In 1989, Toho Studios released Kazuki Omori’s Godzilla vs. Biollante, an addition to the franchise of Japanese kaiju monster horror-action films. Biollante, the new creature featured, was an atypical entry into the canon, as she is among the very few “female” monsters to face off with the towering trademark reptile. Her gender was presumably partly determined by her given origin story: a grief-stricken mad scientist splices cells harvested from Godzilla with a rose bush possessed by the soul of his deceased daughter. The result is a looming hydra of vines and snapping crocodiles, topped with an enormous red rose which opens onto dripping fangs at its center.

The late 1980s were defined by perfumes that were also oversized, high-performance, even threatening—a must-have accessory for the broad-shouldered lady boss who could and would have it all. It was during this decade and the several years following Biollante’s release that perfumer Sophia Grojsman signed some of her most iconic blends for mega-brands such as Lancôme, Estée Lauder, Elizabeth Arden, Liz Taylor, Calvin Klein, and Oscar de la Renta, among many others. Grojsman is a maven of the plush floral and musk mélanges that defined an era of department store designer fragrances. And she is, to me, one of the great geniuses to tease out the idyllic, sensual, and cosmetic dimensions of roses in an interplay with iris and violet in such masterworks as Paris, 1983, for Yves Saint Laurent; Bvlgari Pour Femme, 1994, for Bvlgari; Diamonds and Rubies, 1993, for Elizabeth Taylor; and True Love, 1994, for Elizabeth Arden.

In the proximity of their releases, I associate the romance of Grojsman’s rose accords with the tragedy of rose-monster Biollante. They achieve mythic, chimerical proportions, at turns lusty and alluring and venomous and dangerous. In the story arc of Omori’s film, we are shown a big red rose that is as scared as it is scary. Audiences bear witness to the abjection and alienation of the Biollante creature, which  stands in a misty bay emitting sounds that could be crying or singing. These primal dirges are met with military attack and eventually a series of confrontations with the King of Kaiju himself; at multiple intervals, Biollante’s life cycle turns into puffs of glittering pollen, lifting skyward in an oscillation between doom and solace.

I like thinking of the kaiju rose, because its narrative tension matches the ways rose scents have been among the most challenging genres to my sensibilities in the wide expanse of tropes and conventions in perfumery. The tendency for rose accords to skew astringent, sharply green and citrus, or else heady and wafting in their overbearing floralcy means that the majority of them are not for me. So about five years ago, I embarked on a ROSE QUEST to seek out rose perfumes that I not only enjoy smelling, but also wearing and experiencing on my body. I’ve written two prior installments in my ROSE QUEST here and here. This present missive marks a third chapter in this adventure.


In my years of collecting and writing about perfume, the firmaments of rose perfumery have been shaped by a few very iconic scents. Certainly Joy, 1930, by Henri Almeras for Jean Patou, is one of the venerable standards premiered during a golden age of perfume as heightened fantasy and luxury. Dominique Ropion’s Portrait of a Lady, 2010, for Frederic Malle, has inspired infinite imitations over the subsequent decade and a half following its release, having revolutionized the traditional rose–patchouli combination into an eloquent, endlessly fascinating bouquet. And from my vantage, if there has been another singularly influential rose perfume in the past decade, it has been the sugar-crystallized rose gourmand Delina, 2017, by Quentin Bisch for Parfums de Marly; it appears to have attracted whole new generations and demographics to the option of smelling the roses. It would be difficult to argue the quality of these three compositions—their lasting popularity and influence can be spotted at any point of sale for perfumes today. 


