Independent musicians Soh Darling, Elizabeth Moen, Akenya and more talk their favorite scents —and sounds — in the city. L-R: Facing; Elizabeth Moen; Sports Boyfriend; Akenya Autumn in Chicago. My favorite season in my favorite place. Full of ritual, nostalgia, routine. I pick out my perfume of the day, queue up a playlist, and ride the CTA to my job as a full-time fragrance shop girl. A diverse array of local artists accompany me on my journey, soundtracking the scent-filled day, creating layered memories. Music conjures the window to the past: the people we were with, the particular light that day, the cinematic moments we yearn for. Scent makes those remembrances richer, more vivid, complex, and complete. It wasn’t just a drive down Lakeshore; it was the smell of the lake, the newly laid mulch, the staccato of the radio static, the sound of the cicadas. While Chicago is the birthplace of so many music legends, sonic genres, and iconic albums, it’s quickly becoming a top spot for fragrance lovers alike. New niche brands (and bands) pop up with every algorithm scroll. I thought I’d connect with some favorite local musicians to see how the art of the olfactory has shaped their sound IRL. x Hannah Black This interview has been edited for grammar and clarity. Saxophonist, multidisciplinary artist, and film enthusiast Aja Essex can be found at Music Box Theatre interviewing legends like Lilly Wachowski and providing sax support for bands such as Jennifer Femme, Stereo Mapping, Busman’s Holiday, and Technicolor Band. See Aja with Stereo Mapping at Cole's Bar, October 3rd, and check out their upcoming single, "Fall to You." Up next? This October, Aja heads to her hometown of Bloomington, IN, to record minimalist-adjacent music with musical partner Jacqui Lee. Chicago native Akenya is an award-winning multi-genre vocalist, pianist, composer, and producer synthesizing jazz, hip hop, soul, pop, classical, and world music into one seamless sound. You may have heard her vocals on tracks by legends such as Mavis Staples, Noname, Saba, and Paramore’s Hayley Williams. Be sure to see Akenya on December 16 at Austin Town Hall as part of Future Folk Fest. Known for her confessional storytelling, sharp sense of humor, and vocal power, singer-songwriter Elizabeth Moen embraces the classic Americana of Midwestern folk and the gritty pathos of indie rock. See Elizabeth and her full band at Fitzgerald's on October 3rd. Her album Fields on Fire (produced by Spencer Tweedy) comes out in early 2027. Pre-sales for the Fields on Fire vinyl are available now via her website and Bandcamp. Art rock band Facing builds densely layered, compulsively listenable, fuzzy, droning soundscapes. Comprised of Claudia Ferme (lyrics, vocals, guitar), Kirk Rawlings (vocals, production, guitar), and Nathan Whitman (production, bass, guitar, synth), Facing blends ethereal melodies with experimental, industrial pop-adjacent sensibilities. Check them out at Empty Bottle on October 7 before beloved Claudia leaves Chicago for NYC. Artist, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Softmax crafts left-of-center pop with haunting hooks, throbbing bass, and a distinctive alternative R&B sound. Her recent single “Don’t Think About It” is available everywhere, along with the accompanying music video. Softmax’s debut album is currently in progress. Chicago’s own Soh Darling sparkles on lush, jazz-inspired tracks with rich vocals, playful lyricism, and an effervescent ingenue spirit. Her retro sound taps into a lineage of raw, soulful women a la Amy Winehouse and Etta James. Get hip to her latest “PISCES (REMIX)” video and stay tuned for upcoming live performances. Sports Boyfriend, aka singer-songwriter Eileen Peltier (joined by Ashley Guerrero on drums, Alex Lukawski on bass, and Abby Santourian on keys), creates sun-drenched, nostalgic pop so catchy it feels like you’ve lived a life with it in your CD travel case. Sports Boyfriend will play VV Lightbody’s release show at The Hideout on October 15th. Their debut record Slice of Life, released in June, soundtracked many a summer memory. The band is currently hard at work on a follow-up. Aja Essex Hannah Black: How does scent affect the recording process: i.e., what does the studio space smell like? Do you have any specific fragrance rituals when recording or writing? Akenya: Having nice candles around while recording is always a nice touch, adding to [the] overall ambiance and mood. I also like to sometimes sage and palo santo the space before recording, or have some good incense burning just to clear the energy in a positive way. Can't go wrong with Nag Champa! Elizabeth Moen: I love these questions; they've made me realize how much of my memory in the last ten years is tied to the smell of venues, green rooms, recording studios, the air outside gas stations. When I think of the smell of most studios, my mind goes to dust, sweat, rugs that should have been cleaned a few years ago, and the leftover delivery food sitting out after hours of guitar takes. So much of my life as an artist is transient, and I've felt like I can't make a space my own. Now that I'm getting older and feeling more sensitive to being away from home, I'm bringing candles with me and dousing my clothes and guitar case with perfume with more clean, crisp scents to it [sic] gives the allure of freshness and home even when I'm far away or stuck in the studio cave. Facing: Kirk: The only pervasive scent or ritual pertaining to recording is the smell of cannabis. Nate and I are regular smokers, and it personally helps me to remain a bit removed and keep a soft focus [on] the overall picture of a song. It allows for the illusion of some objectivity, maybe. The scent is comforting and constant. Other than that, it’s all dank warehouse smells and the occasional incense stick. Claudia: The building we practice and record in doesn’t smell great… it usually reeks of cigarettes and sometimes trash. My bandmates smoke weed, and I don’t, but I guess that’s a smell I’ve gotten used to in our room when we practice or record. There is something about familiar smells locking you into the past or present in different ways. I do most, if not all, of my songwriting at home, though, and there I love burning incense, a candle, palo santo, or all three. I spend a lot of time making things in my room in general, and it’s important to me that it smells good and familiar. Softmax: Scent gets me into character when I know what I’m working on, and it gives me a starting point when I don’t. It’s world-building and character-generation. It’s the fantasy. The studio space is quite small, so it smells like whatever I’ve put on myself, which is ideal as I’m not a studio candle person. It’s tight enough in the room that I think I would knock into it and then fail a bunch of QuickTime events and then table and instruments on fire, hard drives melting, etc. Soh Darling: Scent is so important to my daily life, so inherently it’s important to my writing and recording process. Usually I’m recording in a friend’s home studio, and more often than not there’s the smell of weed, haha. Even though I don’t smoke anymore myself, it’s actually so comforting and puts me in the creative mindset — even secondhand! The scent of herbal tea, lozenges, and throat spray is pretty ripe too, as any singer knows. My main collaborator lives in L.A. in this little gnome apartment, and the ambiance is usually low light, lots of plants, incense or sage burning, and a fresh pot of tea always brewing. Sports Boyfriend: I love to light a candle (I’ve been working my way through a serious stack of Brooklyn Candles from an old job) when I’m writing at home — but I’m so often writing out in the world. I think the scents and sounds of things like the airport, the train, [and] when I’m out on my bike are very transportive and inspirational. The studio we love to record in (JAMDEK in Chicago) has this amazing wood/old equipment smell. Makes me feel like I’m in some kind of pre-digital era. L: Akenya / R: Akenya’s fragrance collection HB: Do you use fragrance to draw out specific qualities when crafting melody? Are there any genres that feel more aligned with certain scents or scent profiles? Aja Essex: Having a space feel and smell warm is really important when I'm writing. If things are too sharp, too bright, or too strong, it's hard for me to get into any good creative mindset. I like things like patchouli or the smell of leather or tobacco or sandalwood. I associate Black music with those smells, simply because those were the smells in my grandma's house when I was growing up and listening to music on her record player or with headphones in with my Walkman or iPod. Jazz, funk, soul, gospel, [and] R&B all smell warm to me. Akenya: This is not something I've done in the past, but honestly I might start adding this to my practice! Since scent is so emotionally evocative, I definitely think scent and sound are a natural pairing. And I like the idea of pairing scent profiles with genre; maybe jazz is earthy and warm, while pop is fruity and effervescent. Maybe rock and roll has more bite, with some leather or tobacco undertones! The possibilities are endless. L: Elizabeth Moen / R: Moen’s fragrance collection Elizabeth Moen: I love using candles when I write. It's the quickest, best way to make the space feel like it's set to an intention of creating. I light a candle, set my laptop to offline so I can type lyrics but not be distracted, tune my guitar, and plug in. I've been in a rockier era of my music, and I've also been drawn to smokier, grittier scents like Teakwood and Tobacco by P.F. Candle Co. Facing: Kirk: I don’t think we have used fragrance with any specific intention all together before, but in any type of songwriting you have to employ your senses. Especially lyrically, Claudia often seems to draw on her senses to paint a more visceral picture with words. I would definitely say punk and hardcore carry an implied scent. Musty and lived-in. Unconcerned with cleanliness. Reggae and dub have their own obvious odor association, earthy and lots of weed smoke. Rock smells like stale beer and cigs. Math rockers and bedroom indie poppers are usually a bit fresher but with a hint of cat litter. Not a lot of noticeable perfume or cologne in any music scene I’ve been in, really. Claudia: I guess tying into my previous answer, I like the ritual of lighting candles, incense, etc., and that helps me be more comfortable and present, and the more comfortable and present I am, the more I can focus and create things. Not to give [in to] stereotypes, but I definitely associate stinkier, unpleasant scents with rock and heavier music, and pop music with sweeter, brighter scents. Noise and jazz music with interesting, piercing scents. Doing music, I’m around a lot of men who I suspect don’t care about smelling good, so that’s what I associate, scent-wise, with doing music in general — musky, lived-in, earthy. Softmax: I definitely do use fragrance for direction in the writing and production stages. If I want to bring a coldness or an element of the machine to a song, then I will wear something that smells like that, to me: cold and crisp and sharp and probably metallic. If I want intimacy and humanity to be front and center, then I’ll go skin musk all the way, or a warm, lived-in leather. Thinking about it now, I’m finding that I could absolutely pick scents/scent profiles for an album or for a song, but my brain is locking up when I try to pick something for a whole genre. I just don’t think any genre exists in enough of a vacuum to have its own overarching answer. But I definitely could do it for a track or an album or even single/album artwork. I could also do the inverse and start with the scent and then pick songs and albums that live in its world. Soh Darling’s fragrance collection Soh Darling: There are so many elements of fragrance and music that overlap. Fragrance accords are composed of multiple notes, just like musical chords. A perfumer’s workstation is called an organ; their work is a composition, and that composition unfolds through top, middle, and base notes. This is no coincidence! Because I’m more entrenched in the world of jazz, R&B, and soul, I think — although it’s cliché — dark, resinous, sweet, woody, incense-heavy, smoky, and sexy scents come to mind with those genres. Those are base-heavy fragrances and bass-heavy music. They have soul. But just as music doesn’t have to live in one category, neither does fragrance. Both can be as complex or as simple as they want to be and still be perfect. Sports Boyfriend: I love samples of fragrances. I try to make sure I keep just a little of them when they are gone so I can get transported back in time a bit whenever I need help remembering something or a specific period of time. I think my best songs come from drawing out a single vivid moment — and scent helps me get back into the headspace. L: Claudia Ferme of Facing / R: Ferme’s fragrance collection HB: Scent and memory are so intrinsically linked. Are there any scent memories that have inspired songs or album concepts? Aja Essex: This is so specific, but it's kind of the opposite for one song! I co-wrote a song called "Chase Infiniti," and every time we play it, I can kinda smell fresh rain? No idea why. I don't have synesthesia, but there are moments when we perform that I swear a storm cloud has come and gone and left the scent of a damp wind in its wake. Akenya: Of course! I think it's hard to conjure up past stories and not think about every part of their texture, even if subconsciously. The way a former love smelled conjured up when writing about them. The way my granny's house smelled when thinking about aspects of my childhood. I think one sensation can even be translated into the song the same way certain visuals come to mind when hearing them. Elizabeth Moen: Totally! The smell of fields and gravel inspired my upcoming album Fields on Fire. The fresh smell of gardens. One of the last lines on the album is "Lilies in the garden and grandma's laugh." The record is a lot about rebirth, moving forward; so [the] smokier scents of a bonfire came to mind. I think of people's memories and the smell of their homes, clothes, cooking, cars. Facing: Kirk: I’m not sure if scent has inspired any of our songs directly, but I would associate a clean freshness with our music. Facing smells fresh out of the shower. Maybe because it’s multi-tracked digitally, and we don’t play sweaty punk rock. Claudia: Not yet, but there’s an artist, Ziemba, [who] I played a show with years ago, who made scents to go along with her albums as merch, and it’s something I’ve thought about doing. Softmax: I have a song called “Ghost In The Shell,” which is of course named [after] the manga and anime, but also [after] the fragrance from Etat Libre d’Orange that I have loved and [have] had a fascination with for a long time. It smells like silicon and milky soap and like a hot computer loading too much or running out of memory, which was kind of the point of the song. Soh Darling: Oh totally. Specific scent memories, or even just the idea of scent as memory, have inspired verses of songs, lyrical imagery, and even album artwork. “Left my perfume beside his bed, now all he smells is my regret.” I also create and absorb lyrics with scent in mind. I think being so immersed in fragrance over the years [Editor’s note: Sophie is a fragrance specialist at Merz Apothecary] has just made me more conscious of scent in general. For instance, if there are lyrics about the ocean, a picnic, or even the color green, I can imagine the way it smells. In fact, maybe I should use that more in my songwriting. Sports Boyfriend: Yes, absolutely. I'd say our record was inspired by the smell of a bar; like the smell you get when you walk past a bar with open windows. Literally a scent you can time travel with (especially for me now that I don’t drink anymore). The smell of tobacco is always full of memory and inspiration for me. I also don’t smoke anymore, haha, but I do miss it… L: Softmax / R: Softmax’s fragrance collection HB: What fragrance do you wear daily (if any)? Does it differ from what you wear when performing? Aja Essex:I love rotating between [Etat Libre d’Orange’s] The Ghost In The Shell, [binaurale’s] Matchbox Romance, and [Le Labo’s] Santal 33. I feel like those three scents really found me in a big way. I definitely love to have Santal 33 if I'm going out and want to feel sexy. I've been told it’s a good feral scent. The Ghost In The Shell is just my ride or die at this point. I could wear it [every day]. I think Matchbox Romance has found its way into my rotation as my scent to put on before a show. Something about it makes me feel a little more confident. Akenya: I'm a big fan of lavender; I often dab just some natural essential oil on pulse points. I