I do not like milk. I never have—when I was little I would try to thin out glasses of milk with water to create something more palatable, an approach that did not work—and probably never will. It’s fine in fancy little coffee drinks or baking or things of that sort. I like stuff made with milk (butter, yogurt). I’ll drink some of that super filtered high protein chocolate milk in the airport. But milk itself, I just don’t like.

The idea of “smelling like milk” also doesn’t attract me. (When I was told as a child that if you eat a lot of dairy you smell like milk to people whose diets are not dairy-centric, I felt this was deeply unfair.) In my life, if I’m sniffing milk, I’m usually trying to figure out if it’s gone bad. However, the reality of “smelling like milk” is that I’ve noticed that I tend to like perfumes with milk notes (also known as “lactonic”). I first observed this trying out Cirrus’s “Moon Bathing,” where “fruity” and “salty” both came together to work for me because of the milky aspects of the scent. When, more recently, I loved Eris’s “Mother’s Milk” I thought it might be fun to simply investigate milk, the category.

So I ordered Surrender to Chance’s milk sampler and got to testing. And then I thought, it’s kind of a pity not to have any of Hilde Soliani’s perfumes in here, and… well, things got a little out of hand.

Below, notes on Avatar (Hilde Soliani), Basilica (Milano Fragranze), Bianco Latte (Giardini Di Toscana), Blanche Bete (Liquides Imaginaires), Cream Tea (Sucreabeille), Crema di Latte (Hilde Soliani), Elephant (Zoologist), Hibiscus Palm (Aerin), Hot Milk (Hilde Soliani), Lait Concentré (Chabaud), Latte Freddo (Hilde Soliani), Moon Bathing (Cirrus Parfum), Mother’s Milk (Eris Parfums), Pipe Bomb Blue (Blackbird), Remember Me (Jovoy), La Stanza Delle Bambole (Nobile 1942), Yawahada (J-Scent).

What I loved

Basilica (Milano Fragranze)
(Fragrantica / Parfumo / Basenotes)

Head Notes: Thyme E.O., Rosemary E.O..
Heart Notes: Warm Milk accord, Labdanum Hyperessence, Incense Resinoid.
Base Notes: Cypriol E.O., Cedarwood Virginia E.O., SantamanolTM.

Incense and milk wasn’t a combination I had very high hopes for—I like incense, the actual thing, but incense perfumes tend to smell very similar to me and also just don’t seem to work on me. Plus, the idea of combining incense with milk felt bizarre.

In truth, the milk doesn’t stand out to me here as its own thing, but I think whatever makes up the “warm milk accord” does, I think, marry the savory herbal thyme and rosemary to the cedarwood in a way that means the perfume works. It doesn’t really smell much like incense to me—it smells more like opening a drawer in which someone has placed dried herbs for some reason.

This scent is also available as a candle. I think it would work pretty nicely as a candle.

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Fumerie is a perfume store in Portland that, despite my various travels to Oregon, I have yet to visit in person. I did place an order with them last month though because I wanted a sample of the new Eris scent, “Mother’s Milk.” (More on that later.…)1 Seeking to pad out the order, I ended up adding this sampler. I always appreciate the opportunity to try scents I wouldn’t think of trying.

The write-ups are below but the short takeaway is that I had a lot of fun and I’ll probably get Fumerie’s summer sampler. I didn’t rank them but I really liked three, liked one that didn’t suit me, and hated the fifth. Usually I link to the perfumer’s website, but in this case I have linked back to Fumerie.

Doliphor (Marlou)
(Fragrantica / Parfumo / Basenotes)

carrot seed, costus, cumin, musk

Marlou’s thing is making animalic perfumes (or, as the brand puts it, “a perfume created by Marlou joins itself to the body’s own olfactory signaling”). I have tried one of their perfumes (“Poudrextase”), which is a very pleasant rose perfume. But, despite having samples of some of the others, their reputation unnerves me enough that when I pick a sample to try I’m always like… is today the day for “Carnicure”… and somehow, it never is. On the other hand, maybe when I try “Carnicure” I’ll think “actually this doesn’t smell all that dirty to me.”

Like “Poudrextase,” “Doliphor” is a very pleasant perfume, though in its case what it really reminds of more than anything is smelling a dandelion. It stays close to the skin and I guess this is Marlou’s version of the “your skin but better” type of perfume. I’d say, it’s sort of how you feel unshowered people smell in the movies.

I don’t know if I’d buy a full bottle of “Doliphor,” but I liked it a lot. Definitely a smell that puts you in mind of spring. I might buy a decant if I keep wearing the sample.

