the smell of fear: sweat, vomit, funerals, and other perfumed hauntings

because halloween isn't the only day of the year you're allowed to smell scary

People wear perfume for lots of different reasons: to comfort, to impress, to seduce. I wear perfume to make strangers on public transit afraid. When I walk on the red line towards 95th and see that characteristic look in their eyes, the confusion, thinking some sort of odor is emanating from the rugged and imposing man sitting beside me, I am truly at peace. To this extent I feel uniquely qualified to recommend a number of my favorite truly scary perfumes to wear, for those either looking to impress severity upon others, or to command respect in unkindly situations. I have personally found that while comforting perfumes are an important tool in my emotional arsenal, drawing my mind inward and focusing my attention on the interiority of how scent is experienced, the ways in which fragrance can arrest and provoke the senses serve to orient myself outward: helping me move, disguise, and represent myself in new ways.

Starting out relatively tame, Mistpouffer by Swedish savants Stora Skuggan is named after the unexplained phenomenon of large, crashing noises erupting from within a dense forest. It smells accordingly, principally defined by a thick cypriol smoke accord paired with crisp, woodsy pine and grainy sugar. Like malted milk, distant screams, and fresh-cut pine burning somewhere, somehow, over an open flame so tall it reaches the tops of trees, Mistpouffer is alluring, outdoorsy, and ominous. 

One of the least popular perfumes from Diptyque – L'Autre is a conceptually interesting and deeply unwearable mix of sweat and cooking spice. Immediately opening into a huge blast of caraway, there is a reason most fragrantica users mention the word “armpit sweat” in their reviews. Both cumin and caraway, especially when used together, have the tendency to smell eerily similar to the stench of the perpetually unwashed human body. I wonder, perhaps, if given the sensual bathing illustrations on the back of the bottle, that Serge Kalouguine, clearly skilled perfumer behind the classic L’Ombre dans L’Eau, used these ingredients intentionally, to evoke the human body in all its forbidden vicissitudes. Perhaps, or maybe this perfume just smells like a gladiator arena: pure sweat, adrenaline, and fragrant oriental spice.

Of the number of mainline perfumes Brooklyn wunderkinds DS and Durga released as self-appointed “fragrance enhancers,” the now seemingly discontinued Leatherize is my favorite by far. Intended to function as a barebones leather accord to add on top of your favorite perfumes, I actually find this perfectly suitable to wear on its own, perhaps even moreso than the wildly successful ISO E Super variant I Don’t Know What. What I personally love about the leather accord Moltz conjures here, is how deeply commercial and synthetic it is. This is not an artisan leather handbag, or even the powdery suede of Hallucinogenic Pearl – this is sex shop, new Rick Owens heels, Grease-wannabe leather that would put the Marquis de Sade to shame. A fragrantica user attempts to deride this scent by claiming it wears like “like getting hit in the face with a leather handbag, then left for dead on the side of the road.” I actually agree wholeheartedly with that statement, but mean it in a positive way. The notes here are essentially the aforementioned hyperrealistic leather accord and smoky cade and cypriol oils. The other thing I could think to compare it to would be Le Labo’s Dubai city exclusive Cuir 28, that my friends have told me smells like rancid gasoline. I know that ultimately popularity sells, and perfumers need to get paid – but I also think that these kind of scents are important to keep alive on a need-to-know basis, those who love them, like some of the strangest and most confusing fetishes on the internet, will likely keep loving them regardless of what anyone does.

A rare early release from coastal elites Régime des Fleurs, As above so below was created in collaboration with the artist Bunny Rogers for an installation of bright green squid corpses entitled “Pectus Excavatum” – once hosted in the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt. Centered around the aromachemical Delphol HC, As above so below smells of hazy florals, deer pheromones, and loamy lavender. Recalling the mop water orris haze of another one of their amazing and totally inaccessible early works Dove Grey, it smells supernatural, organic, and depressing at the same time. 

Perhaps the most prestigious perfume on this humble listicle, De Profundis by Serge Lutens is less cheap gag scary and more genuinely somber. Named presumably in reference to Oscar Wilde’s severe and spiritual letter to Lord Alfred Douglas during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, literally translated from Latin to “from the depths,” over the years it has amassed a representation as the smell of death. Its profile primarily consists of the interplay between stuffy, herbal chrysanthemum, metallic violets, and wet dirt. Laced against the faint echoes of plum trees and funerary incense, it smells at once composed and melancholy. Relying on associations of chrysanthemum blossoms with bereavement and the decoration of graves, De Profundis is the crisp and sharp smell of inevitable tragedy. It is the memento mori of the perfume counter, a reminder that in time, death comes for us all.  

Another more low-brow perfume to tackle our eternal repose is cosmetic retailer Lush’s Death and Decay. An affordable mainstay for goths everywhere, this is a simple, waxy lily placed amongst a powdery-spiced landscape of desolation. There are parallels here to Olivia Giacobetti’s all-white silent funerary procession Passage d’Enfer, but Death and Decay wears far more gaudy. I long for Lush’s early and far more provocative days of perfume-shilling, where Death and Decay was packaged in apothecary-style bottles that evoked embalming fluid. The smell is not far off – there is something plastic about this, and most other unpopular perfumes from Lush, but here, it actually adds a great deal. This is a low-budget funeral, something small, unplanned, and quickly forgotten. Wear this to smell like your other car is a hearse, or just to writhe to Bauhaus alone in your room. 