also enjoy anything with a sandalwood or vanilla base, so I keep those on hand. My latest fragrance obsession has been Tears by Régime des Fleurs; I find it so nostalgic with a touch of bittersweetness. When performing, I try to keep things fresh and light because the stage lights can be very hot! So I don't tend to wear heavy fragrances in that instance. But one of my favorite scents currently for going out is Choux Choux by Liis. Elizabeth Moen: I wear a fig-centric scent called Philosykos by Diptyque daily because my boyfriend is Greek and I'm always dreaming of the day we get to go there together. When I perform, I like to wear their scent that has more grapefruit and rose, called Vetyverio. Scent one smells like home; scent two smells like showtime. [I’m] excited to branch out with new scents when I stop by Merz soon. To be honest, I didn't wear perfume until a year or so ago because super chemical-ly perfume gave me headaches. Now that more natural perfumes are on my radar, I'm finally diving in! Facing: Kirk: I just wear deodorant in life and performance. I’m not a fan of most colognes. Claudia: In the spring/summer, I wear She Was an Anomaly by Etat Libre d’Orange, and sometimes I mix it with Ghost Pine by LVNEA. In the winter, I wear By the Fireplace by Maison Margiela Replica and/or Somewhere but Nowhere by Lore. If I’m playing a show, I usually spray some more of whatever I was wearing that day! Softmax: The fragrances I wear daily are pretty consistently Heliotrope Blanc from L.T. Piver and Almond Suede from Arquiste. I usually wind up wearing something resinous or leathery to perform — something that has its own texture and [ambiance] beyond me and beyond skin. It feels like an element of the production like lighting or set design, even if it’s mostly just experienced by me onstage. [It] also makes me feel braver, less like an exposed nerve. Perhaps it reminds me of armoring up and saddling my steed before charging into battle. Soh Darling: I wear a different scent (or a few!) almost daily, but I’m lucky to have a fragrance wall at work at my disposal. When performing, I tend to reach for something that feels the most “me” and makes me feel my boldest. Fine, I won’t gatekeep anymore — my favorite fragrance is Moonmilk by Stora Skuggan. I don’t only wear it for performances, but I wear it sparingly because I want it to stay special and never get sick of it. Any sandalwood fragrance makes me feel the most self-actualized! L: Eileen Peltier of Sports Boyfriend / R: Peltier’s fragrance collection Sports Boyfriend: One of my favorites is Comme des Garçons AMAZINGREEN, which I actually bought on name alone in the middle of a Chicago winter. I was craving something, anything green. I also love Debaser by D.S. & Durga. I first smelled it in a hotel I was staying in for work. I find my day jobs very inspirational! When I’m performing, I’ll pick a random one of my samples and throw that on. I try to keep things a little unexpected for myself going into a show. 🌀 Hannah Black is a fragrance specialist and creative director living in Chicago, IL. Find her at the library, in North Side cinemas, or on Instagram @pinkvariegated.

As intimacy declines and images dominate, a new wave of beauty brands are reclaiming the most sensorial experience of all — sex. We’re so used to sex selling beauty that we hardly blink when it happens, if we notice it at all. Full, parted lips, fluttery eyelashes, and the pertest of derrieres construct the fantasy that the “right” products will increase the users’ (usually women’s) sex appeal. Sex is hinted at, evoked, with little care or interest for whether it leads to consummation of any kind. “Better Than Sex,” said a standard black mascara from Too Faced; “Orgasm,” whispered a blusher shade from Nars, conjuring only a timid cheek flush. A sex recession is upon us, with data reporting that younger generations are having less sex than their predecessors. Yet we don’t need data to say with confidence that we’re living in acutely looks-obsessed times, and that Zillennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha dedicate much time and resources to looking styled, perfected, and desirable; an investment in pleasures visual over bodily, an embrace of the controllable over the mutable. In other words, “everyone is beautiful and no one is horny.” Amid this landscape – not quite neo-puritanism but more a flirtation with its features – a few beauty brands are making the case for sex again. More importantly, they’re doing so without the coy and saccharine trappings that saw a wink and a giggle as a good-enough substitute for the real thing. When the elevated bodycare range Nécessaire launched in 2018, the Sex Gel was part of the core offering. Presented in a minimalistic pump bottle and adorned in a cursive typeface, it announced itself and its use directly. Care for every part of your body, it seemed to say with utilitarian practicality. Body care brand Mienne took the idea a step further. French for mine, Mienne is interested in what is felt, not just what is seen, and incorporating this concept into the brand was essential. JR, Mienne’s marketing director, says, “Desire had to be part of it because we’re making products for the body. We’re interested in bodycare as ritual, something that brings you into presence. We wanted to create formulas and objects you’re drawn to using again and again: skin you want, scent you want, objects you want to keep close. That pull matters, it’s what makes care feel intuitive, not clinical.” For Mienne, desire has a dual meaning; the products are objects of desire, and they work to inspire and facilitate it in virtuous symbiosis. “Desire is both the aesthetic and the function. We design the packaging and the sensorial experience to feel covetable — high design, tactile, almost like you want to reach for it before you even know why. And then the product experience reinforces that: the texture, the scent, the finish on skin,” JR continues. Mienne’s makers aren’t shying away from the kinds of acts that might follow the use of their products. “When skin looks transformed and feels inviting—when you’re more aware of your body—you tend to feel more open, more connected, more interested in touch. That’s the symbiosis: objects you desire, that make you feel more desirable, which naturally attracts desire from others,” JR says. Alongside products like body wash, body cream, and a dual-purpose massage candle is the Sex Serum. The organically shaped bottle and round cap make it look like an objet d’art, while the travel size resides in a chrome bullet adorned with a leather tassel (or mini-flogger, depending on your disposition). Offering a lubricant “was always part of the plan,” says JR. “If we were building a brand around desire and touch, we couldn’t ignore the most intimate context for both—especially in a category that’s largely underserved in prestige skincare.” As for the name, it’s “direct because the intention is direct. We didn’t want euphemisms,” JR states. No other fragrance has attended to the materiality of sex as closely as Secretions Magnifiques by Etat Libre d'Orange. The scent is an homage to sweat, saliva, blood, and sperm. I tried it once, many years ago (a sales assistant escorted me outside the shop to spritz on my wrist), and will never forget the saline, metallic, wet, musky experience. It’s a provocation few would dare wear. A subtler iteration is Pigmentarium’s Erotikon, inspired by Gustav Machatý’s 1929 silent film of the same name and its softness of images achieved through modern American lenses, which are translated into enveloping base notes of amber, musk, and sandalwood. Scandalousness is telegraphed via a heart of tonka beans and spicy, edible top notes: ginger, chocolate, pink pepper. The effect is a playful invitation to lean in a little closer. While many individual perfumes have flirted with sex and desire to inspire scent profiles, few brands have dared to base their modus operandi around them. When I discovered Jouissance and Discothèque last year, I was struck by how boldly both embedded sensory pleasures into every touchpoint. Jouissance’s connection to pleasure and the erotic is most direct, and underwriting it is a statement of intent: “Literary passions, distilled into scent.” The founder and creative director, Cherry Cheng, draws direct inspiration from female writers and thinkers who embraced their desires and helped others do the same. “I was drawn to female writers and thinkers who spoke openly about desire because they gave language to something that has so often been muted, distorted, or claimed by others. Their work didn’t treat desire as something to be apologised for, but as a source of intelligence, creativity, and power. That felt radical, and still does,” she says. The philosophy is inscribed in the brand name as jouissance, a term the French feminist writer Hélène Cixous used to discuss a particular form of pleasure interweaving spiritual, mental, and physical aspects unique to women. When creating Jouissance, Cheng “initially thought that the brand would be read as deliberately provocative and expected a degree of backlash.” The three scents in the range capture the writing of Catherine Millet (En Plein Air), Anaïs Nin (Les Cahiers Secrets), and Pauline Réage’s The Story of O (Bague d’O). Cheng says she was “ prepared for that tension,” especially since The Story of O and its depiction of total female submission have long been a subject of criticism in some feminist circles. Instead, what Cheng has seen is a response of “recognition rather than resistance” with customers describing the fragrances “as intimate, personal, even affirming – an invitation to reconnect with desire on their own terms. That reaction has clarified something essential for me: people aren’t rejecting the erotic itself. They’re rejecting reductive or externalised versions of it, and are gravitating toward more nuanced, reflective, and inward ways of experiencing desire.” Discothèque locates its inspiration in some of history’s best clubs and unforgettable nights out. It pulses with references to the bodily, the pleasurable, and the possibilities unleashed in losing oneself on the dance floor. It’s unapologetically sexy and very much by design, according to founders Jessie Willner and Hanover Booth. “Fragrance is such an intimate experience: it lives on skin and is noticed at close range, to pretend it’s neutral or polite just doesn’t feel like Discothèque,” says Hanover of the decision to address desire directly. “The brand leans into that freeing feeling on the dance floor, where you feel most alive, a little undone, but completely yourself. Scent is incredibly evocative, and it can bypass logic or conscious thought and instantly transport you back to a memory. It’s physical and tactile and undeniably sexy.” And Discothèque is having fun about it, too. Its scent sample pack looks like a cigarette packet, while individual 2ml samples are packaged to look indistinguishable from condom wrappers. (To be on the safe side when going out, I’d double-check you’re bringing the right one.) Willner didn’t think Discothèque would resonate with quite so many people, attributing the continued success to making and saying things “that others may only be thinking.” “People want things that embrace and celebrate what can sometimes be the most inhibited parts of themselves, and the experiences we're inspired by are so universal, but sometimes taboo. Most mainstream brands would probably not have approved me designing a condom-wrapped 2ml sample or calling a fragrance Baise Moi on the Dancefloor. To think that these luxury retailers that we’ve partnered with have signed off on everything we've made is so special: we've been allowed to bring subversive design into the world of luxury, which is rare,” says Willner. It does feel subversive to see a fragrance brand state the quiet parts loudly. We wear perfume to smell good to those who get closest to us; clubs are sexy, intimate spaces where you might just find someone to baise, on the dancefloor or not. Language is central to how Jouissance and Discothèque embody their positioning to embrace the sexy and the erotic. Cheng drew on Nin, Cixous, and Audre Lorde’s ideas about what desire can look like when it’s perceived as an open horizon, free of predetermined concepts and images. “These thinkers offered a framework where desire is not spectacle, but authorship. Jouissance grew from wanting to honour that lineage – creating fragrances that act as a personal language, inviting the wearer into a more conscious, sensual, and self-directed way of being,” explains Cheng. Every fragrance and candle by Discothèque comes complete with a sultry description courtesy of erotic short story writer Jessica Garrison, animating the scents with heady, aesthetic prose that delights the senses. It’s not product copy but a way to experience, albeit briefly, the scent world. Take Body Heat. It’s 1974 in Monte Carlo, and the wearer smells of cardamom and coffee to start before the fragrance shifts to reveal orris, suede, and dark chocolate, wearing down to an intimate base of amber, oud, and cedarwood. Garrison’s words ask us to imagine the encounter that took place. “Her amber eyes lingered, her palm on his arm. They were pressed between bodies, dripping in sweat and suede fringe. [...] Their wrists intertwined as they started to move. A tryst that began in a cedarwood booth on the French Riviera on a hot night in June. His hands grabbed her waist, his breath warm on her neck, like soft-burning sage. From first song to last, they danced through the night, their skin flush from a crush and marked with a bite.” Working with a range of references like music, scent notes, historical photos, and stories of clubs, Willner and Booth give Garrison an open brief to write what feels right. “Jessica has such a natural understanding of tension and restraint in her writing, and it's never literal; it captures those feelings you associate with the best nights out. It reads like a half-remembered moment you recognise instantly, even if you can’t name it,” adds Booth. Joussance closes the circle on its literary inspirations, commissioning and publishing the erotic short story publication, The Collector; a “natural extension [because] of the brand has always been about translation—exploring what can’t fully be expressed in a single medium,” Cheng explains. “The series, like our fragrances, seeks to explore the erotic in a way that is intimate, imaginative, and provocative, inviting conversation, reflection, and the reclaiming of desire as a creative force.” Helena Whittingham, director at Lover Management, a talent agency specialising in intimacy and the erotic, has likewise observed the shift within the beauty industry, a step away from acting coy. “It’s genuinely encouraging to see beauty brands collaborating with sex workers and people who work directly with desire, like with the Urban Decay X Ari or Levi Coralynn's recent career, and not just borrowing from the aesthetics.” Whittingham sees this reflecting a wider newfound appetite “for the physical and the sensorial right now, especially after years of digital fatigue and emotional distance. Sex has always sold, but what feels different in this moment is the confidence. There’s a sense of desire being treated as adult, embodied, and worth taking seriously, which I hope signals a pushback against the neo-puritanism we’ve seen creeping into culture. I basically live to see it! love seeing sex-positive brands and sex workers crossing into beauty and fragrance – when it feels like bridge-building rather than just branding.” “I think what we’re seeing isn’t an absence of desire, but a discomfort with how narrowly it’s been represented,” reflects Cheng. For too long, narratives about sex and desire were defined externally and disseminated through images that created a normative effect. None of the brands mentioned here deal in stereotypically sexy imagery to elicit their desired effect. Products are presented either with a degree of utilitarianism (Nécessaire) or sensuality. Jouissance’s few images of bodies appear illustrative, not prescriptive, while Discothèque insists on a sense of fun and play in a few promo images featuring a real-life couple. What desire is, what sex means, and how pleasure is defined are left for us to figure out. “There’s a fatigue around performative or commodified sexuality, which can look like neo-puritanism on the surface,” says Cheng. “But beneath that, I think the desire for intimacy, meaning, and embodied experience is very much alive.” 🌀 Zhenya Tsenzharyk is a writer and editor living in London, covering (most) things sensory through a culturally critical lens. She loves to over-intellectualise her ever-growing perfume collection. You can find her on Instagram @z.l.d.n.