Silver Saffron (Une Nuite Nomade)
(Fragrantica / Parfumo / Basenotes)

iris, myrrh, papyrus, raspberry, saffron

What does saffron smell like? Honestly I don’t know. If I really search my soul I’m not even exactly sure what saffron tastes like. I know that it is the key ingredient in various delicious foods, but I’m completely unclear on what it tastes like or what its contribution is. The main thing I know about saffron is that it is expensive.

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I have not been to the ballet in a long time—maybe over ten years?—but I enjoy it. I mean, I’m very much a casual fan. I couldn’t tell you a favorite ballerina. But ballet is great and if I ever live in a place where I can “go to the ballet” again I will do so instead of telling myself I can’t afford it.1 My affection for ballet and my affection for perfume have some overlap; both ballet and perfume are art without language, both involve great effort to create something that only lives a moment, and both are ultra feminine in ways that are both “classically beautiful” and “vaguely frightening.”

As far as scent goes, ballet has three aspects which I think a perfume can set out to capture. One is the elegant, pink-toe-shoe-and-white-stocking iconography that most says ballet to other people; this is also the aesthetic people refer(red) to as “balletcore.” It is deliberately girlish but it’s not immature. The fabrics you think of here are soft (workout tights) or smooth (shiny toe shoes). The second is complexly feminine and adult. In addition to the soft and smooth, the scent wants us to think of a performing ballerina, so there is also the stiff and the rough (tulle). Perfumes trying to capture this aspect may want to gesture toward the physical space in which ballet happens as well as the image of the dancer herself. “Balletcore” is cozy. “Ballet” is big.

The third is blood and sweat. I have yet to run across a blood and sweat ballet perfume but feel confident some indie brand somewhere has made at least one.

This is not a review of every ballet scent in the world. Some perfumes not represented here include ELDO’s “The Afternoon of a Faun,” Gritti’s “Tutù” and “Tutù Blanc,” Simimi’s “Esprit De Candela,” and Moresque’s “Ballerina.” I’m sure there are more beyond these.… In any case, not comprehensive. Also, in a stroke of brilliance, I didn’t bring any of these with me to Oregon, so if you’re like you’re totally wrong I’ll get back to you in um… a month… I guess.

The number one “balletcore” perfume brand is Odette (named for its owner/perfumer, Odette Fontaine). It’s not a contest. It’s Odette. And “Pas de Chat” from Odette was sort of the perfume that launched my writing up how things smell on here, because I couldn’t figure out how to describe how it smelled. I still in fact am not sure how to describe how it smells. It has a cozy, warm, sort of creamy–nutty scent to me. It is sweet but not in a foodie way. It smells like wearing an old cashmere sweater over an old silk nightgown. Is this helpful? No.

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At this stage in learning how to smell stuff I don’t know that this says anything about these perfumes. It’s entirely possible that they’re doing something interesting in the wider perfume context that I can’t understand and don’t notice. Like if you somehow never saw a painting and then you saw a Van Gogh.

Marissa Zappas is definitely a trendy name; in addition to her own line (which is all I’m discussing here) she has collaborations elsewhere and even reconstructed a perfume of Elizabeth Taylor’s. (I also like this piece she wrote about Taylor.)

What I loved

Ching Shih
(Fragrantica / Parfumo / Basenotes)

Spices, Osmanthus, Orris, Incense, Gunpowder, Myrrh

This smelled exactly—and I mean exactly—like black tea when I spritzed it on and I was honestly shocked to find that “black tea” was not listed as a note. I think what creates that effect is the orris and the gunpowder, though it could also be the orris and the osmanthus. Anyway, I loved this. I loved loved loved this.

Most of the Marissa Zappas scents that worked for me have a “watercolor” kind of quality, and this one is no exception; it is balanced and muted without feeling dull or like everything’s blending together. I get the smoke, I get the orris, I even get the myrrh, but it’s all harmonious and nothing is shouting. Really beautiful. Far and away my favorite of this set. It feels like the earthy cousin of “L’Heure Bleu,” which is maybe one of the nicest things I can say about a perfume.

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I have a problem—well, I have many problems. One of them is that if a company’s branding is “too good” I instantly acquire an aversion to them. I’m like: why is your branding so good? What are you hiding? Another problem is that I hate booky things where people are like: here’s something for book lovers who love books. A third thing is that I have a conflicted relationship with the “millennial twee” aesthetic of the 2010s (embodied above by Zooey Deschanel). I’m typing these words in a polka-dot blouse, I wear Mary Jane shoes and own Fluevogs, I possess not only a sweater with an animal on it but also a (different) sweater from Kate Spade,1 I’ll never give up my bangs, and I own two separate lipsticks from Besame. I even own a ukelele (though I cannot play it).

