Mlleghoul

I really hesitated before committing to writing a review for this one because at this point in time…why bother? Hundreds and thousands of passionate words have been dedicated to this timeless fragrance and what have I got to offer that’s new or different? What am I really adding to the conversation here, and how do I think about it that makes the scent feel mine when I wear it? The whole exercise felt a little pointless…but. But. There was something there. There was something in this musty classic that weirdly got me thinking of liches, those power-hungry necromancers that did some kind of dark ritual and jammed their soul into a phylactery (autocorrect wants me to use pterodactyl here, and I am so tempted) and who embraced the bittersweet pang of undeath and eternity to become a husk of immortality. Mitsuoko evokes that damp mausoleum herbal mustiness, and when you’ve slid back the impossibly heavy stone door of an ancient crypt to peek inside its atmosphere thick with dust and humming with the quiet thrum of the beyond… there’s this peach there waiting for you, glowing eerily with a sickly light, just having performed its unholy Ceremony of Endless Night. Cobwebby oakmoss, aromatic and tannic, soft and sour, hangs heavy, like a mournful shroud. And maybe now you’re just trapped with it, forever. Wearing Mitsouko is to become a bit of an unearthly phantom yourself, flickering in and out of existence; to cheat oblivion, to linger at the edge of the world–and walk the veil between. Is that what people mean when they refer to this fragrance as “timeless”? It works for me.

I don’t think I know how to talk about this perfume, so instead, I am just going to run their list of notes through my internal translator and speak them to you in my language. This is the scent of a leather armor repurposed into a stewing pot into which you stir the sticky sap of a wounded tree, the sour scrapings of the inner rind of a pumpkin, the last few crumbles of Transylvanian honey bread blessed by the holy sisters and studded with spirit-soaked dried plums, and a scant handful of musty seeds and peppery herbs. Stir over stones that haven’t seen sunlight in one hundred years and trap the cookfire’s ghostly smoke in a glass vial for after-dinner divinatory purposes. This scent is a cryptic recipe written in a forgotten tongue; I can almost decipher the symbols, but ultimately, it remains maddening, a mystery, a riddle that I can’t solve. I can admire it, yet I can't quite call my own.

Yum Pistachio Gelato, aside from being a name that I am embarrassed to type out, is pretty embarrassingly basic for as much as a commotion perfumetok made about it when it was released. Not being all that plugged into perfume community drama, I wasn’t sure why, but I thought it had something to do with how influencers were talking or not talking about it, or maybe some people were butthurt about not receiving PR boxes? I don’t know, but I was curious as to whether the scent itself was in any way worth getting your nose out of joint about. It is not. This is a commonplace vanilla skin musk with the addition of what I think of as a sort of rancid shea butter sour baby puke element, something soft and creamy that’s gone all clotted and curdled. It’s not the worst thing I ever smelled, but if you didn’t receive a PR box about it, you no doubt lived through the ordeal of it and went on to smell better things.

I am finally sampling Frederic Malle En Passant and I'm a little ashamed to say that as long as I've been enthusing about fragrance, 20 years at least, this is the first time I have ever smelled this one. I believe it is meant to be some kind of contemporary classic, so better later than never.

With notes of lilac, cucumber, cedar, and white musk, I am still trying to put into words what a beautiful creation this is. All I can say is that it's like the gauzy childhood memory of a gentle, misty spring day, cool tendrils of fog lifting as the sun shifts through the clouds and warms the skin...but that's not quite right.

As a child, I wouldn't have had the language for the ghostly sense of nostalgic melancholia En Passant evokes. It's more like looking at the source of this memory through a hazy window pane as an adult, the present as it unfolds moment to moment, and becomes memory as fast as the moment unfurls. And knowing how fleeting it all is. And the sadness for the passage of time, and the joy for the child who doesn't feel that yet. It's that. It's all of that.

As intrigued as I was by the idea of a fragrance inspired by the lore of the phoenix, this is less a solitary mythical firebird and more a gaggle of mean girls cackling at a sick burn. It’s the sort of ambery raspberry-smoky rose that I’m already disinclined to like, because I don’t love fruity florals, but there is something about this one that’s particularly smug and acridly unlikeable. It’s got the structure of a scent that aspires to an aura of power and allure, but it falls flat, it’s just a loud, saccharine veneer in the shape of a void where a personality is meant to be. And sure, you can tell me I need therapy for my high school trauma, but I swear I don’t even think about that stuff until a particularly awful perfume comes across my radar. This is one of those perfumes.