Candle Creator: Noire Essentials

by Aubrey Allison

I recently had the joy of collaborating with Noire Essentials to refine the written scent descriptions for their candles—which meant I got to spend time burning each candle, getting to know the fragrances, and noting the way each scent reflects their creative vision. I love the way Noire Essentials’ scent storytelling fosters a feeling of connectedness to my home and feeling centered and present in the moment. Lighting a candle sets an intention and elevates my mood.

lit candle in a glass votive sitting on a mirrored tray with the candle box beside it. The label says Noire Essentials, Nzuri Rose

My favorites are:
Nzuri Rose, a warm and inviting fruity-floral that makes me think of a beautiful woman with poise, confidence, and an air of mystery. My husband and I burned this candle during a date night dinner at home, and it helped create a perfect romantic atmosphere.

Sweet Taboo makes me feel grounded, with its earthy notes of oud, cedar, and patchouli, along with uplifting citrus and serene lavender, violet, and frankincense. This scent reminds me of autumn, of feeling cozy and warm while the weather around me is cool and crisp.

Sixty-Seventh Place smells like the perfect PNW retreat: coastal driftwood and seaweed, soothing lavender, and tendrils of incense smoke. A moment of quiet in fragrance form.

Noire Essentials’ founder, Chasidy Dey, shares this beautiful quote from her grandfather, something he said when she was nine and they were relying on candle light after losing power during Hurricane Alicia—sparking her life-long love of candles: “Never be afraid to sit in the dark as long as you have a little light.”

Perfume Note: Vanilla

by Aubrey Allison

Vanilla: the foundational gourmand note. The characteristic volatile molecule of vanilla is vanillin, which is often used on its own to inexpensively impart a vanilla note. Vanillin is also present in other materials such as benzoin resin, wheat, and oak wood (especially after it has been heat-treated to barrel spirits like whiskey).

Vanillin is distinctively sweet and creamy, and vanilla can have aspects that are fruity, floral, smoky, medicinal, almondy, anisic, caramellic, animalic or leathery.

M. Micallef Note Vanillee walks the line between vanilla’s light and dark sides: honey-floral jasmine notes, boozy cognac, juicy mandarin, and a hint of anise. Inviting and mischievous.

Jovoy Fire at Will is a delicious brown sugar vanilla. Mimosa lightens with a slight powderiness, for a scent that is playful and seductive.

Perris Monte Carlo Vanille de Tahiti’s vanilla is rich and almondy. Ylang ylang and champaca bring a ripe fruity-floral character, and sandalwood adds to vanilla’s creaminess and depth.

Les Indemodables Vanille Havane focuses on vanilla’s dark side: notes of leather, rum, tobacco, spices, dried fruits, and even cocoa. Still absolutely a gourmand, and very much centered around vanilla, but in an unusually rich way.

 Jeroboam Insulo uses clean musk notes and airy jasmine to render this vanilla sheer, a “skin scent” vanilla.

Profumum Roma Vanitas is sugary sweet. Delicate orange blossom and soft myrrh keep this vanilla from becoming overly candied or childish, yet it’s still as delightful as a marshmallow.

Essential Parfums Divine Vanille is the perfume that I always want “wood vanilla” or “incense vanilla” scents to be. Every note blends with and modifies the other notes, for an overall effect like a smooth color ombre. Tonka softens vanilla, becoming like suede with osmanthus. Cinnamon bark’s spice brings out subtle fruit notes, and locks in with the woodiness of cedar, patchouli, and clary sage. Benzoin bridges these notes back into the central vanilla and brings out their incense aspects. A hint of black pepper adds earthy, bitter balance to vanilla’s sweetness, and silky-sheer musks smooth over it all.

Perfume Edit: The Horse Stable

by Aubrey Allison

Parfum d’Empire Ruade is the perfect balance of an authentically equestrian scent with wearability and sophistication. Oud and leather are supported by hay and narcissus, for a scent that is just the right amount of animalic.

Sarah Baker Bascule is the horsiest of this bunch. Imagine nuzzling your nose into a fresh peach, inhaling the fuzzy ripe scent – now replace the peach with a horse’s coat. The earthy, leathery barnyard hay is softened and lightened with the scent of the sun-ripened fruit.

With Naomi Goodsir Corpus Equus, we’re in a horse stable, but it’s the set of a fashion editorial. The leathery patina is there, along with a smoke-and-ash facet. Settled quietly underneath is something cool and soft, like rosewater, that keeps the animalic notes from overpowering. This is not so much the scent of a horse stable or an open field, but rather the scent of an enigmatic person who moves through those spaces and has an understated yet distinctive style all her own.

Francesca Bianchi The Black Knight is an epic tale of medieval knights camped before battle: the leather of horse tacks, the smoke of campfires wafting over wild flora. The heart of this perfume is a waxy, powdery rose.

Parfumerie Generale Arabian Horse paints a scene: an early morning, cool mist lingering over the dewy, sweet grass of the open countryside. You can smell the suede-like warmth of the horse under you and the freshly-turned earth under its hooves.

Andy Tauer Lonestar Memories evokes a cowboy atmosphere. Its clary sage and geranium are herby and green, while carrot seed is earthy and warm. Cedar, vetiver, and birch tar bring woody, grassy, and smoky notes to this dry, resinous perfume.

Photo by Oleksii Piekhov via unsplash

Seattle Perfumers Discovery Set

by Aubrey Allison

I finally got my hands on the Seattle Perfumers set — the coolest collection of independent perfumers here in Seattle. I’m struck by how unique and individual each scent is, how clear each voice is.

Filigree & Shadow Notget is oceanic and briny, but with this unusual sea-animalic character to it—where aquatic scents are often idealized mists, this perfume has a kind of viscous authenticity to its depiction of the sea.