Furthermore, you know, I am proud millennial; if I ever tried to do a podcast again2 I would probably call it “Millennial Excellence.”3 However, there’s millennial twee (good) and there’s millennial twee (evil). Zooey is unimpeachable, obviously. But then there’s stuff like books titled The Sophisticated Ladies’ Compleat Guide To The Hunting Of Dragons or fake curse words like crumplestuffin or that brand that embroiders, like, lyrics from Hamilton onto cashmere sweaters that cost $300.4 This too is the long dark shadow of millennial twee.

So both of these brands deliberately court a tweeness which I find ambiguous. The conceit of Imaginary Authors is that each perfume represents a book that doesn’t exist by an author who doesn’t exist. The pick-what-you-want discovery sample set comes in a box shaped like a book with a magnetic closure. The books all come with little summaries; here is one for “The Soft Lawn” (which is not one I tried):

Published in 1916, The Soft Lawn is a controversial portrait of adolescent upper-class rebellion in New England. The coming-of-age story follows a charmingly snotty college tennis champ who, after years of having everything handed to him on a silver platter, finds himself handing it all back. His selfless acts of altruism anger his family but catch the eye of a budding poet, setting in motion a secret romance that challenges the decorum of the well-to-do community. Shots are cooly volleyed back and forth but as tension rises, it becomes clear that only one side can triumph in the end.

In short, every level of their branding is so consistent and thought through and full of small details that I start to get pissed off.5

Then there’s TikTok favorite Sorce, formerly Sorcellerie Apothecary. Their branding is much more lowkey than Imaginary Authors’, but if you look at the name “Sorcellerie Apothecary” with the knowledge that one of their perfumes is named “Fuckery,” another one is called “English Major,” and their brand is witchy, you will understand why I was reluctant to try their perfumes at first. If you’re like “I don’t know what you’re talking about and I think you need help” I’m happy for you but I will not get help I’m going to stay exactly like this.

Let it be known though, that if you think I’m being snide about an indie aesthetic or something, the absolute worst names on the “evil twee” side of things that I’ve personally come across is probably Kilian’s “I Don’t Need A Prince By My Side To Be A Princess.” 50 mL of that will cost you $150. 50 mL of Sorce will cost about $50 less. Support artisanal twee. Also, I prefer millennial twee to the millennial minimalism of Le Labo, another company whose highly thought through branding pisses me off.

Since I had similar reservations about both brands, I decided to combine them, even though that made this post “too long for email.”

What I Loved

The Bees (Sorce)
(Fragrantica / Parfumo / Basenotes)

Honey extract, myrrh, jasmine absolute, pollen, iris, mimosa absolute, fresh cream, cedar, petrichor

I underestimated this one. When I spritzed it on I was like “that’s nice” but a few seconds later I began to really smell it. “The Bees” is a very intense honey-jasmine-mimosa smell. A little too intense for me, honestly—it sort of felt like I was literally and not figuratively drowning in luxury.

I’m not sure I’d buy it, because it’s just really a lot, but it kept surprising me through my wearing of it and new facets kept coming out, like the cedar.

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Olympic Orchids is an indie perfume house run by Dr. Ellen Covey, a neurobiologist. Once a year, Olympic Orchids has a big anniversary sale, so this year I got its two deluxe sample packs. This is… a lot of perfumes. Almost forty perfumes. So this post is “too long for email.” I cannot be contained! Actually, the length is because of all the links I do after each perfume to show its spot on the three main perfume websites. Next month’s has the same problem. This is annoying to me.

Below are almost all the Olympic Orchids scents, with the exceptions of “Lil,” the “Dev” series, and “Tropic of Capricorn.” All of the samples in these sets are in teeny tiny bottles. I applied one dab from each bottle to a wrist and then wore it until it either became grating to me or was gone.

After Zoologist last month, I’m thinking about the fact that my preference for sampling and writing about small indie brands means “running into a lot of issues at the border” for any readers of this newsletter who aren’t in the States. This is unfortunate and there’s not a lot that I can do about it—nothing coming up is from a “global brand” the way Guerlain is a global brand.

In the present case, Olympic Orchids has suspended international orders from the house’s own website because the situation is so chaotic. There are some international shops listed here as stocking Olympic Orchids perfumes, but I can’t personally vouch for them.

