The Abandoned Mansion Imaginary Authors 2025
6
Helpful Review
Haunted tiki bar, spectral mai tai
Haunted tiki bar, spectral mai tai floating in the periphery while some scratchy exotica album plays from a speaker you can’t locate, Martin Denny maybe, or Les Baxter’s jungle fantasies, that mid-century escapist thing that was already nostalgic for something that never existed, already haunted by its own appropriations, its own colonial fantasies dressed up as lounge entertainment, which is absolutely not what this fragrance is about but it’s where my nose took me, this tiki bar detour having nothing to do with the brand’s actual abandoned mansion concept.
The fruit here does exactly what I want fruit to do in fragrance, which is be weird about it, ashen and dusty and somber, bruised and semi-preserved like fruit that’s been drinking alongside the patrons, drifting in its own languid dissolution, melting into the upholstery, losing definition under hazy torch light, not trying to be fresh or bright or engaging, just strange and a little sad and smoky.
There’s a mustiness here, old wood and older paper, that particular smell of closed-up places where the air has gone stale and sweet at the same time, resort towns in the off-season where the bars are shuttered and the bamboo decorations gather dust and you can still smell a thousand phantom drinks soaked into the floorboards, lime and orgeat and something vaguely tropical gone sour in the humidity. Beach cottages abandoned after hurricane season, with everything softly deteriorating in the damp air, fruit bowls forgotten on kitchen counters, paperbacks yellowing and swelling and smelling like vanilla and wood pulp slowly decomposing, all of it fading together. This is October in places where October doesn’t mean sweaters, where fall is more conceptual than meteorological, where the season changes because the calendar says so, but the air is still thick and warm.
Something resinous and golden underneath, woody-amber earthiness, not cold-earth but tropical-earth, the smell of wood that’s never known frost, rooms that stay humid year-round, dust that never quite settles because there’s always moisture in the air. The smokiness like the ghost of a bar where fruits lounged and got tipsy, daddy-o, got a little loose, a little wild. The kind of abandoned that’s specific to semi-tropical places, where things don’t freeze and die back, but just slowly molder and transform, go spectral in the heat.
The fruit here does exactly what I want fruit to do in fragrance, which is be weird about it, ashen and dusty and somber, bruised and semi-preserved like fruit that’s been drinking alongside the patrons, drifting in its own languid dissolution, melting into the upholstery, losing definition under hazy torch light, not trying to be fresh or bright or engaging, just strange and a little sad and smoky.
There’s a mustiness here, old wood and older paper, that particular smell of closed-up places where the air has gone stale and sweet at the same time, resort towns in the off-season where the bars are shuttered and the bamboo decorations gather dust and you can still smell a thousand phantom drinks soaked into the floorboards, lime and orgeat and something vaguely tropical gone sour in the humidity. Beach cottages abandoned after hurricane season, with everything softly deteriorating in the damp air, fruit bowls forgotten on kitchen counters, paperbacks yellowing and swelling and smelling like vanilla and wood pulp slowly decomposing, all of it fading together. This is October in places where October doesn’t mean sweaters, where fall is more conceptual than meteorological, where the season changes because the calendar says so, but the air is still thick and warm.
Something resinous and golden underneath, woody-amber earthiness, not cold-earth but tropical-earth, the smell of wood that’s never known frost, rooms that stay humid year-round, dust that never quite settles because there’s always moisture in the air. The smokiness like the ghost of a bar where fruits lounged and got tipsy, daddy-o, got a little loose, a little wild. The kind of abandoned that’s specific to semi-tropical places, where things don’t freeze and die back, but just slowly molder and transform, go spectral in the heat.