perfume write-ups: black phoenix alchemy lab

aureus, carnal, mary shelley, miskatonic university, tomie

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.