What I Loved

Ballets Rouges
(Fragrantica / Parfumo / Basenotes)

bergamot, aldehydes, red mandarin, fresh rose accord, rose de mai absolute, ylang-ylang, red thyme, oakmoss, patchouli labdanum, and musks

This is very soapy, which is to be expected if your second listed note is “aldehydes.” (More on that in the next paragraph.) Soapiness can be hit or miss for me, and in some Olympic Orchids perfumes something smelled like soap in a way that made the fragrance simply not work, but in this case, I love it. It feels classic and refreshing, elegant and easy. This perfume definitely goes right up to the edge of my soap tolerance, but it stays under the line. I probably wouldn’t apply it really close to my nose, though. Wrists are good.

What are aldehydes? This video from Cirrus Parfums is a helpful breakdown. If you have ever smelled Chanel “No. 5,” you’ve smelled aldehydes, and if you like it, you like aldehydes (though the converse is not true). Their smell is probably a smell you associate with “perfume,” the general concept. I would say I found this one a heavily aldehydic perfume.

I really enjoyed reading this interview about “Ballet Rouges.”

Café V
(Fragrantica / Parfumo / Basenotes)

espresso-roast coffee, dark cacao, vanilla, cream, spicy chai, cardamom, leather, and well-worn wood

This perfume smells like Frasier looks. If you have ever watched a scene in Café Nervosa and found yourself wishing you were there, this is the perfume for you. It really smells like roasted coffee beans in a way that is distinct from smelling like a cup of coffee, but it also smells a little sweet and a little spicy and a little like a freshly sharpened pencil.

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A while ago, before I had in fact really gotten interested in perfume, I stumbled across Zoologist’s “Moth.” I got a sample of it because of the name and… it smelled like nothing at all to me. Generically nice. After I got into perfume I tried it again: same thing. Eventually I got so frustrated I dumped the entire sample on myself. But it still didn’t really smell like anything. Then this year I got a sample of “Moth” for my birthday, so I tried it again. And this time, in fact, I could smell a lot.

Zoologist is a line of perfumes that are each designed around specific animals. It’s run by Victor Wong, who works with individual perfumers on each concept, and is based in Toronto. The Zoologist line is pretty big and the full discovery set is expensive, so I picked a small number. I picked up the other perfumes done by Tomoo Inaba, the designer of “Moth,” (“Nightingale,” “Orchid Mantis”); one from Dawn Spencer Hurwitz of DSH (“Snowy Owl”); “King Cobra” because it’s the year of the snake; “Sloth” because I’d heard its designer, Prin Lomros (who also did “King Cobra”), is good; “Penguin” because I was hoping for gin; and “Dragonfly” and “Hummingbird” because they looked fun. When the package was finally released from customs it came with a complimentary sample (“Koala”).

I deliberately did not get the various Zoologist scents that are notorious for being weird or unpleasant or challenging, like “Squid” or “Tyrannosaurus Rex.” (Though “Moth” is kind of one of those.) I could not really tell you why. I think I wanted to pick perfumes I could interact with without a strong preexisting idea of how they smelled.

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Providence Perfume Co. is a natural perfume house run out of Rhode Island and founded by Charna Ethier. Once a year they run a buy one get one free sample sale, and this year I bought a few samples.

Outside of this sale, even buying samples from Providence Perfumes is a bit pricey.… and for that reason, what I really regretted after trying my samples was that I didn’t just sample the whole line. These are great perfumes and, unlike Aftelier’s natural perfumes, which are beautiful but fleeting, these last at least four hours on the skin. (My ideal scent duration is probably four to six hours.) I’m definitely a fan!

Sooo… if your interest is piqued but you’re on too tight a budget to try these samples, I would just sign up for their emails and wait for next year’s sale.

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Here is how I understand the perfume market, in pop girl terms.

• Designer perfumes are like your main pop girls. Your Beyonces, Gagas, Madonnas, and so on. Here we have Chanel, Dior, Mugler, Prada.

• Indie perfumes are, well, indie. They are run by a small team—often just one person, who is usually the perfumer, the distributor, the marketer, and so on. Here we have brands like DSH, Cirrus, Odette, and Solstice Scents. There are not really 100% DIY indie pop girls in this sense, as far as I know—so we’ll put down… uh… Ethel Cain, who is like 98% DIY and sort of unwillingly a pop girl.

• In between, you have niche perfumes, which are the “indie / alt” darlings who may or may not actually be signed to major record labels… because “indie” is now a vibe more than a material reality. In pop terms, this is Lana, Caroline Polachek, Lorde, Charli, or Florence Welch. In perfume terms, this is Frederic Malle, Le Labo, Diptyque.1 “Niche” also means that the brand makes perfume and not other kinds of luxury goods (like handbags).