In my questing, I’ve come to revere several noses for their treatments of rose in much the same manner as I do Sophia Grojsman. Vero Kern’s Rozy, formulated at several concentrations in 2014 for her Vero Profumo brand, is possessed of a sophisticated brilliance in the ways it modernizes very vintage-smelling compositions from the Joy-Patou era. Rozy is sultry and suggestive and terribly rich. In her different interpretations of rose, Laurie Stern of Velvet and Sweet Pea’s Purrfumery expresses her own indelible pleasures, fascinations, and bounty of feelings for rose. By seemingly mystical or psychic means, her potions transfer the sheer excesses of her enthusiasm to the wearer. Stern’s Bed of Roses is my personal favorite—and in fact probably one of the rose perfumes I wear most often—but other beauties she has blended include Rose Encens, Rose Jasmine, Jewelry of Heaven, and Pangolin Violette Rose. Last year I was introduced to Bree Hyland’s BARRE perfumes, including Salty Rose, which inspires in me an intrigue veering toward obsession. The aquatic rose is one of the popular profiles I feel most challenged by–and yet, Salty Rose reinterprets the trope toward saline, seaweed, and magnolia, yielding an offbeat conceptual artwork that teems with fantastical associations.

And then there is a rose that when I first encountered it, awakened me as if from a fairytale enchantment. Over the past three years, I have been swept up in the most delicate fantasia rendered by Odette Fontaine of Odette Parfum Co. Hers are aerated daydreams drawn from ballet, patisserie, and highly personal recollections of the romantic minutiae of a life lived with tender care. Fontaine has been widely appreciated for her renderings of such softness as kitten fur, buttercream, and meringue, and for articulating gourmands, florals, and fruity musks with distinctive powdery lightness. But to say that I am smitten, hit by Cupid’s arrows, hopelessly devoted to the roses that Odette Parfum has released still feels like sheer understatement. For two years, Rose Adage and Moulin Rose have been among my most-worn perfumes—certainly my most-worn roses, but generally surpassing literally hundreds of other fragrances in my archive collection. Rose Adage has a touch of coolness in the inclusion of violet, among the airiest of the ‘lipstick scents’ I have. Moulin Rose is a tad more worldly, with some amber facets that recall classic Guerlain and a flutter of tobacco that dances gracefully in relation to the rose heart of the scent. Taken together, though, they go a ways toward describing a house perspective on rose: an almost weightless chiffon effect, blushing like a Boucher painting, coquettish and flirtatious, but also literate and smart. The Odette rose is not sharp or sour or especially green; rather, it is sweetened without being overblown in its confectionery dimensions– an angelic, ethereal counterpart to a jammy blossom. It shimmers and glimmers ethereally. The Odette rose is powdery and cosmetic, as much scattered petals and papery dried potpourri as ripened bloom. It is a sisterly companion to whoever wears it—a confidante that lingers close to the skin, emanating a pastel-tinged aura.

So ever since Fontaine announced on socials that a new rose was forthcoming from the brand, I’ve had a  mix of butterflies and anticipation that a bride might feel  for her most recent round of nuptials. After a protracted winter, the start of May brought us the brand new Prima Rose from Odette Parfum Co. Some of the honeyed qualities that are suggested in Odette’s other rose releases are more pronounced, coaxed forward through beguiling Rose de Mai facets. The ‘bonbon au miel’ note is chewy and syrup-glazed, hinting at the rose and honey combination one would find in baklava or galub jamun. Like boxes of candies delivered to a starlet backstage, the depths of this take on honey interplays with a candied, fondant orris root that deliciously swishes about underneath cascades of flowers, blown kisses, and sweet nothings. To complement that undertow of richness, the rose is dressed up with slaps of fruity tartness that reveal themselves gradually amidst the thick, heavenly cloud cover. Prima Rose handles luminous, poofy white musks as if they are airspun powders and tatters of tulle.