In perfume, nostalgia tends to rule: sweet gourmands, memory-laden florals. But when fragrance borrows from the cerebral world of chess, it opens a stranger, more imaginative territory. Frassaï's 2025 fragrance, Ajedrez, composed by Ralf Schwieger. Of the perfume, the brand says, "Time can move forward, or backward. Time is inverted. Sometimes, it seems to stand still. The pause gains importance. In standing still, there is movement." En passant is one of chess’s more esoteric rules, referring to a pawn's ability to capture another pawn when special conditions are met. I learnt this mostly against my will when I sampled Frederick Malle’s fragrance of the same name. It dawned on me soon after reading the definition that the title must refer to the French phrase’s direct meaning, passing through, not the chess rule – and yet I found myself captivated by the idea of trying to distill and communicate the essence of a player enacting the move in a game in scent. En Passant was inspired by a spring garden in full bloom, filled with the scent of lilacs and the freshness of vegetation lingering after a short, heavy storm breaks the day’s heat. Why couldn’t it refer to an opportunistic pawn, drawing a parallel between the ephemerality of what happens on a chessboard and lilac’s notoriously short blooming season? In a way, both are passing through. Though I was mistaken about the connection between En Passant and chess, other fragrance houses have ventured there directly. Frassaï’s Ajedrez, translating literally to “chess,” is a journey to a darkly lit chess room in the 1960s. Tobacco, dry spices, and iris conjure images of a chess player, sharply dressed; the notes of dark wood, moss, and lavender evoke the materials a chess board is made from, the room it lives in. Vilhelm Perfumerie’s Morning Chess situates the game during the summer months in Sweden’s coastal Falkenberg, verdant and succulent, with only an echo of leather and spice. Both are memoristic, elegant tributes to chess-playing grandfathers. Perfume is not immune to trend cycles. Even its resurgent popularity as a category within beauty is cyclical, and the current boom – though sustained – is likely to dip at some point. Chess’s presence in pop culture is more curious. It’s a game with a 1500-year history, but not exactly a mainstream interest or pursuit, until 2020 when The Queen’s Gambit entered the cultural imagination at a time when, for many, TV was the main source of entertainment. Captive audiences couldn't get enough of the chess prodigy Beth Harmon, with her preternatural talent and dramatic character arc; the show quickly became one of the most-streamed on Netflix. The Queen’s Gambit stepped outside chess’s entrenched symbology. Harmon was beautiful, stylish, sexy, transgressive, ambitious, an addict, a woman. She bore a whole host of dramatic attributes to find interest in beyond the inherent unfamiliarity of chess, while simultaneously immersing audiences in the appeal and tension of the game. The Queen’s Gambit rendered the closed, internal experience of chess explicit; Harmon would look up to the ceiling to envision her next move, the chess pieces celestial objects she mastered at will. Searches for chess surged as did sales of chess sets, and in an amusing turn of events, The Queen’s Gambit board game was born, a simplified facsimile for Harmon wannabes. More niche, though an indisputable event in the literary world, was the 2024 publication of Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo. The hardcover features a fallen rook, which can move any number of squares in a straight line if not blocked by another piece, representing the protagonists’ tribulations and the freedom — with the right strategy — to move beyond them. An intermezzo, an Italian term translating to “in between moves,” is an unexpected action in the game that disrupts an opponent’s strategy and necessitates an immediate response. Readers of the novel will be able to make the symbolic connection between those metaphors and the narrative arc of the two protagonists, though it’s the humanistic Peter, and not the chess-playing Ivan, who most embodies the cover’s clues. Chess has long served as a metaphor for anyone looking to explore and express complexity. So why not fragrance, too? In the aptly titled novella Chess, also known as The Royal Game, Stefan Zweig asks us to consider whether chess is “not also a science and art [...] a unique link between pairs of opposites: ancient yet eternally new, mechanical in structure, yet made effective only by imagination; limited to a geometrically fixed space, yet within unlimited combinations; [...] no one knows what brought it to down to earth to vanquish boredom, sharpen the senses and stretch the mind.” It’s a fitting description for the art of perfumery, particularly when it draws attention to the function of imagination — it’s imagination that connects what’s inside a perfume bottle to its narrative and visual identity. The high conceptualism of chess and the average nescience towards its nuances can only be a good thing for fragrance. A perfumer could start by translating each of the 32 pieces on a board into individual fragrances or reach for the thousands of chess openings, the oldest of which are named after nationalities of players who advocated for them; all ready-made genesis nodes for olfactory exploration. So many of the most popular scents today, even in niche spaces, over-index on nostalgia and gourmands, the two often present concurrently. Sweet and sticky, they harken back to places and memories stripped of contextual complexity and therefore negative associations. Chess, then, presents a new opportunity for perfumers and perfume enthusiasts alike. Perfume house Mind Games is putting this theory to the test. Launched in 2022, Mind Games “links the complex artistry best embodied by the strategy and brilliance of chess with the innovative and hypnotic effects of perfumery.” Naturally, the collection is divided into black and white flacons, adorned with a sculptural topper corresponding to different chess pieces. Scents mirror “the significance behind every move a player makes [...] Each note is carefully considered and selected, performing an essential role in the grand scheme, comprising a collection as layered, nuanced, and insightful as the ideas that inspired them.” At Mind Games, this isn’t mere marketing. It’s a gamut of ideas striving to coalesce into a narrative detached from nostalgia, free from predetermined parameters. By building a brand around the concept of chess and all it encompasses, Mind Games has created an olfactory playground for the perfumers it works with. Grand Master, unexpectedly, opens with rose water, blackcurrant, and peony. The initial softness is bolstered by coffee and violet before the fragrance reveals a robust foundation of ebony wood, myrrh, and incense. Grand Master is unisex – if anything, it leans feminine – the soft, powdery flower petals concealing aromatic woods until a gust of wind blends them. Meanwhile, Gambit is herbaceous and spicy. Cloves and lavender open, leading to a cardamom and geranium middle, while patchouli, sandalwood, and ambrostar ground. I can extrapolate how the spicy opening notes translate to a player making a calculated sacrifice at the start of the game, as the fragrance transforms into a stable, animalic base, the player waits to reap the gambit’s advantage. Is it ontologically true? I don’t care – it’s fun to experience the notes like colours and brushstrokes in an impressionistic scape, conjuring previously unexplored and unexpected associations. Julian Wasser, Duchamp Playing Chess with a Nude (Eve Babitz), Duchamp Retrospective, Pasadena Art Museum (1963) I often think about a 1963 photograph by Julian Wasser of a nude, youthful Eve Babitz playing chess with the besuited, aged Marcel Duchamp. An absurd contrast transpires between them, the game, and the Ferus gallery setting, surrounded by Duchamp’s artworks, including the famed Fountain. I long to know what the scene smelled like. Did Babitz arrive smelling of “swaying fruit trees and blooming bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds,” as she described her hometown of Los Angeles to smell like in Eve’s Hollywood? Maybe Duchamp was wearing classic French cologne, or his suit was freshly laundered for the opening of his retrospective. The gallery must have had a smell, they always do, of expanse, and the recently installed artworks. Why not add a salty, aquatic note, courtesy of the Fountain? The chess game between Duchamp and Babitz didn’t last long. “I tried my best, moving a knight so at least he knew I had some idea what a knight was, he moved his pawn and the next thing I knew, I was checkmated. ‘Fool’s mate,’ they call it when you’re so stupid that the game hasn’t even begun and you’ve lost,” Babitz recalled of the experience. Sadly, there’s no fool’s mate fragrance, though I’m not surprised. It’s the fastest checkmating pattern in chess, predicated on white making awful opening mistakes, leading to a checkmate in only two moves. Perhaps in a fragrance, it would be embodied by two discordant notes, quickly going nowhere. It wouldn’t smell good, necessarily, but it would be fun to experience. In The Queen’s Gambit, chess was a refuge for Beth Harmon, the process through which she transformed herself. It may be a conceptual refuge for perfumers too, a new semantic circle to play in. By centering chess, perfumers and perfume appreciators can, per Zweig, “sharpen the senses and stretch the mind,” vanquishing the boredom of revisiting well-worn olfactory concepts. To thrive as an art form, perfume has to look in directions other than the past; to concepts and ideas that uncover possibilities: cerebral, delightful, unexpected – without this move it may grow stale, blundering into a fool’s mate.🌀 Zhenya Tsenzharyk is a writer and editor living in London, covering (most) things sensory through a culturally critical lens. She loves to over-intellectualise her ever-growing perfume collection. You can find her on Instagram @z.l.d.n.