• There are also celebrity perfumes, “cheapies,” dupes, whatever—these are more like Pink in that they are actually crazy popular but not going to be discussed much. (Though it may be that they’re discussed on video platforms… I don’t really hang out enough on TikTok.)

So if you look up “is Guerlain niche or designer,” you will get a lot of people who are sort of like… “both and neither.” Guerlain isn’t a fashion brand, like Chanel or Dior. (It makes cosmetics, yes, but… Le Labo makes candles!) It’s one of the oldest perfume houses in the world. It’s also not niche in terms of the vibe. It makes beloved, iconic, and influential perfumes. Guerlain is just Guerlain.2

Using Surrender to Chance, I got samples of most of Guerlain’s “Les Légendaires” collection in various concentrations. These are the house’s big classics—including “Jicky,” which is (I think) the oldest continuously made perfume, having been on the market since 1889. People who love vintage perfume seem to be pretty happy with the job Guerlain, under the direction of Thierry Wasser, has done over the past few years in keeping the new versions of their old perfumes smelling like their past selves, while still accommodating modern regulations. I did get one small sample of one vintage Guerlain perfume (“Mitsouko”) for the sake of comparison. I also got a couple samples that are not in the Les Légendaires line.

Because using the Guerlain website to extract usable lists of notes is impossible, I have used the descriptions from Surrender to Chance. I also linked their store instead of Guerlain’s because in a few places I could not find what I looking for on the Guerlain store. I’ve placed a few orders with STC now and have had nothing but great experiences with them—so if you live in a place where they ship, I recommend them for getting decants of scents that might be otherwise annoying to try.

This post is too long for email. Too long! For email! I never.

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ERIS Parfums is run by a woman named Barbara Herman, and I am biased therefore in its favor. If you are a Barbara, you have to work to get me off your side. There aren’t that many of us and we have to stick together. Herman also wrote a very cool-looking book about vintage perfume, Scent and Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume, which is extremely out of print. (I almost scored a reasonably priced copy recently but was beaten to it by somebody faster on the draw.)1 You can also read an AMA she did here or read her old blog here.

As Herman indicates in the AMA, ERIS is not dedicated to duplicating vintage perfume. It’s dedicated to a certain type of glamour. You cannot tap into this glamour by going straight to the source for a couple reasons, one being that many of the ingredients used in vintage perfumes have been regulated out of normal usage, and the other being that what is chic or edgy in one generation is “grandma’s perfume” fifty years later.2 So the challenge that ERIS sets for itself is making perfumes that register the way vintage perfumes did… while avoiding actually smelling vintage to people who aren’t into older perfumes (or smelling like bad imitations to people who are). As is so often the case, one must repeat that line from The Leopard… for things to stay the same, everything has to change.3

I bought an ERIS sampler when I first started getting interested in perfumes last year, after trying “Ma Bête” (though I no longer remember why I decided to do that). I tried almost all of them at the time, and wrote down some notes, but felt reluctant to write about them here. My thoughts kind of felt underbaked. But now, a year later, I’m going through them again.

And… it’s pretty cool, because I can actually smell more than I did before.

What I Loved

Mxxx.
(Fragrantica / Parfumo / Basenotes)

Top: Madagascan Blue Ginger, Mace (CO2 extraction), Saffron, Ethiopian Olibanum, Pink Peppercorn
Heart: Trinidad Cacao (ultrasound extraction), Virginia Cedarwood, Sandalwood
Base: Haitian Vetiver, Indonesian Patchouli, Laotian Benzoin, Castoreum (synthetic), 7% Natural Ambergris, Pierre d'Afrique (Hyraceum), Madagascan Green Vanilla (ultrasound extraction)

Funny thing: before I spritzed this one on I was wishing I had a chocolate-y perfume to try (mostly because I wanted chocolate to eat). I was like man I wish I had a chocolate perfume, but not like, a perfume that smelled like fudge… more of that sophisticated dusty bitterness of chocolate drifting pleasantly around me… wouldn’t that be nice… and so on and so on. Then when this was about a minute in I thought I had somehow hallucinated a chocolate smell out of sheer desire for chocolate until I went to go look at the notes. Trinidad Cacao… welcome.

“Mxxx.” is an odd experience for sure—spicy and rich with that small kick of chocolate. It does really prickle your nose if you get up close! But it’s also got this smoother, velvet side if you keep your distance, and then the cacao smell blossoms out around you. Then it smells good so you want to get close, but what you actually have to do is keep your distance. Basically, if you resist the urge to bury your nose in your wrist you will have a different experience, and it’s interesting to smell the change as you bring your wrist closer and further away.

