This Is How The Winter Should Smell

The Stink is a monthly column that analyzes the desires and cravings evoked by scents, particularly those of New York City.

---

I’m writing to you from a precarious and vulnerable position: a man has left me in his house alone while he goes to therapy. None of this is your business, but you might want to know that I was met with a pleasant and unexpected surprise when I grabbed his worn shirt to smell it before writing this. At first, a classic base of skin and sweat dusted with a musked citrus laundry detergent, but this classic core was wrapped in an unusually minty, fresh, and cold sweetness, like chewing gum while standing in line at an ice cream shop, particularly a Cold Stone Creamery– sugary, blonde ice cream mixed on a frozen stone slab. After breathing into it for long enough (about three deep breaths), dormant cigarette residue began to rise to the surface. Heavenly. I think I’ll step out for a smoke.

The weather is finally cooling. The onset of cold weather has always been one’s cue to conceptualize how you’ll bring the outside in for the cold months. This task is at once isolating and incredibly romantic. Decisions about what to take inside with you begin at the end of August when the light shifts and the air starts thinning, but the weather remains hot. The smells you took in during that time will stay with you through the winter.

So let’s rewind: towards the end of summer, something awakened my lifelong love of artificial flavors, particularly the sacred smell of manufactured cherry and grape. This awakening took place in a new setting—on a rooftop. The climb to this rooftop took me past rows of artist studios, through hallways drenched in the smell of dusty clay and oil paint, leading out through a small door to the fresh, open sky. The sunsets cooled off the soot-black roof while a new friend and I discussed various candy flavors we’d brought to show and tell (and taste and smell): a cherry candy spray misted into a mouthful of pop rocks; blue, tubed, candy goo; purple grape slushies for the sake of tongue dying.

Another end-of-summer/early fall experience was an ‘anti-fashion-week’ trip to Long Island with Mati, Tom, Meg, Perla, Frankie, and Grahm (a wonderful-to-watch gay couple for a different column). The property was beach-front with a winding fairytale garden in the back. Flowers and produce and rabbits and butterflies, bliss bliss bliss brag. Morning walks in the park smelled thickly green and damp, with brighter currents of fragrance cruising through it; piles of briny and sugary fallen apples fermenting under their trees, the last floral dregs wrung from September roses, and the perseverant banana coconut residue from Meg’s Studio Selection Dark Tanning Oil caught behind my chin or in my nose. Powerful stuff. Just a distant image now.

On this nature-esque-ish getaway, I picked up two items from the gas station to bring back to the rooftop for my new friend: a grape sucker candy with a plastic boxing glove toy on the packaging (you press a button, and it extends) and here's the kicker, a roll-on cherry candy, this is presumably so that you can roll it on your tongue and lips, or on your wrist, like perfume, and lick it up! I wonder if these candy makers know they are designing sex toys– they must. Tart cherry liquid candy combined with salty skin and a mist of Listerine breath spray… like mating in some video game Eden.

On this nature-esque-ish getaway, I picked up two items from the gas station to bring back to the rooftop for my new friend: a grape sucker candy with a plastic boxing glove toy on the packaging (you press a button, and it extends) and here's the kicker, a roll-on cherry candy, this is presumably so that you can roll it on your tongue and lips, or on your wrist, like perfume, and lick it up! I wonder if these candy makers know they are designing sex toys– they must. Tart cherry liquid candy combined with salty skin and a mist of Listerine breath spray… like mating in some video game Eden.

All this is to say that my summer ended with a collision of organic and artificial smells. The following fragrances reflect that coming together: Y06-S by Blackbird Fragrance is a prime example: romantic milky jasmine nestled in a pile of Banana Runt candies singeing together atop a dangerously hot circuit board; plastic and electronic, floral and fruity, white and yellow. This fragrance is special because of just how realistically it captures the smell of heating electronics and pairs it with such unexpected counterparts.

Another fragrance to explore is the limited edition and discontinued (call me, I have a sample) Douleur by Bogue Profumo. Douleur combines a minty, metallic rose with a cotton candy, vanilla-ed melon, and subtle sluttier background animalic notes. The metallic, minty sweetness is like makeup on the face of a pop star sweating on an air-conditioned stage. This smells like a factory where pop stars are made; the bloody, sticky dissection and inspection of candies on a stainless steel operating table; a high school first kiss blown out by minty bubblegum residue with Teenage Dream playing faintly in the background.

A third, less extreme, fragrance to accompany the end of my summer is Monserat by Fzotic. Bright, juicy, and fruity florals, like a sophisticated pack of Tropical Twist Trident gum paired with a dry, dusty plaster/gesso note that gets caught in your throat— an ode to colorful Italian fresco paintings, it smells like chewing gum in the studio.

When it comes to how this energy will influence my cold weather scents, I must also bring in the phenomenon that occurs when one perceives a smell of the summer confronted with the incoming fall weather front: a best girlfriend's warm, peachy summer fragrance, when first caught in a gust of brisk wind, shrinks; it’s carefree associations acting as a balm to mellow this viscerally unexpected coldness, while the coldness, in turn, acts as a conductor for the smell’s most bright, urgent, and exciting aspects. Does this make sense? I’m stoned now.

In the case of this year, the bright, tart, sugary smell of candy crashed against my usual fall jazz death. I instinctually return to almost exclusively listening to jazz at the onset of autumn for obvious reasons. And this year, the jazz was tasked with softening the chill, smoothing out, and smoking up these bright, artificial, childlike smells. The comedy and pain of jazz paired with candy's nostalgic and manufactured qualities. Plastic packaging is coated in Billie's smokey voice; sour blue syrup slides down Betty Carter's sweeping, winding scales; an ever-ripe raspberry sits in Helen Merrill’s weeping throat. A whiskey glass of amalgamated candy slop sits alone in a dim jazz bar, waiting for the show to start.

Here are the smells I’ll be surrounded by this winter: Basilica by Milano Fragranze, milky rosemary and incense (Gideon brilliantly described it as a cartoon church); Loudo by Sarah Baker, a playful but brainy cherry in a woody antique shop; Tobacco Jam by Criminal Elements, verging on vape-like, a generous dollop of raspberry jam is paired with tobacco, leather, and hay notes. Warm Bulb by Clue Perfumery (a refreshingly inspired and excited new Chicago-based line), Hot Bulb is a dusty and sweet embrace that slowly transforms into the shocking image of an electrical fire threatening death to a lover’s diary (and die it did). For the house, I’m enjoying the Cowboy Kush candle by Boy Smells (leave me alone), a candle with a similar sentiment to Tobacco Jam, mentioned above, and luckily, no real pesky marijuana note. On the daily? The smell of my Nivea Creme (German formula) mixed with beeswax candles and whatever memory of candy I’ve got left in my mouth from early autumn.