For science, obviously. From L-R: my regular face, my UV damage, and my subsurface redness, in all their glory. On a rainy, balmy, beautifully gray Saturday earlier this month, I nestled my face into a digital facial imaging process machine, or a VISIA. It looked about as Kronenbergian as it sounds: a Cross-polarized UV light swung a 360° axis around my head, photographing each visible inch of my face, from my widow’s peak to the tip of my chin. Every freckle, mole, wrinkle, rogue eyebrow hair, and melasma bouquet was accounted for, tallied, and systematized. There is something oddly serene in feeling a bright, white light tickle your cheekbones; in stepping out of your body and witnessing it objectively, without reaching for the balm of aesthetics or the relief-thrill of turning away from the mirror. This is my face. This is how it exists in the world. Now what? I received the scan at the boutique aesthetics studio OVME. The business of aesthetics is undoubtedly controversial, and I’d finally gotten to the age (26) where I was thinking more about the way I looked less from a youthful mode of self-hatred and more from a desire for health. I worked out, I took a glut of supplements, I ate whole foods, I slathered and plumped my skin in a 12-step, meticulously designed routine. And while my skin wasn’t perfect — nor was I very much interested in perfection as an aesthetic or spiritual pursuit — I was interested in making sure my skin health was robust, and that I was doing what I could to not destroy our bodies’ largest organ. When the scan was over, I’d been expecting vanity metrics — the summation of my face translated into raw data, designed for easy solutions: fill that pore, dissolve this wrinkle, temper that rosacea spatter. What I was not expecting was something no one, not even me, could’ve ever seen in a mirror. Since time immemorial, women’s beauty rituals have been treated as frivolous, excessive, or fundamentally unserious. (Therein lies the rub — what’s so wrong with a bit of frivolity?) “All we are really seeking is a reliable way to show ourselves love when so many people around us are telling us we're worthy of little more than contempt,” says Kristin Iversen in NYLON. Skincare, despite its scientific bedrock, has continued to live in a weird space between legitimate healthcare and snake oil: buy this algae serum. Peel the topmost layer of your skin off. Look 15 forever. And while none of this is particularly new criticism, the ascendancy of dark horses in the skincare business — like Primally Pure, whose recent SPF campaign came under fire for claims that their products were “100% poison-free” — has made the question of skincare’s health legitimacy even more pertinent. And while the merits of specific formulas, products, or branded campaigns can be endlessly debated, technological innovations in skincare are much harder to dismiss. “The future of aesthetics is no longer just about treating aging; it's about supporting healthy aging through regenerative medicine and evidence-based innovation,” says Iman Shamloul, PA-C. Imaging, diagnostics, and dermatology-backed formulations have risen considerably, like exome serums and Lancôme’s Cell BioPrint, which assesses skin-surface protein biomarkers to predict ingredient responsiveness. Being able to see how and why the skin, as a whole organ, changes, rather than simply waiting for a product to do its promised job (or reacting to what we can already see), is transformative. While this isn’t to say beauty = medicine, it is to say thus: as the skincare industry finds more footing in tried-and-true, quantifiable clinicality, rather than the subjective or decorative, other associated industries — like aesthetics — are following suit. With clean, freshly washed skin, the VISIA scan broke down my skin into seven categories: wrinkles & fine lines; texture; surface spots; emerging brown spots; red areas; visible pores; clogged pores; and UV damage, and balanced my results against the global aggregate of anyone who’s ever had a VISIA scan. It was the last category that revealed what I couldn’t see: that I was in the bottom eighth percentile of sun damage in my age group. As a Southern WASP who spent most of her childhood running on the beach, I’ve always had very fair skin poxed with freckles, darkening and deepening in the summertime. The scan captured subterranean freckles and dots, invisible to the naked eye, secretly covering my entire face like a Pollock. And while my first instinct was to brush this off (So what! I like my freckles!), I’d found out that the extent of that UV damage could, later on, aggravate my risk of sun cancer — disconcerting news, given I’ve had family members fight melanoma. “UV exposure accumulates over years, causing repeated DNA damage to skin cells. While the body is able to repair much of that damage, repeated sunburns and chronic UV exposure increase the likelihood of permanent DNA mutations over time, which can ultimately contribute to the development of skin cancers,” said Shamloul. And while this was just raw information, not a diagnosis, it showed me something I never would’ve known had I not received a scan. After all this data, I then got a purely pleasurable, analysis-free beauty experience: a Hydrafacial. Using gentle, oddly satisfying suction, the esthetician glided the Hydrafacial device — a mini-vacuum with a hydro-dermabrasion tip — across my skin, extracting impurities and exfoliating dead skin cells I’d never be able to remove with an at-home exfoliant. Then came a layer of nourishing serums to replenish my barrier. As someone who holds a lot of lymphatic fluid in their face, I could feel every ounce drain from under the skin, flowing down my neck and toward my traps. And while I appreciated getting my lymph moving, it wasn’t like I hated that I also looked a lot more glowy and sculpted by the end, either. I don't think a facial needs to cure anything to be worthwhile or generative, whatever that means to you. But I also don't think the things we do for aesthetic reasons are inherently unserious. If this were a morality play, I wouldn’t harangue you about how everyone deserves a facial (though I actually do think that, along with $10,000 and a good lip balm). What I would tell you, though, is that everyone deserves to have the kind of information a VISIA scan makes legible. If something relatively quick and harmless can illuminate something imperceptible — and if something like that can change how you think about your health — then beauty tech isn’t an indulgence, nor is it frivolous. It’s another way of understanding your body. OVME offers the VISIA scan free of charge, and I’ve urged the people in my life — both skincare devotees and agnostics — to consider one. Because while skincare will be thorny and complicated until quite possibly the end of time, your skin (and your health!) really doesn’t have to be, freckles and all. 🌀 Savannah Eden Bradley is a writer and fashion editor born in 1999. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the fashion magazine HALOSCOPE. Her first book, Ladies of the Canyon: Fashion and Fear in Los Angeles, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press. You can stalk her everywhere online @savbrads.

Where to sniff, shop, and see, from the Naxos Apothecary to the Angelika. If you listened to season one of the Smell That Movie podcast, then you know that two of my very favorite things are films and fragrances. While you can enjoy both from home, I think it's more fun to make them an active part of your practice. For me, enjoying film and fragrance out in the world in New York City — walking, viewing, smelling — is meditative, and it’s usually what I’m picturing if you ask me for my perfect day. So, if you find yourself in NYC, let me share with you the best ways to take yourself on a film-and-fragrance date. There are, of course, a lot of places to see movies in New York, and a lot of places to smell beautiful smells. Below are the areas I believe provide the best and most plentiful opportunities to do so. NOLITA Perhaps the best, most full-day film-and-fragrance day you can have in New York is in Nolita. Elizabeth Street and its surrounding area have become a hub for fragrance (I call it Little Perfume). Little Perfume is a hop and a skip away from the Angelika Theater or the Anthology Film Archives. After seeing a film at either theater, you can easily walk to fragrance boutiques: Stéle, Osswald, and Scent Bar; the heritage Italian house Santa Maria Novella; the Greek house the Naxos Apothecary; and the Korean house Elorea. For candles, diffusers, and bath products, visit Blueme. And there are always locations of many popular houses like Le Labo (original location), Aesop, D.S. & DURGA, Diptyque, Glossier, Boy Smells, and Commodity. If you head a touch west towards Soho, you’ll find the new US location of Penhaligon's, as well as Kilian and Amouage. You can truly spend all day smelling around Nolita. For Anthology Film Archives, I recommend checking showtimes, as they don’t screen as many films as other theaters. For the Angelika, if you’re a member, tickets are half off on Tuesdays, and you get free popcorn for your birthday month! UPTOWN The uptown version of this day centers around another jewel in the Angelika crown — Cinema 123. It has some arthouse charm with the added bonus of a Coca-Cola Freestyle machine. For smells, uptown you have the expansive fragrance collections of the New York department stores Bergdorf Goodman and Bloomingdale's. You also have the US location of the Brazilian brand Granado, the ultra-luxury Swiss brand Amaffi, the Dior store, and the heritage brand Krigler, which is located in the concourse of the Plaza Hotel. You can also walk a little farther north on the east side and hit Museum Mile; some of those gift shops carry fragrances, too. WEST VILLAGE In the West Village, you have two incredible repertory/independent theaters: IFC and Film Forum. For fragrance, you have a few of the usual suspects (Aesop, Diptyque, etc.), but you also have Naked Ghosts, Frédéric Malle, Bond No. 9, Ranger Station, and, further west towards the Meatpacking District, Parfums de Marley. LOWER EAST SIDE Back on the east side, and further downtown, you should smell around Aedes — a 30-year-old fragrance boutique on the Lower East Side, as well as Seoul-based brand Nonfiction’s first U.S. location. Then, you can head to the haven for cinephiles, the Metrograph Theater. The Metrograph also has a restaurant (The Commissary) for those looking for dinner and a show. BROOKLYN In Brooklyn, there is another Little Perfume forming in Williamsburg, near both Williamsburg Cinemas and the North Brooklyn Nitehawk location. Much like Nolita, there’s a Stéle, a Scent Bar, as well as the usual suspects (Glossier, Olfactory, Aesop, Le Labo, Diptyque, Byredo, Malin + Goetz, D.S. & Durga, etc.), but there’s also Japanese brand Linc Original Makers as well as Beautélier’s. A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT FILM & FRAGRANCE EXPERIENCE If you want to go beyond simply smelling around a store, a 20-minute walk from the AMC Magic Johnson Theater in Harlem is MUSE. Modern Urban Sensory Experiences (MUSE) is an appointment-only perfume destination in a townhouse that specializes in curating a unique collection of niche, luxury, emerging, and global fragrances. Kimberly Waters truly creates an all-encompassing sensory journey (one I had the joy of attending back in 2022). Despite not being in a perfume hub, I wanted to include my personal favorite movie theater on this list: the Prospect Park Nitehawk. For a sensory experience before your movie, I recommend spending time in Prospect Park across the street. You can check online to see what’s currently in bloom and where. Or you can wander and get lost in the park’s lush flora; just don’t miss your movie. 🌀 You can listen to the second season of Smell That Movie next week, 9/4, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Podbean, or wherever else you get podcasts. Carly Silverman is a writer and producer who’s worked in television + digital media. Her passions are film, fragrance, literary fiction, animation, and the New Jersey music scene. You can catch her doing comedy with Young Douglas or here on X.

