Once

I should not have worn this to work.

This smells like the Madonna/Whore complex.
This smells like the Maiden Mother Crone cycle.
This smells like going through the Bible backward, from Mary to Sheba to Eve.
This smells like the chapter in American Gods with Bilquis and the trucker.

I am in love, I am in lust, I am talking myself down from a full bottle to a travel spray because I will only be able to wear it recreationally in the winter.

It starts sweet and warm and comforting. Christmas cookies and hugs and sitting with your friends in a cozy sweater and the memory of your grandmother, and the woman at the halal bakery who calls you sister.

Then the cinnamon turns to incense and the jasmine turns to sandalwood and the amber turns to oud and it’s not a friendly warmth anymore, it’s the moment kisses turn to undressing, it’s a promise, it’s an invitation.

Then it gets musky and animalic and it is so so sexy, but the fruit keeps offering itself, until it rests in smoke and sandalwood.

Turn the wheel again, it says, be reborn.

I would wear this to slay Holofernes and fuck King Solomon

This one is a journey, you are following this owl through an early morning. You start in the cold on your icy branch. The first 20 minutes smell like moonlight. You fly over the cold water, just starting to get muddy and alive at the edges, and catch a fish, this is where it’s fresh and aquatic and a little too alive. You take it back to your nest where you hide out as it gets just a little warmer outside and the flowers try to pop out through the last vestiges of snow that’s when you get down into a whisper of tonka, vanilla and cedar and sit in this quiet and lovely base note, where you still get breaths of wet breeze off the pond.

Also you have a coconut. The whole time.

You move through the stages of this fragrance, almost like moving through seasons from the icy opening to the green and aquatic heart like a walk alongside a thawing pond, to an algae and sunscreen smell that is the exact memory of learning to canoe at summer camp, then to a warmer, more marine smell, like hiding in the cattails at the edge of the lake. This fragrance happens between March and June. Warming up, but never warm or summery.

I sat in a swampy smell on this for a couple hours before the spray on my wrist went to a lightly sweet whisper of vanilla and tonka, but the spray on my collar stayed swampy. A little like if swamp thing went to Lush. I didn’t get to the cedar until the very end.

This is the first zoologist I’ve tried that is just too artistic for me, but I think it may also be super sensitive to body chemistry, as it is so delicate and changeable. I think if I hadn’t sprayed this under my blouse it wouldn’t have gone a little fishy on me.

I would wear this to a city council meeting where I didn’t want to get roped into a conversation, but I wanted people to worry about water conservation.

This is what Bilbo’s 111th a birthday party smelled like.

It’s out in the fresh grass, hay bales to sit on, baking cakes on the air, beer and bouquets on the tables. It’s warm and convivial and a night to remember.

I would spend entire Novembers in the first half hour of this scent. Spicy and woody and green and comforting, with a whiff of warm baking at the edges.

The dry down turns to a warm sophisticated vanilla, like coming out of the snow into an expensive bakery.

It’s not totally linear, the wood and vanilla chase each other around, and it keeps the vanilla from ever getting sugary.

I am simply not a gourmand person, so I don’t think I can really wear this, but it is wonderful. If you are a gourmand person, you just have to have this.

I would wear this to a going away party I knew I would cry at, even though I was happy for the person leaving.