It’s not for clean girls.
The world of obscure perfumes can be puzzling to those who have never waded into their uncanny territory. People often ask—and even I used to wonder—“Why would you spend your money on a gross, unwearable fragrance?” My perspective is that perfumes are like vinyl records, CDs, books, or any other collectible item. Pawing through piles of LPs, selecting one, and dropping the needle are not just motions you go through, but part of a meaningful ritual, whether conscious or not.
We experience our environment meaningfully through our five senses, and we often underestimate the power of the nose. The sensation is all-encompassing, conjuring up emotions that weave through your psyche, creating new associations and reinforcing old ones. A self-proclaimed “foodie” (ugh) enjoys cuisine with their innate sense of taste in the same way I enjoy fragrances with my sense of smell. The art of perfume is no different—the liquid is the record and your mind is the turntable.
Agar Olfactory, a remarkable project by artist agustine zegers,* asks “smellers to bend time through molecular technology, inviting states of attention that allow for deeper forms of kinship and reckoning with a planet in rapid transition.” Zegers offers a selection of fragrances that showcase the shifting fate of earthly ecological systems, specifically by bottling up perturbing yet comforting narratives of apocalypse. The way this conceptual scentscape invites newcomers to interact with fragrances in a synesthetic manner is refreshing. It can be easy to neglect your imagination when it comes to perfume, often out of fear of being “wrong.” The best part is, there is no right or wrong when it comes to fragrances. Just like with music and film, people will tell you your opinion is incorrect, but at the end of the day your unique interpretations of the medium are subjective. Isn’t democracy great?
Come with me as we jump across temporal planes—sort of like in Everything Everywhere All At Once, but it will actually be good. It’s 1999, my birth year—complete technological collapse is imminent, and the iMac G3 that lies in the family computer room is battling a 500-degree fever brought on by the Y2K bug. A fax machine is rapidly spewing out sheets of unreadable gibberish, pungent ink bleeding into the nylon carpet. Whirrrr bzzzz beep whhhrrrrrr. I don’t think Geek Squad can fix this. Your face is pressed against the box television screen; you’re trying to count the pixels before it’s too late, but the malfunctioning phosphors fry your brain.
Cero is, quite frankly, repulsive. The first sniff was like the vomit of someone who drank too much tequila on an empty stomach—spicy bile dribbled inside a scalding motherboard. It’s like eating a bowl of Nintendo-cartridge cereal with printer-ink milk. It’s a bitterant that signals technological meltdown in the same way a black widow warns with her red hourglass. It’s also HOT. The objects in @unicity74’s Instagram feed have planned a stress-induced suicide pact by self-immolation, melting into a vaporous blob.
I was taken aback by my first smell of Cero; it triggered such primal disgust in me that it left a lingering headache. Thousands of early machines sending out warning signals like the stripes on a venomous snake—do NOT approach. The new millennium is a corrupting force that will soon collapse into itself like a black hole. This fragrance gives me vivid flashbacks to when my neighbours started a fire in their trash bin and the flames licked up a telephone pole in front of my house, roasting the wires to filth. It’s thermal receipt paper dipped in pure BPA, ignited with sparks from frayed wires, and baked in an air fryer. Despite Cero making me nauseous for 45 minutes after smelling it, it took me on an exciting, visceral journey that I do not regret one bit.
Next, we travel to 2077, where mycelium has become intertwined with human life after many decades of incorporating fungi into societal structures. Our skin is bouncy and pale due to copious amounts of chitin. Matsu Musk is a fairly linear fragrance, combining photorealistic mushroom with the mildness of human flesh. The vision here is not fairycore-plant-mother-trippy-egirl-mushroom-emojis, but rather a stock photo of a button mushroom. It’s an earthy, raw mushroom freshly sprouted from a lush green garden. Just enough soil remains caked on during the photoshoot to maintain its authenticity, but not enough to repel prospective mushroom enjoyers.
Upon the first smell test, I thought of the Fungal Wastes in Hollow Knight, a whimsical landscape of purple fungi. I was totally wrong, though, because on the dry down the modesty pointed toward creamy whites and velvety beiges. Don’t get me wrong—whimsy plays a huge role in this fragrance; however, there’s a forbidding undertone. It’s like throwing a Kylie Jenner–level party for someone in a vegetative state.
Layers of thin, fleshy gills swallow our bodies, the membranes actively breaking down organic matter into carbon. Just a week ago, it was only one sprout protruding from your belly button, but now you and the mushroom have become one. You don’t freak out, though, because you were prepared for this. It’s meditative—inhaling and exhaling slowly to the rhythm of the superstructure you are now attached to. It’s really quite beautiful—a wave of calm washing over me as I let this potion dry down. Matsu Musk is perfect for adding more verdancy to a stinky floral. I tried layering it with Imaginary Authors’ Fox in the Flowerbed, the result being a tangle of fungi resting among a bed of heady jasmine.