If you’re looking for eyewear to ooze Kate Hudson's iconic Penny Lane, look nowhere but Velvet Canyon. The Noughties' in Black ($277) Velvet Canyon eyewear has something distinctive: a cool, effortless attitude that blends retro allure with a sustainable sensibility, the kind of aesthetic that feels like it already belongs in a film. Think Thelma & Louise, La Piscine, or Almost Famous — you know the vibe. No wonder, then, that these bohemian ‘70s road-trip lenses have captivated It Girls like supermodel Bella Hadid, model and author Emily Ratajkowski, musician Suki Waterhouse, boho-chic legend Sienna Miller, model Kate Moss, and actresses Laura Harrier and Daisy Edgar-Jones. There’s no denying that the label, founded in 2017 by sisters Bec Nolan and Cass Moase alongside photographer Ali Mitton, has cemented its status as one of the coolest eyewear names around. Ahead, HALOSCOPE sits down with Bec Nolan to trace their journey from Byron Bay, Australia to the global market, diving into how a shared sun-kissed vision, a love for nostalgia, and a distinctly ‘70s free spirit became the foundation for a new era of nonchalant, magnetic eyewear. Ana Beatriz Reitz: When and how was the moment you decided to launch a sunglasses label, and why specifically sunglasses? Bec Nolan: In 2017, I was working as a clothing designer, styling photoshoots and unable to source the sunglasses that I wanted to feature. So I designed our first collection based around that: those styles that I wanted to exist that I couldn't find anywhere. Specifically, ‘60s and ‘70s styles in really a beautiful, tonal color palette. ABR: I love the energy Velvet Canyon gives. Effortless, retro, with a sun-soaked edge that belongs to a girls' trip à la Thelma & Louise. How did you, your sister, and Ali land on this name, and what was the feeling you were specifically trying to capture with it? BN: We wanted the name to sound like a movie — maybe a sleazy ‘70s spy thriller with a femme fatale lead. We’ve made a few short films as campaigns and tend to approach our shoots in a cinematic way, which has influenced both our designs and brand voice. We like to have a little backstory or character associated with each design. ABR: What details do you obsess over that most customers might never notice? BN: I like to think that our customers do notice the details, and that is why they buy from us as opposed to one of the million other brands! We do keep things minimal, so each detail must be there because it is beautiful and adds to the overall experience. ABR: When did you first realize the brand was becoming a favorite among the "It Girl" set? Was there a specific moment, celebrity sighting, or street-style photo that made it click? BN: From the beginning, we were lucky to have been worn by some very influential people. 2020 was definitely when things really started to ramp up, and Kendall Jenner was wearing her Zou Bisou’s on repeat. ABR: What role have TikTok and Instagram actually played in shaping the brand's following — [is it the] algorithm, or something more organic than that? BN: Instagram was really important to us early on, and it’s how we managed to grow so quickly. It was back when it was still completely organic. And still fun. These days I’m just so fatigued with social media that we’ve taken a step back. I know it’s something I need to invest in more, but I kind of hate it, just how much time and life needs to go into the little screen. ABR: How do you feel about the "It Girl approved" label? Is it something you lean into or push back against? BN: The thing I love most when I see celebrities who are followed for their style wearing Velvet Canyon is knowing just how many options they have, how many items they must be sent, and yet they chose ours. ABR: Which unexpected person or moment wearing Velvet Canyon meant the most to you? BN: To be honest, I get just as excited when I see people in the street wearing our sunnies as I do when I see a celebrity has worn them. I remember being on vacation in Puglia in Italy and seeing a girl wearing them, and she looked SO good, and I was just so happy. ABR: You're headquartered across Byron Bay, L.A., and Paris, three cities with wildly different ideas of "cool." How much of the brand's appeal comes from refusing to pick one? BN: Our headquarters has actually just moved from Byron to Melbourne this week, and the founders are now based in Mexico and France — none of us can seem to stay in one place for too long. I do think we are influenced by our surroundings, but Velvet Canyon lives in its own world, in its own era. L-R: L'Homme in Havana Foncé ($329), The Siren in Black ($149), La Touriste in Chocolate ($263) ABR: Does staying "cool" get harder as you grow? Or is it an easy task for something that channels it so effortlessly? BN: I don't think being cool has ever been the goal, and I certainly don't think that is something one can — or should — chase. It's not that we are anti-trend — if something feels right for us and aligned, then we will incorporate it. But it needs to feel like something true to the Velvet Canyon story. There have been moments when I tried to include a style that felt like something people would respond to, even if I didn't personally love it, but ended up not doing well. It's a lesson for me to trust my instincts and not try to cater [to] everyone. ABR: Eyewear is a category that doesn't get the same sustainability scrutiny as, say, fast fashion garments. Do you think consumers are asking the right questions about their sunglasses? BN: Acetate eyewear [is] generally a lot lower impact naturally than clothing — acetate is a plant-based material; there is also plastic eyewear, which is usually cheap, but even designer brands sometimes make their frames from petroleum-based plastic. So I think the same scrutiny isn’t necessarily there just because the impact isn’t as extreme. People buying eyewear should certainly be checking that their frame is made from acetate if they are interested in [fewer] plastics. It’s tricky with lenses because there is glass, which is not practical as it can shatter, or different types of plastics. I think the most important thing is to buy high-quality eyewear that will last a long, long time. ABR: Was sustainability part of the founding thesis from day one, or something the brand grew into as the industry and the customer started demanding it? BN: Of course, yes, from the beginning it was important to us to make sure we had as low of a climate impact as possible. It’s been frustrating at times because we want to do things perfectly and sometimes our idea of how we want to do things doesn’t match with the current technology, we end up trialling materials that sound amazing but don’t quite hold up to the level of quality we expect and it’s about that balance of doing the best we can while making a product that is going to last. ABR: There's real fatigue around sustainability claims in fashion right now because people have been burned by greenwashing for far too long. How do you build trust around that without sounding like every other brand? BN: It does feel a little like people don’t really care anymore, and with the rise in popularity of online fast fashion, it can feel hopeless. But we just have to trust that our customer understands and values well-made pieces. ABR: What's something you had to learn the hard way as the brand started growing so quickly? BN: That growth isn’t necessarily consistent and can come in waves rather than a steady incline. ABR: Are there categories beyond sunglasses you're excited to explore? BN: Right now, I just want to keep things simple. More categories [mean] more work and likely expanding the team, and I’m waiting for the day when that sounds appealing to me again, but at the moment I’m enjoying having some free time to spend with my daughter and enjoy life outside of work. ABR: Where do you want Velvet Canyon to be in five years? BN: Everywhere. ABR: What's one thing about the brand's future you're excited to share that hasn't been made public yet? BN: We took a little design hiatus just to recalibrate and take our time with a new collection. We went from three seasons a year to no new styles at all in the past year. So we have a new collection launching in November, and I’m so excited for some fresh pieces! ABR: And what can we expect to see from the new collection? BN: A return to our roots, yet with a completely new energy. 🌀 Ana Beatriz Reitz Gameiro is a Brazilian freelance journalist covering fashion, entertainment, beauty, and culture. Her work has appeared in publications such as FASHIONISTA, V Magazine, Polyester, Remezcla, and NSS. She is also the voice behind The Devil Writes Fashion (previously For Fashion’s Sake), a weekly newsletter where fashion is dissected, celebrated, and occasionally roasted with humor, heart, and just a little bite.

The dopamine-driven aesthetics of the mid-2010s are back — and with them, a renewed taste for play. But, as aqua blue, body glitter, and hair feathers roll back onto the collective Pinterest board, can borrowing the era’s aesthetics revive the optimism that first created them? “Wake up, it’s 2016.” Natalie smiles into the camera in a pink tank top and skinny jeans. Major Label's “Lean On” blares as she performs some variation of a TikTok dance in front of L.A.'s palm-tree-flecked skyline. Washed in the purple tones of the Rio de Janeiro Instagram #filter, the video feels like a time capsule — perfectly designed to recreate the carefree iPhone 7 ambiance of the mid-2010’s. Though the scene around her is an imitation, it’s clear her excitement is not. Natalie is part of a growing cohort of young people using every power available to forcibly turn back the clock. Hervé Léger’s bodycon dresses backlogged on Vinted saves, chrome eyeshadow tutorials trending on Instagram, girl-centric pop music soundtracking TikTok’s dances — everything short of the dog filters’ unfurling tongue and Avicii himself have been dug out of old Snapchat memories, under the anthemic motto “2026 is the 2016.” It seems we’re all collectively closing our eyes and wishing ourselves backward. But can we really jar the zeitgeist of a bygone era and keep it shelf-stable long enough only to crack open on the coldest of cultural winters? And why, now, are we so eager to rummage through our prepper pantries? Looking back at the early 2010s, the era felt scored with an undeniable sense of forward momentum — so much so that it has since been flattened into the shorthand of "millennial optimism.” That optimism was not just felt, but seen. It lived in maximal cut-crease glam, in the sugary-saturation of Tumblr pink, in the layering of neon green over neon orange, and in the thousand variations of palm tree print sold from Primark to Paco Rabanne. On TV, Lena Dunham “found herself” in Bushwick warehouses and lost herself to season-long situationships, all while dressed in bright green jersey tops and lady-bird print dresses. At the same time, independent print magazines, like NYLON, ran articles with step-by-step instructions on “How To Change The World,” next to spreads of brightly clad, upbeat young warriors ready to leave their mark in tweed and Aztec print. And design houses — from Stella McCartney’s unicorns, to Gucci’s parrots and Dries Van Noten’s cheetah print — reached for motifs that implied terrain not yet mapped. In a time when the culture still believed the future was wide open, fashion dressed for its expansion. Back then, the future felt malleable and fashion engaged with it playfully. After 2016, the culture hardened. Politics became increasingly polarising and our clothes, like the world around them, turned black and white. Now, a decade on, the aesthetics that once defined the big and bold 2016 era — saturation, gloss, the word “swag,” and sing-along pop — are back. Gen Z, who feel cheated out of the Bushwick Warehouse Raves, BuzzFeed Office Jobs, and the VICE gonzo documentaries they were promised by millennials and their Obama-era optimism, are once again using dress as a deliberate tool to influence mood. So-called “dopamine dressing” — a trend of late 2025 to use dress to positively influence moods — arrived as a workaround: a way of engineering pleasure back into our lives when it stopped arriving on its own. Fashion creator Sammie Lena describes dopamine dressing as “wearing clothes that bring you the most joy and confidence.” Her list of clothes that induce this kind of euphoria includes but is not limited to: leopard print, polka dots, gingham, layering bold colours over metallics, and adding on as much big, chunky jewellery as your arms can carry. This logic hasn't faded into a fast fad. If anything, it’s intensified through to the new year into an outright call to arms. Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel in Bambi spots, Alaïa in tiger stripes and Prada in zebra — bold animal prints are again appearing everywhere from fur coats to ballet flats, dressing the collective psyche in the wild, the ungoverned, and the untamed. Off the runway, Addison Rae is wearing aqua blue latex dresses, Kylie Jenner and Timothée Chalamet are in head-to-toe Chrome Hearts orange, and Rachel Sennot’s I Love LA is studded in barely there, skin-tight neon. Fashion is once again in the mood to play, and to step foot onto the playground is to insist that fun is still to be had. Against a backdrop of hardened cultural division, fewer certainties, and narrower futures, this visual excess insists on novelty when none feels guaranteed. Our growing appetite for play goes beyond how we dress, and into our relationship with the broader world. Across feeds and For You Pages — “my year of whimsy,” “whimsy goals,” “how to add more whimsy into your life.” The word “whimsical” has become nothing short of a Gen Z buzzword, with countless videos and articles detailing how to rewire play into your life, whether it be cutting your pancakes in the shape of love hearts, sending postcards to friends, or bedazzling your BIC lighter with pink rhinestones. Embracing our collective sense of silliness is a way of refusing seriousness as the default emotional register. In the same tone, young people are consciously switching algorithms for analogue: CDs, mixtapes, DVDs, and magazines. Physical media that reinforces presence over convenience; choices, patience, and limits over easy-access, infinite-scroll, device-driven dopamine. Just before escaping London’s January greys for a South American holiday, a friend dug out her old family camcorder. We tested it in the living room before she left, waving at the lens, watching ourselves move across a small screen in big pixels. Lugging the heavy bulk from its dusty box, through easyJet’s carry-on prison, and across the mountains of the Colombian jungle — just to film a worse version of what an iPhone could — might seem like nothing more than nostalgia-driven escapism. But it felt like something deeper: a desire to be more present with our memories as we make them. Signaling a return to the same carefree style of capturing memories we had back in the mid 2010s, when the collective gaze still faced forwards. We can’t return to 2016, no matter how much glitter we pack onto our eyelids, but we don't need to. Dressing for a brighter future may be how we begin to believe it. Aesthetics don't just reflect how we feel; they train how we move through the world. Against the greyscale dopamine drought of recent years, the bright and playful optimism of the 2010s feels like a breath of fresh air. To reach for these aesthetics now is to borrow the same visual language – one that treats optimism not as a mood, but as a muscle. 🌀 Karla Lategan is a writer based in East London. Her work explores the intersection of fashion, culture and media. Originally from Australia, and with a background in sociology, she writes with a curiosity for people and the social forces that shape them.

