Mlleghoul

Beautiful foolishness, madcap delight. Coloring book fruit bowls come to life scribbled wild outside every line, Aladdan's cave jeweled jello towers giggling, wibbling, sweet reckless audacity of spinning til dizzy-drunk, dress helicopter-whirling eyeballs pinwheel-wild. Mandarin acid-bright, cartoon citrus. Rhubarb's pink bite. Blackcurrant shadows pooling, brief gravity, wry mordancy. Peachy fuzz osmanthus, vetiver's tannic grip, a self-aware undertow of flat champagne effervescence, Tartness with sass-filtered sweetness, bright bright primary colors, slightly chaotic energy of cars shaped like pickles and animals wearing tiny hats doing important jobs, delightfully absurd, winking impish. Breathless, tumbling; catching joy by its wrist as it races past.

It's a scent that combines the feeling of radical kindness and demented glee and calls to mind why I love the stories of shows like Steven Universe. As a matter of fact, I think the whole cast of Steven Universe smells like this, the way they can be simultaneously deeply caring and completely unhinged with joy. That combination of genuine sweetness with chaotic energy - it's Garnet's cool confidence meets Amethyst's wild abandon meets Steven's pure-hearted enthusiasm. The fragrance has that same quality of being deeply good-natured but never boring, sweet but with enough "edge" to keep it interesting.

I just read John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet and this is a scent that sort of makes me think of what he wrote here, “You can't see the future coming--not the terrors, for sure, but you also can't see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.”

I highly recommend John Green's book and I also highly recommend Delulu.

Marble checkerboard chilled beneath wan feet, the beauty and horror of a centuries-long waltz. Longing, glamour-twisted, pale and thistledown silver. Silk slippers worn to bone, candlelight cold and shimmering, dreams translucent, yielding, disorienting. A flittering fae floral of twilight shimmers, shadows, and sighs. A paradoxical longing of vanilla, an amber just beyond the mirror's reflection. Uncanny pollen encompassing the bleak chill of winter in summer's blazing throat, spring's sweet promise as the last autumn leaf drops with the dying sun. Morning light, iridescent and impossible, and dreams, everpresent, beyond recall.

A melancholic's cream-stained regency morning dress worn well past midnight, white muslin and satin grown heavy with torpor, lace-trimmed cap askew over hair unwashed and unpinned for days. Yesterday's rice pudding congealing in bone china teacups, spiced cardamom linen sachets tucked into untouched pillows, the intimate smell of unwashed scalp beneath crumpled muslin caps. The ontological vertigo experienced by a doppelganger's reflection - am I the copy or the original, is this morning or evening, why does this chemisette smell like vanilla and the milky price of sweetness, the ghost of tiny, crushed wings. The sleepless moon, bedimmed and bedeviled, bears witness to another pale, faceless shadow in the window.

Myrrh Shadow 403 smells like the Crypt Keeper's signature ice cream flavor, an inexplicable combination of sour medicinal powders and resinous, demulcent sweetness. Apothecary ice cream served in dusty parlors where softly spiced cola syrup was dispensed by skeletal hands, bittersweet olde-timey remedies dispensed, ironically, in a dusty tomb lined with crumbling marble shelves and cobweb-draped medicine bottles, stone walls saturated with the balsamic phantasmagoria of centuries-old incense. It vaguely recalls the whispery smoke and mysterious veils of Annick Goutal Myrrh Ardente - except Myrrh Shadow 403 emerged from the freezer creamier, sweeter, colder: mystical tree resins churned into midnight, ghoulish horror host gelato.

Incense Rori feels like building an altar to the temple of dreams - not that it smells like any of these things individually, but the way someone in a dream can be your mother even if they look nothing like her, the golden balsamic woodiness conjures walnut and mulberry and rosewood; the creamy gentle spice suggests whipped orange blossom honey, marigold-infused sandalwood attar, ink perfumed with clove and honey and musk. Applied before sleep and still whispering the next afternoon, it becomes a nightly ritual for dream incubation, precious enough to justify its price not for special occasions but because sleep itself is the special occasion, the potent pantheon of dreams deserving its own sacred preparations.