Artsy-Fartsifying My Perfume Reviews (plus some prompts, if you want to play along)

I have been writing and journaling since roughly the womb, but the creative practice of artsy-fartsifying the pages, all the cutting and gluing and fussing until a page becomes an objet d'art, is fairly new to me.
Here is my project: I have a stash of blank journals I have been collecting for years, a year's worth of crafting supplies I somehow accumulated and now feel morally obligated to use up, and a small clutch (or insert your made-up collective noun of choice) of fledgling fountain pens I want any excuse to write with. So I am slowly, and I do mean glacially, transcribing two decades of perfume reviews into these books by hand. Stickers, cut-out illustrations, washi tape borders, a scavenged frog, a water lily, a Hill House paperback cover, whatever seems to want to sit next to the scent on the page.

The inspiration is Sadie of @wordlayout, whose journaling and commonplace-book pages I would happily crawl into if I could. If you don't know her work, go look. Thoughtful, gorgeous, the sort of pages that make you want to be artsier and craftsier just because they exist.

A word on how I muddle through these, in case any of it is useful to you. I stopped trying to write "useful" reviews many years ago. I write down what the thing made me feel, and I have found that if I get the feeling right, the usefulness either turns up on its own or it doesn't, and either way I had a lovely time. So none of the prompts below need you to know a single perfume word. (Personally, I think a lot of perfume words are dumb. Looking at you sillage!) If I have a method at all, it's that I write to find out what I think, not to report what I already decided. The closest thing I have to a process is skipping past the question of "what does it smell like" and going straight to "what space or scene does this open a portal into/onto," and describing the little film it starts running behind my eyes.

Interrogate the lazy word. Nice, pretty, cozy, clean. What do any of them actually tell you? They go a little limp the second you lean on them. So take the blandest thing you could say about a scent and sit there with it until it turns into a picture you can see. Is "nice" a daisy in a jam jar on a windowsill? The inside of a 1987 tin lunchbox? A mouthful of communion wafer chased with warm cola?

Translate the note into the dialect it actually speaks. Do notes ever really smell like their names? Tobacco has never once smelled like tobacco to me. It shows up as stewed raisins. Rose can arrive as cold cream and a bitten pencil. Vetiver, for me, is the underside of a stone you pried up as a kid, damp and secret and faintly alarmed to be seen. What does the note turn into once it is on you?

Give it a bod. Make the scent a creature and let it go wild. A nocturnal glamour-cryptid cloaked in its own velvety wings, buggy eyes like antique opera glasses, at home in the manicured dark behind concert halls. What has it eaten? Where does it sleep? Is it courtly, is it feral, would it walk you home, or has it turned out to be already inside, terribly pleased to see you?

Put it somewhere. A real place, with weather and a floor and a light of its own and a smell that is somehow this exact smell. Cool wet soil at the foot of a pine where the night things slither and glint. A shadowed fountain, topiaries at midnight. A house, not sane, holding its darkness by itself against the hills.

See if it trips a wire. Does it drop you, with no warning, into an afternoon you had filed away and forgotten? Does it snag a dream, a deja-vu, a story you were told once and can no longer place? Some scents unspool on the skin like a scrap of forgotten lore, or a fable from a future that hasn't happened yet. Wherever it wants to take you, maybe just go to there.

Keep a commonplace page of borrowed lines. Somewhere in the journal, start collecting bits of writing that smell like something to you: a scrap of Mary Oliver, the earwormiest lyric, a Nigella Lawson food-rapture about "Victorian pallor" or the "fat coral curls" of shrimp. When a scent and one of those lines rhyme, copy the line onto the page beside the review, and let the two keep each other company.

Take the nasty, difficult one and make it precious anyway. The dank, the funky, the feral, the one that quickly clears a room. Can you render it so vividly that a reader leans in instead of flinching back? Graceful and grotesque in the same breath, sacred and profane, no fibbing about which parts are which.
Triangulate. When a smell won't settle into one thing, name three at once and then go poking at what holds them together. Perhaps you get [bruised violets / overripe pear / hot vinyl], and the fun isn't the three things, it's working out what lassoed them side by side. Why those three? Something sweet and just past its turn, a chemical hum under the fruit, the warmth of skin under a bandage. The smell lives somewhere in the middle of them, and following the lines between the three, where they touch, where they bicker, is probably where the review lives.
Then make the page. Cut something out, stick it down, break in a pen you've been hoarding, let a coffee ring land and call it collage. The writing can be twenty years old, and the page can be twenty minutes old, and that gap turns out to be where a lot of the fun lives.

If you make a page from any of these and post it somewhere, please tag me so I can come admire it. I am extremely nosy about other people's journals!