The bag charm craze is coming for notebooks next. Photo sourced from Pinterest; all credit to original owner. For Gen Z, personalizing your everyday essentials is the shiniest new fashion trend. Purses covered with charms and ribbons, Phone cases with beaded wrist leashes, plastic figurines dangling from anything and everything with a loop attached. We thought we’d seen it all until the latest essential to get a makeover: the journal. Gone are the days of the “secret diary,” an inconspicuous notebook brandishing warnings not to read any further (OR ELSE!). Always carefully stowed away so it wouldn’t fall into the hands of an enemy, or worse, a crush. Now, the humble journal is a luxury accessory bound in patinaed leather, monogrammed with the owner’s initials in gold foil and decorated with sentimental charms. Owners flaunt them on social media, showing off how they’ve decorated their journals and even what is kept inside. The once-secret journal is now an open book confessional. The trend of sharing journals on social media can be traced back to the bullet journal of the mid-2010s, created by designer Ryder Carroll and popularized by millennial bloggers like Rachel Nguyen. But where the bullet journal lacks in decor (the most being a few stickers slapped on the front of a Moleskine or Leuchtturm), this new form of journaling doubles as both an organizational tool and a fashion statement. In 2023, Victoire Valmary began posting videos on TikTok to attract business and an international clientele for her family’s handmade leather-bound notebook company, Louise Carmen. The brand, established in 2016 by Fabien and Nathalie Valmary, came after a year-long family trip through Asia, which left Nathalie in need of a way to organize her many notebooks from her travels. The result was the first “Louise Carmen” made of leather that Nathalie picked up at a market in Thailand, and colorful elastic cords that fastened all her notebooks into place (in the vein of the Japanese Traveler’s Company notebooks). It would become the prototype for their now vast selection of journals offered by the Parisen brand, which has garnered a 148k following on TikTok. But with these journals starting at €122 EUR (around $139 USD), stationery enthusiasts have followed in Nathalie’s footsteps to create their own versions of the Louise Carmen. Philly-based jewelry designer and co-founder of Cult of Angels, Brooke Pizio, made her first journal as a birthday gift for her roommate, who was interested in the Louise Carmen notebooks. At the time, Pizio had leatherwork experience designing accessories like bags and leather cuffs with antique pendants, but had never made a journal. “From the very beginning, my search to find one for my roommate in a certain color was impossible, and I couldn’t really find one, so I think that I tapped into a market that I didn’t know really existed,” says Pizio. She’s now received an influx of commissions not for jewelry, but for stylized notebooks with elaborate cross-stitched designs, embroidery, and silver adornments. In recent months, she’s created journals for all purposes, from vow books for couples to commemorate their wedding day to a collection of pink suede journals for influencer Anastasia Karanikolaou, which stuck out in a “PR haul” video on Instagram alongside Rhode lip balms and Balenciaga tees. A chic, personalized notebook has become another bookish accessory that leans into the trend of literacy – or, at least the appearance of it. An influx of celebrities such as Dua Lipa, Reese Witherspoon, and Kaia Gerber promote titles both well-known and under-the-radar for their respective book clubs. Long-form social media platform Substack is flooded with discourse, whether informed or baseless, from young writers and music-industry moguls like Rosalía and Charli xcx, the latter of whom just scored Emerald Fennell’s buzzy (and heavily stylized) adaptation of the gothic classic Wuthering Heights. One can achieve a “smart” look simply by carrying a novel or a notebook as they would a clutch. For people creating these fashionable journals, like social media and marketing consultant and creator Hailei Wynter, who created hers in the fall of last year, the style is more than maintaining a writerly image; it is a functional form of personal expression. “I love making the things that I reach for every day beautiful so that I am more likely to use them every day,” says Wynter, “I want everything I pull out to be very customized and unique and different and feel very me.” However, fashioning these journals goes beyond external impressions. Whether using a Louise Carmen or something they’ve crafted by hand, creators are sharing how they’ve organized and decorated the interiors of their journals, too, in videos often dubbed “journal tours” or “journal ecosystem tours.” They reveal pockets filled with stickers and pens, photobooth strips clipped onto notebooks, then explain the purpose behind each notebook bound in the journal, and even flip through entries. “I like posting that content for other people to give recommendations because that's how I put my ecosystem together, just by watching a ton of people and seeing what would work best for me,” says Wynter, who posted her own journal ecosystem video as a “yearning for connection.” Even before joining this digital community of crafters, Wynter and some coworkers all gathered to share how they’ve organized their journals for the new year. It makes sense that, in a digital age when young people are feeling more isolated than ever, many are turning to analog interests to foster new relationships (even if those connections start on a social media platform). My own Louise Carmen is the product of my friendships. At the end of 2023, I had discovered Louise Carmen through TikTok, and then through my friend who had just come back to New York from Paris with a red, pocket-sized version. I had planned my first-ever solo trip for the spring of 2024 and knew that, even though I couldn’t afford the notebook, I would visit the store to window-shop. On the first morning of my trip, I woke up in Reykjavik to a Venmo payment. All of my friends, knowing how much I wanted this notebook, had pooled together money so I could afford one of my own. To this day, it’s the most meaningful gift I have ever received. Every time I look at it, I see the journal as a connection to all the friends who put it in my hands, and the charms that connect me to each place I went on my first solo trip. This specific type of journal is a fashion statement as much as it is a gateway towards connection. A stranger sees someone’s fabulous, meticulously designed journal, and it opens the door to deeper conversation, not just about the craftsmanship and design of the journal itself but also what’s inside — a person’s thoughts and observations, interests, and personality are all bound together in one place. People connect and build long-lasting connections that outlast any trend cycle or fashion fad. And it's longevity that draws people to the Louise Carmen notebooks and their subsequent iterations. Due to their customizable nature, they can shift both functionally and stylistically as a person’s life does over time. They are both timely and timeless. 🌀 Tess Growney is a writer based in Brooklyn with words in HALOSCOPE, Stereogum, Spin, and IRK Living. She’s interested in writing about the intersection of music and fashion history, planning dinner parties, and curating playlists. You can find her at @tessgrow or at any vintage store in NYC.

On the phenomenon of having a “favourite dead girl” — from Marilyn Monroe to Sylvia Plath — and what it means to let women live in peace. Dogs may be man’s best friend — but a girl’s are usually famous dead women. Whether it be Laura Palmer, Princess Diana, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, Sharon Tate, Marilyn Monroe, Lux Lisbon, Ophelia, Juliet, Amy Winehouse, or Sylvia Plath (the list is truly endless), we all have one that haunts us. But what is it about these dead women that has such a hold on culture, and, more specifically, on girl culture? Historically, men have sexualised the dead bodies of women, most notably in the Victorian era. Pale, gaunt-looking women were the standard of beauty at the time, immortalised in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite artists. Dead women were the ideal, preserved in their youth, forever beautiful and passive. Is it still about looks, purity, and youth now that it is girls who love them, or is it something deeper? Edgar Allan Poe famously said, “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” I have been thinking a lot about this obsession with dead women, as the gallery I work in has been tirelessly prepping for their exhibition marking the 100th birthday of Marilyn Monroe. As portraits of her are plastered across gallery walls and social media, excitement and anticipation have been high among visitors, bringing one of the most well-known and adored dead women back to the forefront of popular culture. Marilyn Monroe is an example of a woman who was primarily loved and watched by men, and even in her death in 1962, she was subject to obsessive male behaviour. Notably, Playboy's founding father, Hugh Hefner, purchased the plot next to hers, and the plot above went from her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio to entrepreneur Richard Poncher, whose widow sold it to an anonymous bidder on eBay in 2009. Poncher reportedly had told his wife, “If you don’t put me upside down over Marilyn, I’ll haunt you for the rest of my life.” Monroe had no control over the men she would be lying in eternity with, and no way to fight against their sexual motivations. In death, she has still never been left alone. Despite the almost constant male attention, I have observed that it is primarily women and teenage girls who have shown the most interest and excitement in the gallery’s exhibition. Monroe’s legacy has become more than just her sex symbol status; she is now recognised as a talented comedic actress and businesswoman, fighting for women’s independence and agency in the film industry. The public hardly knew her, and yet the adoration and obsession with her are global and constant. Just under a year after Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath died — another woman wronged by men and adored by women post-death. Many girls' and young women’s first encounter with her was on Tumblr: seeing quotes from her poems and journals pasted over aesthetic images, poetry inspired by her, black-and-white pictures of her from when she was young, and, of course, many references to her death. What seems to come along with a love for her work is an immediate knowledge of and focus on her infamous suicide. Plath died from putting her head in a gas oven in her home in London in 1963. Plath’s struggles with mental health and her attempts at suicide throughout her life are very present in her work; her words are so deeply personal that it is impossible to disconnect an interest in her from her untimely end. In every generation since her death, girls relate to her words, whether through her poems, by seeing themselves in Esther from The Bell Jar, or by finding solace in the pages of her journals. Over the decade that I have known about Sylvia Plath, I have been in two minds about the obsession with her suicide. References to Plath’s death happen a lot in popular culture: we see people with DIY cardboard ovens over their heads on Halloween; the Gilmore Girls making jokes about it 20-odd years ago; Emma Roberts’ character in Adult World attempting suicide in the same way; girlbloggers posting “I am one bad day away from sticking my head in the oven”, and even a fake porn thumbnail with the title “young MILF gets stuck in the oven.” Although I understand that her death is undeniably connected with her body of work and, in turn, is an easy way to refer to her or honour her, the visuals and memes related to it often come across as mockery, and it seems that is entirely what Plath is reduced to: the woman who stuck her head in an oven. We rarely, if ever, see the same happen to male artists: Kurt Cobain, Jeff Buckley, Nick Drake, etc. The most recent visual reference to Plath’s suicide was in Lana Del Rey’s music video for “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter,” bringing Plath’s death to the forefront of popular culture once again. In the song, Rey coos about how wonderful her husband is, so much so that she wants to cook for him, an unusual and out-of-character desire for her oeuvre. The homemade music video compiles clips of Rey singing the song in her house; in one, she is seen from behind in a satin bronze skirt, seductively putting her head in the oven. This irked many fans. Rey often references Plath in her lyrics and poems; she clearly has an affinity for her work, as many women do, and it is unquestionable that this was also the case. This visual, however, comes across as erotic and at the same time romantic, considering the song’s lyrical content. This imagery, along with the lyric “I know you wish you had a man like him, it's such a bummer,” appears distasteful, considering Plath had a tumultuous relationship with her husband, Ted Hughes, which many relate to as a factor in her death. The discourse around Rey’s music video spanned a wide breadth of reactions, with some saying it is disrespectful to visually mimic someone's suicide, while others defended Rey, who has alluded to suicide attempts in the past and perhaps is using the imagery as a tool to communicate her healing. Despite Rey’s reasoning and intent, which we do not know, there is still a level of romanticisation which Plath’s family has continuously spoken out against. Plath’s daughter Freida Hughes wrote a poem titled “My Mother” where she said “Their Sylvia Suicide Doll, who will walk and talk and die at will, and die, and die and forever be dying,” emphasising how Plath will remain a dependable victim of her death if people continue to manipulate and aestheticise her image in that way, making her a visual symbol of tragedy as opposed to an important literary icon. Figures like Plath no longer exist in our current culture, at least beyond reference. We are in an age where artists are no longer just artists, but commodities; they are marketing opportunities, walking advertisements. We romanticize dead women like Plath because her suffering wasn't a commodity — she wasn't performing it; she was living it, and she wrote about it because that is all she could do. We don’t have a 21st-century Plath and we never will. Girls obsessing over and referencing Plath isn't necessarily a desire to be her, but instead an escape from artists today. Plath was confessional, raw, and honest about her struggles with mental illness; it's almost impossible to find anyone now who doesn't have a BetterHelp sponsorship or a discount code for anti-anxiety meds. In that way, Rey references Plath because she doesn't fit the narrative of contemporary celebrity culture. Rey leans on nostalgia and on artists of the past who had experiences similar to hers; she rarely relies on advertising. She is far from a modern-day Plath, but much like how we look to dead female artists for authenticity, Rey looks to them for inspiration. Monroe has also been an overriding symbol in Rey’s work both visually and lyrically. In her music video for the song “Candy Necklace,” Rey takes on the personas of doomed Hollywood starlets: Veronica Lake, Elizabeth Short (more commonly known as the Black Dahlia) and Marilyn Monroe. The video offers a behind-the-scenes look at filming a music video: hair and makeup being applied, camera equipment, lighting, set design, and Rey talking to the team. The song critiques the exploitative nature of media success, especially for female stars. In the video, Rey explains the concept to her team: “Why it was all supposed to be behind the scenes was because all these women who changed their names and changed their hair like me, it’s like they all fell into these different snake holes. So the whole point is like, ‘How do you learn from that and not fall into your own thing?’” The “snake holes,” I imagine, allude to the coping mechanisms that many stars develop to deal with the pressures of success — drug addiction, alcoholism, surgical procedures, suicide. In her scene as Marilyn Monroe, Rey is sitting in an Eames chair in a mid-century style room, dressed in a black turtleneck and trousers, a blonde wig, and a diamond necklace. She poses like Monroe in some clips and appears sad and contemplative in others, expressing the contrast between performance and reality. Rey, through this video and song, implies that being a woman in this industry inevitably leads to demise. The end of the video heavily alludes to the deaths of all of these women, visualised through the necklaces and diamonds falling into a pool of blood and a shot, Sunset Boulevard-style, of paparazzi photographing from above, capturing the dead body. We all cling to these women of the past because we crave what we no longer have in our culture. Sabrina Carpenter is branding herself as a 1950s starlet; Legally Blonde is coming out with a prequel series; Brutes by Dizz Tate was pitched as “The Virgin Suicides meets The Florida Project.” Is it still possible to pioneer originality, or are we only capable of selling a sense of nostalgia? People like Marilyn Monroe and Sylvia Plath represent emblems of their crafts, and now all we see are others attempting to echo or reimagine their careers. It’s easier to sell yourself as an artist, especially in an age when virality is the quickest road to fame, if you echo the familiar. And although people love the nostalgia that these artists provide, constantly seeing these references played over and over again is becoming exhausting. When you have a favourite dead person, all you have is their art and an idea of them. You don't have to stay up to date with their brands or personas, or question if what they're doing is a publicity stunt. Dead people can’t enter a new “era”. It is all authentically them and the art that outlives them. They give us a different perspective, a fantasy, an escape. Perhaps our only escape from the algorithm. 🌀 Bella Blue Bloss is a writer and editor from London. She runs the Substack blog Fragmentary Girl, where she publishes essays on feminism, art, culture, literature, and fashion, exploring female representation in the visual arts and media. Bella is currently working on her first book, an essay anthology edited and written by herself and other up-and-coming feminist writers. You can find more of her work on her website and follow her on Instagram @bellabluebloss.

