemingly harbors a dense conceptual background, but is revealed only by fragments of poetic stanzas and remembered vistas. “How do you balance the need for touch with the fear of being known?” - “why can’t we stay innocent forever?” Virgile beckons. I am weirdly reminded of similar concerns in apocalyptic Japanese bildungsromans like Oyasumi Punpun or Neon Genesis Evangelion. There’s a similar sense here that these perfumes carry an inherent sadness to them, of lost innocence sure, but also a childish sort of bratty refusal to process an at times gritty reality. I reach for my little decants when I’m feeling like shutting out the world and retreating into myself. As is clearly evident to my sensibilities, they only harbor such meaningful interior worlds, because Virgile as a creative has laced so much of himself into their compositions.

Baby Boy was the first thing I smelled from AMPHORA, and it remains my silent favorite. It is at once childishly powdery, salaciously animalic, and nostalgically sweet. Colored a deep purple, as if made of mixed up molasses, broken hearts and Pixy Stix, it sprays on like photorealistic baby powder and grape juice. Into the drydown, I get the full body of a more classical civet, married to rich, gummy-like peach. This is maybe what I wish cough syrup smelled like when I was a child, and feels uniquely easy and comforting to wear. The common denominator of almost all of Amphora’s fragrances, mentioned and unmentioned, is a sort of tactile sweatiness. Here, it serves to remove the audience strictly from childhood. Yes, I am overwhelmed by nostalgia, but I also feel the presence of a very adult kind of age-regression, almost an erotic play. While they don’t exactly smell similar, it reminds me incredibly in spirit of Universal Flowering’s Heliotrope Milkbath: a delightful little minx that straddles its wide-open legs in a skirt halfway between a night out at the symphony and a chlorinated pool tainted by urine. My own pretentious musings aside, this is an extremely versatile and rewarding perfume to wear, and has accompanied me to bed, to art openings, to work, to hookups, and everywhere in between. In many ways I think Baby Boy epitomizes the best of what independent perfumers have to offer the current hypertrophied and often bloated niche fragrance market: genuinely arresting and evocative perfumes that rest on simple combinations of deftly executed and inventive accords. There is a lot here that’s fun and inventive, but there’s also a clear sense that Virgile understands the history and bounds of perfume-making as a tradition. It may not always be by the books, but it is also at least aware of the books. It's here that perfume feels alchemical, like the casting of protective spells or the communing with memories that belong to someone else entirely. Ten out of ten no notes, one of the best fragrance releases of the last year.

Virginal is another perfume that, even just by name, clearly exists at the intersection of wistful nostalgia and salacious sexuality. Much more aqueous and transparent than Baby Boy, I had to experience this composition on skin to truly understand how complex and beautiful it was. Inspired in part by childhood trips to sleepy seaside towns in Maine, this is barely even an aquatic perfume, much less a ‘coastal vibe.’ The opening is juniper and saline strawberry, halfway between my beloved Fraaagola Saalaaata and the sharper opening of Diptyque’s Orpheon. I was delighted to see tuberose in the notes of this perfume. It wasn’t immediately intelligible to my nose, but there is a sort of creaminess held between heart notes of salt water, ejaculate, and vanilla. The drydown is my favorite part: a melted candle accord I can only find mirrored in Clue’s wonderful With the Candlestick. Something that smells waxy, balmy, and faintly like chalk. This is a perfume so musk-based, it really does need to be tried out on your skin. I get a bit of the intimate saline of Antoine Lie creations Post Tenebras Lux or even Secretions Magnifiques. It wears lightly, but with an enduring tenacity. This is lovely worn to bed, but I very vividly remember wearing it to church on Easter Day. Think slurred strawberries sauntering sleepily towards something like intimacy. Lover’s spit left on repeat, awkward first kisses, drinks with enigmatic older men, et cetera. Watery, but in an embryotic fluid way, not at all like going to the beach. This is pink flavored LCL, wear it to embarrass yourself at summer camp, or to learn about the birds and bees from your cool older cousin with an infected nose ring.

Smelled in tandem, this diptych is a provocative jaunt through olfactory creations that carry a notable degree of sophistication, but never give up their dollish gaity. The name Amphora clearly harkens back to antiquated modes of Hellenistic scent storage, but with this collection seemingly just beginning Virgile’s career as an independent perfumer, I am eagerly looking towards the future.

A sample set of these two perfumes, plus two others from the debut line is available here. There are also currently stockists in Chicago, New York City, and Charlotte. If you’re looking for a sign to take the plunge, this is it.

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.