We’re rocketing back to 2021—lowkey not a good vibe for humanity. Life is looking bleaker than ever with The Virus looming about, and femcel-dom seems more and more inviting. Bit Bit begins in the herb section of a natural health food store (namaste), but in a split second enters the most menacing bitter chard you’ve ever tasted. The initial whiff set off my gag reflex—this salad is rotten AND covered in Monsanto’s strongest cocktail of GMOs. How does that even happen? Quarantined in your grey compound, you’re shovelling mouthfuls of acrid Amazon lettuce into your mouth because, as far as you know, it’s the only sustenance you will have access to for God knows how long.
This scent is penetrating—the valerian root nods to sleepy-time tea—but, like with Cero, primal instinct kicks in, and it’s more like stink bug extremities mixed into your prepackaged salad.
The spinach is marinated in pesticides, a flavour now as familiar to you as salt and pepper. Forest-green chard lines endless concrete rooms—it’s surgical; the clinic recommends you boil the greens until soft. A pungent slew of mugwort, wormwood, and soil escort the bitter leaves toward a glimmer of freshness, but it is repeatedly stomped out by rancid fumes. Every time I smell this perfume, I am hit with the blue/black dress effect; my mind cannot decide between delightfully aromatic and cyanide. This ability to lead your imagination in opposing directions is what makes this scent so impressive. Bit Bit illustrates the scientific management that produce goes through nowadays—it’s the salad Shein will probably start selling someday, delivered to your doorstep in less than 24 hours.
Fast forward to the year 3030, and human extinction has allowed an abundance of flora to overtake the planet. It’s giving eco-punk Plantasia. Damp is a stark specimen of life. It’s earthy— and I say earth rather than dirt for a reason. The newborn blossoms are vigorous enough to break through concrete and other structures that humans left behind. Prosperous foliage sighs oxygen into the atmosphere; lightning strikes the grass, and a crisp, ozonic wind fans droplets off gigantic emerald leaves. This formula is reminiscent of Demeter’s Dirt; however, Dirt contains evidence of Anthropocene agricultural systems, while Damp showcases nature unscathed. Extreme weather systems rush through, summoning a gentle petrichor.
Damp possesses the same melancholic tranquility as Matsu Musk, while Cero is the complete antithesis. Chaos may have once loomed over the planet, but at this moment time stands still. Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors would wear this fragrance to an audition to play a normal, well-mannered, non-evil plant that doesn’t eat humans. Petrichor by perfumer princess Marissa Zappas shares the same tepid soil as Damp; however, Petrichor is more like sticking your nose in a rain-soaked lemon tree, only getting a small dose of the earth below. I love smelling like a muddy garden, so I will definitely be wearing this.
Finally, we settle back into the present day. Don’t get too comfortable, because thousands of cicadas are overtaking cities all over North America. They’re very excited—I mean, they’ve been underground for almost 20 years. I can only imagine how disappointed they are after witnessing 9/11, crawling into their little soil beds, then emerging expecting a better America, only to see that they now have a moldy corpse for president. Sad!
Brood is a musty dose of tree sap and bark, sprinkled with trampled grass and cicada carcasses. There’s a drought; the grass is dry and thirsty. The bark is dusty—it breaks apart in your hands and leaves microscopic splinters. I was thrilled to discover the cicada-carcass essence in this; it’s crunchy and smells like hot garbage. This makes sense because apparently their dead corpses smell like roadkill. Their lives sound really nice—sleeping in dirt for years, waking up, having sex, then dying. Sign me up! Brood is lively—though it’s dry, there’s a brightness to it, like the cicadas are definitely going “Weeeeeee!” as they take flight.
These insects bear many symbolic associations: reincarnation, immortality, and spiritual ecstasy are a few. Their unique life cycle was relished among ancient Greeks, and Aristotle apparently loved to eat them, including the females’ creamy eggs—someone match his freak.
The juxtaposition of apocalypse with the metaphor of rebirth is what makes this perfume so special. Accords like fresh tree sap and wood signal life, carrying almost a medicinal quality, as though they could heal wounds. My only encounter with a cicada was at Millennium Park in Chicago. I was sitting on the grass eating deep-dish pizza (which was very disillusioning) when a cicada started crawling up the back of my skirt. Horrified, I flicked it yards away, but then was overcome with guilt. It started struggling across the grass and seemed to be aiming toward the tree we were sitting under. The way it was stumbling through the weeds almost brought a tear to my eye—it reminded me of a Friday girls’ night on the town; all it needed was a beat-up pair of Air Force Ones and an Urban Outfitters corset. I decided to carry him on a stick to the tree, and he latched on and started crawling up the trunk. In that moment, I felt a sentimental connection to this gentle creature, and that same fondness strikes me when I smell Brood.
*zegers’ name is intentionally left in lowercase.
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