A time stamp in media culture that will be hard to outshine. As Joshua Citarella and Caroline Busta were setting up their latest project, placing Nick Land books amongst miscellaneous viral pharmaceuticals, nestled beside a True Anon tote bag and Red Scare shorts, the news broke that The Onion had purchased Infowars, and that Tim Heidecker would be their new creative director. The timing of this world-imploding announcement was not only the perfect cherry on top of their months of painstaking work, but a time stamp in media culture marking the complete magnetic pole reversal of a landscape where alt-media has planted itself firmly in and amongst legacy media, fertilized like a giant beanstalk, and now looms heavy over the mainstream. “If internet culture is, like, the apex of the project of globalization, we timestamped it at the very end, where now Infowars is done and Tim Heidecker is the host and was purchased by The Onion.” — Joshua Citarella, via New Models podcast ADULT SWIM DAYS Before there was Slushy Noobz and Emergency Intercom, there was Tim Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!. Upon its conception in 2007, the reaction was often disgust — the surrealist, anti-humour comedy of the show had very polarizing effects. Shock-based gags, body fluids, and skits made to repulse audiences made it a good Christian American parents' nightmare, but a cool kid born in ‘94’s favorite thing to watch. If you’re unfamiliar with Tim’s sketch work, you’ll likely recognize him from the viral “it’s free real estate” meme. The resurgence of this meme in 2016 was being used left and right, mainly in the context of colonization — its Google searches peaked in November 2025, when Israel’s attacks on Palestine weighed heavily in the news cycle. The breakthrough of Tim and Eric’s fringe comedy sketch into mainstream culture was an intriguing foreshadowing of what was to come — a glimmer of what the future held for alternative artists and comedians. Cartoon Network’s channel, Adult Swim, hesitantly championed the duo's quirks and oddball absurdities. The lo-fi, highly saturated visuals — what the kids today might call “liminal”, and what kids back then called “random” — fit in nicely with the channel's other bizarre offerings like Aqua Teen Hunger Force. The show was wholly unique, however. “Awesome Show” fed off the deepest bowels of human discomfort, with fake advertising shot to look like early cable television, and surrealist sketches akin to VHS footage you might find in a New Mexican gas station bathroom. So, how did Tim manage to become — for all intents and purposes — the creative overlord of the most prolific conservative media corp today, when only 16 years ago he was acting as a child-clown salesman and breeder, defecating in bedpans and having co-stars dissect it, consuming his own vomit on camera (more than once), and suckling milk out of Eric Wareheim's chest? You might think it’s due to him getting older, growing up, or perhaps leaving behind his juvenile antics of the early aughts. But he was already 30 years old when “Awesome Show” premiered — already graduated from Temple University film school, where he met Wareheim. This is something else, something nobody has done before, but most of all, this is the consequence of funny men channeling the power of their masculinity into something productive, rewarding, and entertaining — the pig has grown wings and left the building. “Awesome Show” didn’t so much one-up the semen-drinking, pie-breeding, horse-masturbating gross-out comedies of the ’90s and early 2000s. It obliterated them. Excrement, ejaculate, tears, blood, sweat weren’t used as gags or stunts, but as the fundamental elements of the demented comic world the duo created.” — John Semly “There’s something about the cigarette juice skit that literally made me vomit." — Reddit comment THE ONION The Onion, an American digital media company that has been delivering knee-slapping satire since 1988, has catered to a generally leftist audience since its inception. Up until 2024, it had been owned by G/O Media, a large holding company that also houses Clickhole. The Onion is now owned by Global Tetrahedon, a Ben Collins-owned company which, as you may learn upon reading their site, is essentially a meme in and of itself. The United States’ most precious export is news, and wars are fought over media just like they are for oil — but instead of maiming civilians with AKs, the weapon of choice in our post-literate society tends to be visuals that, when met with the exhausted eyes of average Joes housed in food deserts, paint a mosaic of bombastic narratives lacking any nuance whatsoever. July 2 marked the first official Onion as InfoWars livestream, with over 2,880 people tuned in across platforms such as YouTube and Instagram. The implications of this massive media overhaul are likely to make waves across the world — Heidecker and the team plan to donate proceeds of their merch sales to the families of Sandy Hook victims, a horrific mass-shooting event that Alex Jones famously denies ever happened. It’s reported that they already have $100K planned to donate, even though the takeover isn’t officially complete. In an exclusive quote provided to HALOSCOPE, Heidecker commented on the comedy being chronically underplatformed and underfunded: “A lot of what people watch now is shaped by algorithms and low-cost formats. If you give comedians real support, production, time, you start to get weirder, more interesting work. That’s what we want to unlock.” It’s hard to say how far the show will reach for sure–news outlets like New York Daily have covered the story, but often only refer to Tim as an “Alex Jones impersonator”. Regardless, an institution like The Onion taking the reins from a notorious far-right media conglomerate is a piece of history that should be taught to school children starting yesterday. As a pseudo-millennial, the notion of reviving Adult Swim on the internet is wonderfully exciting. As I reflect on Heidecker’s career, I feel a sense of involuntary paternal pride. This is an event I just know my old communications professor would have us study in a course called “Media and Mayhem” or something. Let us all rejoice, taking pause to acknowledge that male comedians can indeed still contribute to the greater good. 🌀 Lauren Lexa Brown is a writer, medical office assistant, and the editor-in-chief of Heart Note Press. She collects and studies media — both physical and digital — specifically focusing on visual culture, fragrance, psychology, and anthropology.

How Rama Duwaji’s footwear reveals that, for socialists, fashion is always a material concern. In the days after Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration, I read far more about Rama Duwaji’s fashion choices than any other element of the ceremony. Tabloids feigned outrage, noting that her boots, made by sustainable footwear brand Miista, retail for $630: the New York Post declared the look “gave more socialite than socialist” and “flew in the face of [Mamdani’s] ‘everyman’ image.” In typical fashion, the story was picked up by other outlets, even prompting a furious Instagram story from White House secretary Karoline Leavitt. Many rushed to Duwaji’s defence. Her stylist, Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, emphasised that the boots were on loan, bemoaning the presumption of the opposite on her Substack. In Vogue, Anna Cafolla explained how borrowing archival pieces demonstrates Duwaji’s commitment to circular fashion while strategically disassociating her from price tags that might make her seem out of touch. For Forbes, Gemma Allen objected to a history of political wives’ fashion being treated as a morality test while, in Vanity Fair, José Criales-Unzueta wrote on the political considerations both Mamdani and Duwaji have to juggle in their clothing choices. Vanessa Friedman covered Duwaji’s fashion in more depth for the New York Times, arguing that regardless of the context or intention, her outfit at the inauguration offered an image of “aspiration and coded luxury.” I’m not sure that, compared to similar once-in-a-lifetime formal occasions, this would be so hard for ordinary people to relate to — consider the cost of even a low-budget wedding dress. While Friedman is right that it’s “not as if the general public can borrow a pair of designer boots,” this framing overstates the inaccessibility of luxury fashion. After all, for ordinary people the occasional indulgence from the lower-priced end of the designer market can be far more affordable than formerly accessible amenities – like education, medical care and homeownership – that the average earner has been priced out of. But how should a socialist dress? It’s a loaded question, especially for a woman. The idea of fashion as a specifically feminine fixation is self-perpetuating; growing up with the expectation of interest and finding our appearance under the harsh scrutiny of a patriarchal world, it can easily become a central concern in our daily lives. I often think of Rosemary Hill describing what happens between women and their clothes as “a kind of third rail of female experience.” Coded as a woman’s world, inaccurate as that might be throughout the industry itself, fashion is often considered frivolous and indulgent. It’s not only reactionaries who perceive fashion as a hypocritical indulgence for a socialist; leftists themselves frequently joke about the personal conflict between their politics and the allure of materialism. “Marx failed to consider…” begins a popular joke format. Of course, this sentiment is tongue-in-cheek, not exactly expressing a sincere fear that socialist politics cannot accommodate “how good life feels when you wear a brown suede jacket,” but it does gesture to widely held views of socialism as aesthetically bleak and austere. But there is no avoiding that others will read into what we choose to wear. Even if you believe that left-wing politics necessitate a rejection of luxury and frivolity, there are aesthetic choices that you will have to make that communicate such disinterest. Much is made of the scene in The Devil Wears Prada in which Meryl Streep explains why her assistant’s unfashionable sweater has everything to do with the fashionable world of the magazine she runs. It is perhaps a facile view of the many contexts any one garment can be understood in, but it does at least illustrate how influential some of these contexts are. Anti-fashion is itself a style, and the aesthetic history that has influenced the creation and design of clothing is never absent. Even if we have chosen a garment for solely practical reasons, it continues sartorial communication with the world regardless of our intention. Practical choices can become more calculated aesthetic messaging, too – just think of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s worn trainers, shared on her social media to illustrate the mileage she’d racked up door-knocking. What had been a practical choice became symbolic of her tireless efforts canvassing, framing herself as a politician winning by a “shoe-leather campaign”, the underdog connecting to would-be constituents in person. A shyness of high fashion is understandable for a socialist under scrutiny, given that more than a luxury industry, it is one that has often had a troubling relationship to fascism. Coco Chanel famously had Nazi ties, attempting to use the German occupation of France to seize control of her company from her Jewish business partners, while Hugo Boss was a committed Nazi whose company manufactured SS uniforms and Cristóbal Balenciaga designed for the family of Spanish dictator General Franco. Plenty of designers today dress the women (and men) associated with President Trump, even if perhaps they are wary of publicising it too much; brands that have designed custom looks for Ivanka Trump include Oscar de La Renta and Givenchy. As such, Karefa-Johnson’s thoughtful styling choices, rooted in vintage pieces and loans, work to distance Duwaji’s image from that of the wealthy, indulgent client of luxury goods conglomerates. Public figures occupy a difficult space regarding their fashion, particularly those, like Duwaji, who have not exactly sought to be in such a spotlight – their clothes are often read as advertisement and influence. Moreover, I wonder what we concede as socialists when our approach to fashion requires so many caveats. Why should we accept that luxuries, and even beauty in the abstract, are by default the realm of the wealthy few? In all this outrage, few have articulated what they believe is an appropriate alternative to good, expensive shoes. Of course, your average metropolitan fashion girlie is practised in the art of bagging designer items for a bargain, but these excuses mean little to right-wing tabloids. This leaves cheap shoes, poorly made from cheap materials by underpaid workers in sweatshops. Miista, the London-based brand whose Shelley shoes were the cause of all this controversy, has its own factory in northern Spain, where their shoes and garments are made by skilled artisans. The brand has emphasized their slow fashion approach and commitment to craft, even working with local schools to support the next generation of artisans. Meanwhile, as fast fashion accelerates at an unimaginable pace, garment workers suffer dangerous working conditions and poor pay across the globe. In 2013, over 1100 people, mostly garment workers, died in the collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh. While industry conditions have ostensibly improved, a factory fire last year in Dhaka killed sixteen, recalling similar fires in Pakistan, Egypt and Indonesia. In Leicester, UK, garment factories pay far below the minimum wage, often exploiting workers’ immigration status and limited English skills to do so, while in Southern California, the US Department of Labor found widespread violations among garment manufacturers. Perhaps even worse, while researching this piece, it was striking how much reporting on sweatshop labor is already out of date, given that the worst offenders in fast fashion are now significantly outdone by Shein and Temu. When we abstract fashion from the labor that it depends on, we lose sight of each and every garment as a material object. At the Tate Britain’s ‘Sargent and Fashion’ exhibition in 2024, I was struck by how little attention was drawn to the production and construction of garments, even as the very dresses John Singer Sargent had painted were displayed alongside his portraits. But in one corner, next to a portrait of socialite and suffragist Adele Meyer, a book lay open in a display case. The book was Makers of Our Clothes, a report by Meyer and trade unionist Clementina Black, investigating conditions of garment workers in London. The report was part of the efforts of the Anti-Sweating League in campaigning against the poor conditions in sweatshops, leading to the creation of the Trade Boards Act 1909, which introduced and enforced a minimum wage in the poorest paid trades. Selections from Tate Britain's Sargent and Fashion exhibition, which ran from February 22 to July 7, 2024. In a moment of sharp class tension, some socialites took a charitable interest in working conditions, especially those of working women. Still, such advocacy was not always welcomed by workers and trade unionists with open arms; during the New York shirtwaist strike of 1909, anarchist Emma Goldman’s response to support from socialites dubbed the “mink brigade” was famously chilly, insisting on the necessity for the labor movement’s independence from capitalist philanthropists. Beyond the centrality of garment-worker organising to labor history, socialists have defended the value and necessity of beauty in everyday life, particularly identifying the production of luxury goods as a place where artistry meets labor. In 1871, when Parisian citizens took control of the city and established the Paris Commune, the Commune’s Federation of Artists was formed, bringing together painters and sculptors with artisans working in the decorative arts. As Kristin Ross discusses in her book Communal Luxury, this inclusion “subvert[ed] the hierarchical relation between art and industry,” a bold stance demanding autonomy and dignity for all artistic workers. An interesting case study Ross presents is that of communard Napoléon Gaillard, who considered himself a “worker” and an “artist-shoemaker.” In exile after the commune’s brutal end, Gaillard wrote a philosophical treatise titled The Art of the Shoe, which Ross notes sought to argue that the opposition “between the useful and the beautiful” was transcended by shoemakers, who therefore “should be accorded the dignity and remuneration [they] deserved.” His vision, Ross explains, was “a shoe made at last ‘not for the foot as it is, but for the foot as it should be,’” instead of the “narrow, pointed, deforming instrument of torture” that was the modern shoe. Last year, fashion entrepreneur and artist Ramdane Touhami took inspiration from Gaillard, naming an artisanal leather shoe in his honour, with a lengthy dedication to “comrade Napoléon Gaillard” inscribed on the insoles. At the mayoral inauguration, Lucy Dacus sang “Bread and Roses”, a folk song that began as a poem by James Oppenheim. The song has long been associated with trade unionism and feminism, voicing demands that, along with “bread” (the meeting of the most basic physical needs), “roses” are also needed: “art and love and beauty.” The slogan which inspired the song also influenced the DSA logo; the song’s inclusion says a lot about the image Mamdani wishes to project and the commitments he wishes to make central to his tenure. As the right wing press and politicians no doubt continue to look to Mamdani & Duwaji’s lifestyle for points of attack (certain, as Ross says of the commune’s critics, “that sharing could only mean the sharing of misery,”) we can take a lot from those who have fought for a world “where everyone, instead, would have [their] share of the best.” It’s a concern that spans from the hand that makes a shoe to the foot that wears it. A refusal to see a more equal world as one of only scarcity but, as Dacus sang during the inauguration, one built on “the sharing of life’s glories.” 🌀 Emma Tranter is a writer and bookworker based in London. She writes about literature, fragrance and feminism at her Substack, Heart Notes, and is online everywhere @emmatranter_.