Anjali Perfumes Under the Mango Tree is an addictively delicious tart green rose with fruity mango skin and a green woody base.

Immortal Perfumes Dead Writers is an oil-based perfume that smelled wonderful on my skin. Its opening beautifully evoked the sentimental vision of a musty library filled with leather-bound volumes, a cup of black tea in your hand. It dried down into a soft clove scent.

Namesake Fragrance Alpine Wildflower is a gust of fresh mountain air. A perfect example of a camphorous scent: a kind of coolness that balances between smoke and mint. Cedar, soil, lily of the valley, lavender, and frankincense all add detail to the picture this perfume paints.

Samar Pit Crew The Tea House is another oil-based perfume and its opening is a gorgeous osmanthus-peach and oolong tea scent that I love.

Age de Querelle Severine is a soft, green rose balanced with woods and resins and a subtle hint of funky oud.

Atelier Madrona Venetian Mask is an aromatic leather that opens with an accord of clementine, lavender, and spices. It has that slight powderiness I associate with traditionally masculine scents, but with its own twist.

L’Aventura Perfumes Lions in the Library showcases the addictive, woody-musky (and to my nose, vaguely salty) scent material called cashmeran. The perfume’s opening is big and juicy with bitter orange.

The Phoenix and the Fool The Omega Fool is an oil-based perfume, a gentle blend of resins, cedar wood, cinnamon, and clove.

Perfume Pairings for Pantone’s 2024 Color of the Year: Peach Fuzz

by Aubrey Allison

These perfumes feature prominent peach notes and fit Pantone’s characterization of the color, which includes words such as gentle, tenderness, sanctuary, warm and cozy, wellbeing, sweet and airy, quietly sophisticated, clean, and nurturing.

The soothing peach priestess, Frassai Tian Di is a peach pit carved from ivory wood, tendrils of incense smoke rising. self-assured and calming.


L’Artisan Parfumeur À Fleur de Pêche is the gentle scent of peach skin with airy jasmine and a soft, subtly earthy wood base.


Keiko Mecheri Peau de Pêche clean and soft, this perfume is like rubbing your nose on the fuzzy skin of an underripe peach. orris gives it an earthy-clean powdery texture.


In Les Bains Guerbois 2013 Residence d’Artistes, peach, mandarin, jasmine, and violet combine for a heart that is both a juicy fruity-floral but also restrained and sophisticated. cardamom and cumin bring a smooth spiced aspect, while a subtle patchouli-leather accord adds depth and richness. the scent is rounded out with clean musks, soft sandalwood, and a papyrus note that blends the texture into something more smooth and dry than the sum of its notes. lovely.


Shay & Blue White Peaches is the most straightforwardly sweet of this set. clean, cool, peachy sweetness, like ice granita. birch wood tempers the sweetness with gentle structure.

Anosmia

by Aubrey Allison

2023 was the year that I (briefly, thankfully) experienced anosmia. After three years, COVID finally got me, and I lost my sense of smell for about a week. The only perfume that just barely, faintly registered was Slumberhouse Norne; everything else was just blank. It felt a bit surreal. I became paranoid that something could be burning in another room and I wouldn’t know. What surprised me most was how much this affected my experience with food. I take for granted how much I smell my food while I’m cooking, and smell ingredients to check on them before I use them—not to mention how faint the flavors tasted. For that week, food became more about texture. It was a jarring experience overall, and when I finally detected the smell of a grapefruit-scented bath soak, it was a relief.

Abundance: After the Flood

by Aubrey Allison

#nosevember prompt: Abundance
Perfume: Apoteker Tepe, After the Flood

I came late to the party with this scent, after Apoteker Tepe closed in 2018 and ATF was thus discontinued. However, the perfume somewhat notoriously still circulated among groups of perfume enthusiasts online, who, even though there was only a finite amount left in the world and many of them only had small decants themselves, generously decanted vials of the stuff and shared it with others. Because it was too good not to share. That’s how I first encountered the perfume—I don’t remember who sent it to me anymore, but someone wonderful decanted a few milliliters from their own decant and mailed it to me in a small glass vial.

The scent is magical: mushrooms and dank moss on the forest floor, as morning light filters through the trees. Carter Weeks Maddox of Chronotope Perfume wrote about this perfume and its abundance-from-scarcity in a wonderful article published in Mushroom People, titled “Precious Milliliters: In search of a lost scent.” He writes: “When we share this perfume, whose life was so tragically short-lived, we’re documenting its wondrous time lapse—these violets, this glorious mushroom—and constructing the narrative we’ll use to recall it once it evaporates from the real world to live only in our collective memory.”

Last year, Pineward Perfume revived AT’s perfumes, partnering with AT founder Holladay Saltz to acquire her formulas and bring her perfumes back to life—that’s how I finally got a full bottle. But more special to me is the little glass vial, mailed to me from a fellow perfume enthusiast, its contents dwindling down with every wear and every share.

Jónsi: FLÓÐ

by Aubrey Allison
dark room with single overhead line of light glowing in the fog

Sat for a while inside Jónsi’s FLÓÐ today at the Nordic Museum. It was a dark, fog-filled room, pitch-black except for the shifting beam of light overhead. The scent of sea brine and stone permeated the air—a tincture of seaweed. Hazily through the mist, if the light shifted brightly enough, I observed the silhouettes of the other few people in the room with me, most of us sitting on the floor with our backs against the wall. The soundscape shifted from blaring ship horns to thunder and crashing waves—sometimes more peaceful and sometimes less peaceful—to Jónsi’s echoing voice accompanied by deep, near-monastic tones. Between the scent, the sound, the light and the texture of the air, the experience was certainly immersive. It felt like sharing a moment of respite with strangers in a safe cavern while the apocalypse crashed in waves above us.