On a different theme, natural perfumers Hiram Green’s Hyde smells like the namesake savage Jungian shadow of Stevenson’s novella. An overdose of smoking birch tar and sultry labdanum make Hyde a dapper gentleman’s cologne set ablaze. People on fragrantica have described this perfume as “something that kicks” and herein I find encapsulated a shared trait of some of my favorite perfumes more commonly associated with men. When any designed smell is able to create this visceral reaction, a recoil from some even, I more than likely find myself entranced. Here, however, there is more than just shock. Into the drydown Hyde evokes worn leather, tobacco plumes, and sweeter vanillic undertones. Wear this to stalk the streets of London and you’re sure to be the most terrifying beau at the ball. 

Bruno Fazzolari’s Room 237 purports to be the only perfume directly inspired by a horror movie. While I do highly doubt this, given independent perfumery’s propensity for horrorcore, its approach is unique. The main accord here is of synthetic vinyl shower curtains, the same ones notably featured in Kubrick’s The Shining. The effect is plasticine and fresh. Like the smell of a freshly opened beach ball, the opening is eerie in its artifice. Later on, this perfume yields to a musky array of unidentifiable florals: angelica, flea bane, estragon, and costus. The appeal of Room 237 is an undercurrent of uncanny experimentalism, packaged in an inoffensive and surpassingly wearable shell. Wear this to go trespassing in the backrooms, or just to sit pretty listening to Midnight, the Stars and You.

Perhaps the most popular release from the revitalized house of Oriza L Legrand, Chypre Mousse bears a long history, but a very modern scent. It is hard for me to imagine anyone wearing this perfume who doesn’t at least a little bit want to feel, as Morrissey so aptly wailed – the soil falling over my head. I’ll be curt: if I had to wear a perfume to be buried alive, this would no doubt be it. The opening is a vegetable medley of green fennel and sage. From there, the real star emerges, a mix of soil tincture and mossy mushroom. Of the number of dirt perfumes currently on the market, Chypre Mousse resides somewhere besides the hyperrealism of Demeter Dirt, evoking freshly rained-on loam and tilling up forest floor with a rotten shovel. Wear this to comfort the lonely gravedigger who wanders your local cemetery at night, or to lie down on the ground in late autumn and let the fungal rot slowly consume you.

I initially debated whether or not to include Prin Lomros’s Sombre on this list, mainly because, on the hosting website of Strangers Parfumerie, it was initially not even listed under their Eaux de Parfums, but rather, under its own separate category of “unidentified object.” Even the fragrantica listing I linked you to above was unable to properly read the actual character of this perfume, as many of its stated notes are unable to be imported into the website’s database. Inspired by the French extremity film of the same name, where shaky visceral camerawork follows the many brutalities of a serial killer stalking and murdering a woman he met after her car breaks down. This is – naturally I suppose – quite an upsetting perfume, for an upsetting film. It opens floral and effervescent, with a fatty and aldehydic champagne note covering up the first of three maladies, an upsettingly realistic vomit accord. This perfume first wears like kissing a woman blackout drunk at a bar: it’s boozy and somewhat sweet, and maybe you feel her excited sweat dripping onto your nose, and then suddenly, her bile is on your tongue. I will say, as someone with perhaps a problematically resistant nose to somewhat intentional provocation, I was intent to linger with the acidity of this perfume longer after having applied it to skin. Into the drydown, however, the true offense emerges. A pus accord, pure and distinct decay, blends with an offensively synthetic animal musk. I think it is at this point I begin to become somewhat let down. Yes, it’s bad, but it’s not – naturally bad. I can’t say I liked how this perfume opened, but I was drawn to how evocative its repulsiveness was. Is that not the value for conceptual olfactory experiences such as these? Much ink has been spilled over Etat Libre d’Orange’s Secretions Magnifiques – that it smells like a mix of bodily fluids, that it shouldn’t have been made. I wish such claims were true. While I often adore much of Antoine Lie’s provocative and human-scented work, Secretions is to me nothing more than a docile seaweed coconut. I would wear it to the beach, not to an orgy. While Sombre is certainly on another level of disgust, it does somewhat fall victim to the moment in which the unfamiliar and fearful reveals its constituent parts. Like seeing the bloopers of a scary movie to calm yourself down, the second I am able to identify this perfume as constructed, it loses its power. Into the drydown comes the supposed notes of mud, sweat, orris, and mold. At this point, I can hardly say these shine through. What I get is primarily this flat animalic presence set against a somewhat powdery backdrop. Wear this to upturn a large diet coke at your local rep theater’s midnight screening of Last House On the Left, or don’t wear it at all.

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‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, scholar, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and media studies. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.