But also, it’s genuinely crazy how much this perfume is in fact the chocolate smell I was wishing I had. Like almost exactly. What’s up with that.

Night Flower
(Fragrantica / Parfumo / Basenotes)

Top: Italian Bergamot, Russian Birch Tar, Guatemalan Cardamom
Heart: Suede, Indian Tuberose, Laotian Cinnamon
Base: Indonesian Patchouli, Venezuelan Tonka Bean, Musk (synthetic)

From first sniff, “Night Flower” made me feel like I was Jane Greer in Out of the Past, aka, the greatest femme fatale of all time. I loved it. However, it is also so potent I’m sort of afraid to wear it. It’s not just that the perfume itself is strong but anything you touch while wearing it becomes supersaturated with “Night Flower.” Then if it goes into, say, a drawer, everything in that drawer becomes saturated with “Night Flower.” If you aspired to become somebody’s dead first wife, “Night Flower” would be a great pick for a signature scent. That home will smell like you forever.

As I mentioned above, “Night Flower,” along with the other ERIS perfumes, was actually one of the first perfumes I tried when I started getting into them. I really liked it but also found it overwhelming (I wrote a little bit about it here). So I’ve come back to it almost a year later, to wear it properly. It’s still huge, but more intelligible. I think I can pick out things in this that I couldn’t before—I was like “I think this is a little spice-y?” and then took a gander at the notes. There’s cardamom and cinnamon! That’s pretty cool. And I can pick out the suede.

Basically, I am enjoying this just as much as I did before, but I have more of an idea of why because I can smell different parts. And it’s just sort of cool to realize that in fact I am developing a better sense of smell.

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Cirrus! Our first returning brand. Cirrus and Odette are my two big favorites from my time spent sampling perfumes, but Cirrus is slightly more budget friendly and a bit more unpredictable in its scent profiles, so while I’ve been letting new Odette releases stack up until it feels worth it to pay for shipping, I’ve found staying up on Cirrus’s releases pretty easy.

At this point, I think I have tried… all but two of the extant Cirrus perfumes.1 Per a recent promotional email, some more are forthcoming later this month, but we’ll get to em when we get to em:

I really like Cirrus and I’ve bought a number of their perfumes in larger sizes. “Snooze” (written about here) is probably my favorite sleep perfume, though I have to rotate it in and out with some others because one otherwise goes noseblind.2

Cirrus only ships to the continental United States, but if you live there and want to try them out with one of their “pick five” sample sets, the official BDM-recommended starter back is: “Bellano,” “Snooze,” “Sybarite,” “Antique Nouveau,” plus one wild card of your choice. Alternately, you can use their four most popular scents—“Bellano,” “Chamomile Cafe,” “Fall Creek,” “Snooze”—and one wild card of your choice. Obviously, if there’s one in there you just know you’ll hate, skip it, but otherwise I think my suggested list gives you a pretty good sense of the range.

What I Loved

Duomo
(Parfumo)

burning wafts of church incense, labdanum, dusty ancient stone corridors, papyrus, and campari on your breath

When I think about perfumes that remind me of alcohol, I tend to look for gin. The reason for that is pretty straightforward: I miss drinking gin. But there are lots of alcohol notes out there: maybe the most popular boozy perfume right now is “Angel’s Share” (By Killian), which is supposed to smell like cognac. (I haven’t tried it.) I never would have thought of trying to smell like a campari and soda, though. Turns out it’s great.

I have to be in exactly the right mood to wear “Duomo,” and it’s got to be the right weather. But when I am in that mood, and it is the right weather, the incense and the bitterness hit just right. For me the scent association is maybe the reverse as the one Cirrus has: I think of the incense as lingering, the campari as present. Or maybe they’re both lingering: you’ve left the church, the glass is empty, but those sorts of smells, they just don’t go away.

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In a way that, perhaps, befits their name, I have zero recollection of where or how I heard of Clandestine Laboratories. Attempts to reverse-engineer how exactly I heard about them have ended in failure. At some point I just noticed their emails in my promotions tab, which suggests that I signed up for them, but maybe Boswell did. Who knows.

Their samples are pretty generous—you get 2.2 mLs for about $7 each in a nice little bottle (with a cap!). I’m sure there are plenty of reasons to do the little wand cap samples, but I really prefer it when I can spray a perfume sample.1

I decided not to rank these—I liked all of them, and the reason I wouldn’t buy them is just the price of a full bottle, but… that price is fair! I just don’t have the money. I want to sample more from Clandestine Laboratories in the future, certainly.