From Molecule 01 to Mark Fisher, Bee Beardsworth investigates our desire to bottle corporeal closeness and a yearning for a future that never materialised. The first time I smelled Marlou’s Doliphor, I had a visceral reaction. The hairs on my arms stood on end. I was transported. An ivory-walled room, dry with summer heat but saturated with lust, corporeal condensation sliding down the walls. Shards of sunlight danced on the ceiling, chipping away at the shadowy corners as linen curtains danced under the tugs of a voyeuristic breeze. Sheets drenched in feral human scent, the smell of dried sweat and intoxicated half-dreams, infatuated bodies ouroborously entangled around each other. The softly seductive smell of the back of a lover’s neck as I pressed my face into the slightly sweet, slightly saline, almost untouched crevice. I had never smelt a perfume so skin-like. It felt alluring yet unsettling, fleshy vulnerability and animalic allure distilled and bottled like some sort of Hannibal fantasy that perfectly overlapped with my own halcyon memories of a lustful bygone summer. It felt human, close, safe. I was obsessed. In a myriad of constantly shifting scent trends, our love of the so-called Skin Scents seems not only to endure but repeatedly return to the leader’s position. Marrying the chemical with the corporeal, skin scents tout one core promise: your skin but better. What exactly is it that we can’t get enough of? Or is it simply just skin deep? My love affair with skin scents started early on in my olfactory obsession. In the first throes of my twenties, a 5ml of Le Labo’s Another 13 slipped into my possession, hooking me with its strangely synthetic muskiness. All used up, I went to the Le Lebo counter with the gauche recklessness of a young woman trying to forge her definitive presentation and irresponsibly spent money on a 100ml bottle, printed with my name in the facsimile typewriter font that inevitably rubs off. Musing on that period, I realise what made me fall so in love with a scent as simple and subtle as Another 13. Underneath the sheen of artificial ambroxan lies something you can’t put your finger on, something that comes alive on your skin, like an unseen creature moving underneath a pile of discarded clothes. Although the molecules that we most often closely associate with skin scents stem back to the animalic notes of the perfume revolution circa late 19th century, the Skin Scent is — ironically — the product of a scent story that is decidedly synthetic. In 1973, IFF created a synthetic aroma-molecule with uniquely woody undertones called ISO E Super. For years, this was laced through perfumes to add a layer of fleshy ambery warmth, most notably Dior Fahrenheit and Creed’s Adventus. Claiming to be disillusioned with the predictability of the mainstream industry, perfumer Geza Schoen discovered the chameleonic quality of pure ISO E Super after developing a fascination with how it changed when it touched human skin. In 2006, Escentric Molecules bottled this fascination into their inaugural scent: Molecule 01. This was my next skin scent obsession. “We came out with something that was almost impossible to categorise because nobody had experienced anything like it before,” Geza Schoen tells me. “The idea of wearing a single aroma-molecule as a fragrance was almost unthinkable. We made the molecule itself the protagonist. That was a radical idea at the time.” Radical indeed, yet also bizarre. What does Molecule 01 actually smell like? Geza describes it as “woody, velvety and cocooning, but also strangely elusive.” I would argue that these descriptors are bordering on wishful thinking, especially to the untrained nose. Whilst Molecule 01 has a smell, the smell is almost nothing. But that’s the point. The millennium marked a point of transition — not only chronologically but also psychologically and socio-politically; the crossing of a threshold from a century marked by the most rapidly technological advancements humanity had ever seen to a new era that felt limitless and boundless. Everything had the potential to be modern, minimalist, and sexy — bitten by the Millennium Bug. Consumerism, music, the future… it was all steeped in the sheen of gleamingly slick accelerationism. Tapes turned to CDs, VHS to DVD, computers to laptops and film to digital. Identity moved into a new articulation; hyperindividualism bloomed in the fertile ground of early internet culture. Molecule 01 wasn’t a perfume that told you who to be. It was a perfume for the new age. A new age that seemed to have an endless horizon and increasingly formless self-expression, elevating who you already were in a way that, through being a nonconformist, was truly rebellious and revolutionary. From gym to office to club to bed, there was no need to slow down, to change, to disrupt the adhesion from one identity to another. Molecule was simple enough to be streamlined, yet still indicated a sense of superior taste and eclecticism. And because of how ISO E Super adapts uniquely to each skin type, there is only one prerequisite: there has to be a You first. Le Labo’s Another 13 and Juliette Has A Gun’s Not Another Perfume both followed in 2010. Despite the similarly chalant names (another perfume…), both scents took the simple seed Molecule had sown and grafted it into something that promised your skin but better with a little something else. Another 13 alchemises ambroxan and ambrette into something warm yet metallic with a strangely synthetic coolness that summons an olfactory imagining of an Under The Skin extraterrestrial humanoid. In JHAG’s Not Another Perfume, Cetalox takes centre stage. A synthetic note created by Firmenich, Cetalox sits somewhere between ISO E Super and Ambrox and was introduced in 1993 to imitate the musky, slightly creamy smell of one of the most expensive and rare perfume ingredients, Ambergris. On my skin it comes through like some sort of high-end eco-disinfectant with a hint of pear. And lest we forget the ultimate It Girl skinscent that had every Millennial worth their weight in American Apparel and Girls in a chokehold: Glossier You. Just over a year ago, Skin Scents started cropping up on my FYP. I initially chalked it down as another symptom of the Clean Girl hangover, but they weren’t all fresh linen and your skin but better. Whilst the true and tried aforementioned classics started trending, something new was emerging. Skin scents were getting weird, sexy and even a little dirty. With the explosion in popularity of niche perfumery that accompanied the rise of #PerfumeTok in the early 2020s, more subtle scents relying on clandestine whisperings of solo connection shared through screens soared into the limelight. Fugazzi’s Angel Dust is one such wunderkind. Despite the EPD being released in 2021 to lacklustre success, TikTok’s proclivity for platforming the personal lifted the scent from sitting in a bargain bin to flying off the shelves at Sephora. Suitably, the perfume is constructed to "celebrate the introvert,” claiming a gentle strength and silent attractiveness through the use of so-called “polite molecule” Cashmeran, which their copywriter personifies as notorious for intimacy and privacy. Perfect for the Big Tech-terrorised COVID Generation. Not to be a stereotypical party girl, but I do have to take it to a place of brat, briefly. Or more specifically the SWEAT Tour, a #collab between popstars du jour Charli xcx and Troye Sivan. Sweat and perfume are a match made in heaven, and in their 2024 press run, Charli and Troye named then-yet-to-be-released Luca from Tsu Lange Yor as their signature scent of that moment — a PR move no doubt spurred on by it being Troye’s brand, but nonetheless another layer of skin scent resurgence. Luca is an Ambrox and sandalwood-heavy skin scent with hints of fruit and earthiness, radiating with a warmth and texture like the baby hairs behind your ear. Described as “both grounding and animal,” it was made not for subtlety but for sweat, seduction and (hopefully) sex. “Luca came from wanting a scent that feels close and real, like a second skin,” Troye tells me. “As things get sweatier, those musky and amber notes pop more, making it feel personal and alive. It's built to last through the night and keep things interesting.” It’s no surprise it’s the brand's top seller. But there was one skin scent that truly started the 2020s renaissance: PHLUR’s Missing Person. An ode to heartbreak and longing, the scent of freshly washed skin is mixed with something echoing a clean, empty bed. At once undeniably familiar and deeply melancholic, the perfume logged over 200,000 backorders before it was officially released, owing to viral videos of the tearful reactions evoked by smelling the scent-soaked white boyfriend t-shirt vacuum-packed into the PR pack. The familiar, the comforting… is our obsession with skin scents really just that simple of a craving? After all, we can’t go a day without mentioning the loneliness epidemic. But to label the hundreds of thousands of people who love skin scents as simply lonely would require a level of assumption that is both lazy and unlikely. The gay man I met on the weekend has an amazing boyfriend, but he wears Another 13. I love wearing Missing Person to bed, whether alone or not. And before someone mentioned pheromones, the idea that human smell can detect pheromones is actually a total myth. There is something more abstract lingering underneath our skin scent obsession — something that I think has intensified in the last 20 years. Molecule 01 was an idea of the future: an olfactory utopia of simplicity, efficiency and hyperindividuality. So were its immediate successors. The recent resurgence in skin scents indicates a yearning, but not just for corporeal closeness. We yearn for a past that never materialised. The trend of skin scents came back at the same time Y2K propagated across social media, visually communicating the nostalgia a new generation of consumers has for an era they didn’t experience but that held the promises our current epoch doesn’t. As Mark Fisher posited, the slow cancellation of the future has not only deflated expectations of change but has situated us in a time where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Accompany that with how “the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition,” and how “there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.” If we can’t imagine escaping capitalism, then how better to express a silent rebellion and desire for protest driven by a subliminal sense of despondency and nihilism layered with nostalgic melancholia than an overpriced perfume? It isn't that simple, either. Dousing myself almost daily in different skin scents for the past few weeks, I discovered my final prismatic reflection and favourite experiential element. A sticky, humid day in June saw the launch party for Discothèque’s Next To Me Or Nothing, an opalescent ISO E Super scent laced with sake, milk and jasmine. Drawing inspiration from gauzy dreams of jazzy ‘90s Kyoto, I smell the strange solidarity of bodies pressed close with strangers in a moment of strobe-light fractured hedonism, the feeling of collective effervescence as you lose yourself in others, a haze of ecstasy and indescribably human euphoria. A few days later, I unboxed a tester of Mabelle O’Rama's Lunar Dust. One spritz and my mind wandered from terra firma to ether, the cool, metallic quality leaving an otherworldly scent trail that shimmered like moonlight in a pond. Marlou’s Doliphor has haunted me in the most erotic way since I first tried it months ago. These perfumes speak to the esoteric and the unknowable that underpins everything that is human, the olfactive acting as a bridge to both the nostalgic and the fantastical. In the age of ever-deepening artificiality, to evoke the human is rebellion. It will always be deeper than skin deep. 🌀 Bee Beardsworth is a perfume princess, Professional Party Girl, semi-retired model and unretired writer known for her innovative approach to fashion, beauty and culture. From her viral videos on perfume to cult beauty writing for Dazed and Coveteur, Bee captivates audiences with her tongue-in-cheek humour, unorthodox insights and charismatic allure. For an ever-updated vantage point of her London life, completed uncurated carousels, and perfume videos such as The Smell of Sex, scroll to @beebeardsworth.