Friday Scent of the Day: Halloween Calls for the Odd, the Eerie, the Unruly

Halloween dares your wrists to get weird. If a fragrance cannot make a candle flicker, save it for Monday. I’m traveling today and went semi-commando, just a homemade lotion scented with sweet orange and ylang ylang to keep me human until nightfall. Later, I want something that feels like a velvet cloak and a side-eye.

Today also tips a hat to birthdays for John Keats and Ethel Waters, which feels perfect. Keats gives us mist and melancholy, Waters gives us smoke and spotlight. Together they set the stage for perfumes with shadow and drama.

Here are the bottles I reach for when the moon climbs higher and the streetlights look like ribcages:

• Etat Libre d’Orange Sécrétions Magnifiques: the grand high priestess of wrongness. Metal, milk, panic, salt. If you wear it to a Halloween party, congratulations, you are the performance art.
• Zoologist Bat: cavern air, damp stone, underripe fruit. It is a midnight biology lesson that somehow flirts back.
• BeauFort London 1805 Tonnerre: flint, cordite, brine. The deck tilts, cannons thunder, and your pulse keeps time.
• Slumberhouse Norne: conifer pitch, forest cathedrals, resin-soaked sleeves. Like waking up on the forest floor with pine needles in your hair and a grin.
• Serge Lutens Borneo 1834: patchouli dusted in bitter cocoa and shadows. Victorian lace with a hidden flask.
• Comme des Garçons Avignon: cool incense and stone. The hush before the hymn, the echo that lingers after.

If you want gothic glamour rather than jump scares, plain and simple: Tom Ford Black Orchid still struts. If your Halloween skews bonfire, D.S. & Durga Burning Barbershop or Imaginary Authors A City on Fire give you charred sugar and spark-licked woods, no costume required.

My pick for sunset is Papillon Anubis. Leather, smoke, labdanum, a kiss that tastes like gold leaf. It is ritual and relic and something whispered. Exactly right for a night when the veil feels thin.

Keats would have called it season of mists. Ethel Waters might hum Stormy Weather. I’ll just say this: Halloween is the one day I want my perfume to look me in the eye. And I will happily look back.