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For the past couple months I’ve repeatedly wanted to wear something violet-y but didn’t really have any samples that satisfied this urge. (Actually, I did, but I forgot about them. I’ve incorporated them below.) Spring is here, weather is warming, the heavy winter scents are going into retirement, so it seemed like—now is the hour (to go hog wild on violets). I decided to get two violet samplers from Surrender to Chance (this one and this one), plus CB I Hate Perfume’s “Room With A View.”

“Violet” is an important scent in the history of perfumery, as it was one of the first synthetic scents, such that suddenly everything could be scented with violets (and was scented with violets). In short, “violet” went from being an incredibly expensive smell to an unspeakably cheap one. Now, oddly, I don’t think you really see violet scented things much outside of perfume, or at least you don’t in the States. I’ve never seen “violet” scented soap in a store, for instance. It exists and I could order it online, but it’s not like rose or vanilla or lavender. Possibly as a culture we perhaps went a little too hog wild on violets and the pendulum has not swung back.

Beneath the jump: “Zagorsk” (Comme des Garçons), “Insolence” (Guerlain), “Love in Black” (Creed), “Aimez-Moi” (Caron), “Ormonde Woman” (Ormonde Jayne), “Room Service” (Vilhelm Parfumerie), “Splendiris” (Dusita), “Violet & Amber Absolu” (Jo Malone), “Equistrius” (Parfum d’Empire), “Le Parfum de Thérèse” (Frederic Malle), “Duende” (Fantôme), “Sweet Parmesan Violet” (Hilde Soliani), “J’Adore” (Christian Dior), and “Room With A View” (already mentioned).

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Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab is (I believe) one of the oldest indie perfume houses in operation. They’re based in Philadelphia and have been around since at least 2002. They have an aesthetic that I think of as related to a type of nerd culture that was very online fluent but not online based—a fondness for Decadent art, the macabre, witchiness, in a particularly earthy way. Before I found out that they have a business relationship with the Mütter Museum… I just sort of already knew they’d worked with the Mütter Museum.

BPAL is, for my purposes, notable for two things: first, they have a number of surprisingly high-profile brand collaborations given their indie status, but that’s a testimony to how long they’ve been in the game. Second, BPAL has an intense, cult-like following (including a whole dedicated forum, though I can’t tell how active it still is). One way this kind of cult following becomes apparent if you poke around the forum is that BPAL perfumes seem to be primarily understood in relationship with other BPAL perfumes. It’s sort of a self-contained world.

I mention this because if you are “in” the world of BPAL, my guess is my thoughts on these samples will seem pretty uninteresting to you because I don’t get the intertextuality (or whatever intertextuality is when applied to scents). Also, this is sort of a weird collection of scents to represent this particular brand and if I do another BPAL review I’ll try to pick up their classics, like the ones included here or “Snake Oil.”

All that said, let’s get to it.

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This was the year I found a new expensive hobby (perfume) to replace my old expensive hobby (drinking gin). So I wanted to put down some of my favorites from this year—all of which, weirdly, I have not actually posted about yet, though some of them will almost definitely get posts before the end of the year, unless I get hit by a car or something.

At this point in my journey to the center of perfume, I have tested something over 170 perfumes.1 (This was achieved by wearing at least one new sample every day, and sometimes more than one depending on the longevity of the first one I tried.) I have not tried very many “canonical” perfumes outside of Chanel No. 5 or even that much of the niche perfume world that tends to dominate forums I look at online (ELDO, By Killian, Byredo, Frederic Malle, etc).

This wasn’t really on purpose, I have a bunch from t…

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Cirrus Parfums is a (very new) perfume house founded this year by Zoey Lake and based in Texas. It caught my eye because Cirrus put out an autumn chypre collection, and, as previously discussed, I am trying to learn how to smell the chypre structure. So I ordered the chypre set and a few other samples.

I liked these a lot. In the world of indie perfumes, what I find interesting about houses like Cirrus, Sunsphere, Pineward, or DSH is that they take the indie interest in oddball notes and wed that to an interest in perfume history, older structures, traditional ingredients, etc.1 DSH calls her perfumes in this style “retro-nouveau” and while I don’t think it applies wholesale to all these houses, it’s an aspect of their work.

I’m not somebody who knows enough about perfume to declare this or that scent or house “unique,” but this kind of re-vitalized interest in classic structures is an easy way into my heart in literature (particularly poetry)… so unsurprisingly, it is also a way into my heart when it comes to other things. I’ll admit, too, that I have a strong preference for trying things out from these indie perfume houses that are dominated by single individuals.2

Notes taken from the Cirrus website.

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Have you ever noticed that you can sing “Mary Shelley” to the tune of “Buddy Holly”? I sure noticed because it gets stuck in my head every time I open this draft. I’m trying to make this your problem also.

Anyway. For reasons that don’t matter, I’ve been collecting Mary Shelley perfumes. The world of indie fragrances is fully of witchy nerds (I say this affectionately) and if there’s one thing witchy nerds love… it’s Mary Shelley. So this is all indie stuff. If Guerlain has a Mary Shelley perfume they’re doing a great job hiding it from me.

Not paywalling this one because it’s a bit of a goof, but there will be a paywalled one coming out soon. (I only send the paywalled perfume posts to paid subscribers because I find getting short little preview posts really annoying, incidentally.…

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On the Pineward website, there’s a note on the homepage that says “proceed only if you would like to smell like a pine tree.” Do I? To be honest, I don’t know. I love the smell of pine trees but as I’ve learned liking to smell something and liking to smell like that thing are not the same. Still, what I do know is that there are various smells I really like—trees, soil, petrichor—and I’m open to trying them in perfumes.

All that said, most of these samples are not Pineward at its pine-i-est. A few are, but I mostly went for the non-pine-forward options.

One thing: unlike the other perfumes I’ve tried, Pineward’s are (literally) colorful. All of them stained the cotton test squares I sprayed them on. I would be careful applying them. That said, they mostly did not seem to show up visibly on my skin, so it’s not like you’ll be wandering around looking green.

A second thing: Pineward is not “IFRA” compliant, that is, it does not follow the rules laid down by the perfume industry’s self-governing body about what are and are not safe materials. In Pineward’s case, for instance, there’s oakmoss, which has been restricted by the IFRA since I think 2010, but there might be other things too.

I was not really worried about this, but if you are, you can probably correspond with the owner and find out what exactly isn’t IFRA compliant in any given perfume. And if you are curious about the world of scent regulation, Kate Grenville’s The Case Against Fragrance is worth a read.

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Sometimes I think about the people who sign up for this newsletter for Taylor Swift takes or literature reviews or whatever only to realize that they’re going to taken for every single ride I myself choose to go on. It will only get worse, I promise you.

Dawn Spencer Hurwitz is a perfumer in Colorado who has been designing perfumes since the 1990s. One thing she seems to be quite well-known for is her contemporary re-imaginings of vintage perfumes that are either no longer made or have been dramatically reformulated. I was pretty interested in trying something like that, so… I did. Plus, her brand is called DSH Perfumes. Have to support another initials woman. Hurwitz’s catalog is so massive that I imagine everybody who reads this could go place an order for five samples with little or no chance of overlap… so we will probably return to this well. (Even if you just stuck to her “retro nouveau” list, it’s pretty big.)

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I ran across the work of Mandy Aftel, a natural perfume maker, while making a list of perfumes that contain real ambergris. I didn’t think I had the palate to appreciate what she was doing, so I put her work in a mental category labeled “to be sniffed when I am not so stupid.” But then when I was trying to figure out how certain things “actually smelled,” I ended up… back at her work. So here we are.

Natural perfumery is basically what it sounds like: perfume made only from materials derived from plants and animals. Even when an identical synthetic version of a scent molecule exists, natural perfumery will use the version obtained from natural sources.

Aftel has written a few books about perfume. I own two (Essence and Alchemy and Fragrant) and have read one (Essence and Alchemy). Even if you aren’t terribly sympathetic to the motivations behind most natural perfumery (about which, more below), I think Essence and Alchemy is worth a read. Aftel’s own reasons for pursuing natural perfume are, as she makes clear, spiritual and sensual, and have a lot to do with the ways in which she sees perfume as the heir to alchemy:

In alchemy, attaining the absolute meant creating the Elixir, that magical potion to defeat the ravages of time. But the process depended on the marriage of elements the alchemist could not perceive.… The alchemical quest stands for the attempt to create something new and beautiful in the world, through a process that cannot ultimately be reduced to chemistry.

Natural perfume has much less longevity than traditional perfume (on her website, Aftel says not to expect it to last more than three hours) and the eau de parfum format I got most of my samples in seems to have less longevity than the other available formats. I mention this because even though I knew that, I was still surprised at how brief their lifespan could be. I had the best results spraying the perfume around the collarbone region or the backs of my hands—the more traditional pulse points (wrists, neck, etc) sped things up too much.

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