I fetishize perfumes redolent of lipsticks, makeup bags, and the contents of purses, and Prima Rose achieves an atmosphere that radiates around such talisman: it’s evocative of vanities and dressing rooms and boudoirs, bringing to my mind nothing more than Victoria’s Monaco dressing table in one of the later scenes of Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 film adaptation of The Red Shoes (a fairytale that served as inspiration for Les Chaussons Rouges, a limited edition collaboration between Odette Parfums Co. and Pearfat Parfum in 2024. Prima Rose gathers into the corners of some glamorous repose replete with powders, dust, and a permutation of the delicately furry something-or-other that has made Odette’s Pas de Chat so popular. I can pick out flourishes that have been developed out of previous inventive turns in the prolific Odette Parfum catalogue, adding storied depth, complexity, and nuance to the composition without compromising the prancing-into-flying light touch that is among the house’s trademarks. Joining the two other rose perfumes aforementioned, I feel ardently that Odette Fontaine is building me a dollhouse or a memory palace in which to live, hidden behind hedges heavy with the frills and coy evasions of pretty pink roses.


One might expect a perfumer and brand that take ‘rose’ in their names to be committed to the rose fantasy that they might offer. And one wouldn’t be disappointed by the London-based nascent perfume house Faux Rose. The nose behind the brand, Amelia Rose, harkens from fashion, having worked previously under Jeremy Scott and Vivienne Westwood before introducing what the brand describes as “a boudoir triptych: studies in hyper-femininity and eroticism unfolding as intimate tableaux, where visual language meets the corporeal and perfume becomes a sensorial expression of desire and feminine artifice.” The project of these perfumes and the manner with which it declares itself is so near and dear to my values, I have been eager to indulge in smelling these perfumes, daydreaming my way through them, and smelling some more.


The eponymous release, Faux Rose, 2025, is, like Prima Rose, a powdery floral gourmand supported by a defined honey accord and a disco nap’s worth of dusty-vaporous musks. But where Prima Rose is evocative of ballerinas, ingenues, even pampered mistresses and lolitas in certain phases, Faux Rose is given over to more louche impulses, careening its constituent parts toward streetwalkers and sugar babies whose one-night stands are splashed in another application of perfume in lieu of a bath. Faux Rose is a pietra dura of rose artifacts inlaid into Cadbury Crunchies and Violet Crumbles—an architecture of beehive entremets, a boudoir dripping in sugar-sweet pollen and punchy innuendos. This fragrance conducts worship of a divine erotic femininity at an altarpiece assembled from ornamental cake stands: a rosewater spiked Île Flottante runs like a mote around a dreamscape of flower carts and makeup counters. Faux Rose is draggy, eloquent in its campy effeminate insinuations.

The delicacy of Prima Rose and the vampishness of Faux Rose are the two wolves inside of me. It’s no surprise that these fragrances would be developed in the same period as Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation of Wuthering Heights; a 67-year-old Madonna’s rotating wardrobe of lingerie coinciding with the release of her Confessions II album; and the renewed assaults on women’s sexualities, bodily autonomies, and gender identities at state, federal, and global levels of policymaking. Both Odette Fontaine and Amelia Rose’s approaches to rose have been deconstructive of the meanings and associations the flower has held in the perfume arts and in culture, crafting compositions that are witty performances and sendups of  how gender has been represented across and beyond binaries, fashions, and epochs. The two fragrances are effusive in their powdery indulgence, referring back not only to the bloom under review but to the endless ways it has been iterated and interpreted in cosmetics and beauty products for many decades; they conjure flirtatious advertising, frilly packaging, and languorous uses of head-to-toe self-pleasuring. Several waves of feminism have left unresolved the debates around a liberationist co-opting of the social pressures, costs, and consumption of capitulating to ideals for womanhood and beauty per se, but for all those tensions ongoing there persists an apparently self-determined fixation for some of us to be within the fantasies of feminine frippery, adornment, and an aroused state of aesthetics edging toward ecstasy. For those so inclined, Prima Rose and Faux Rose are next level. 


Another recent rethinking of roses has accompanied an iconoclastic brand’s examination of one of the most central vocations assigned to womanhood in as expanded a field of definition as one might choose: the life and times of motherhood. Eris Parfums helmed by founder and creative director Barbara Herman has worked closely with master perfumer Antoine Lie to wax poetic—and especially erotic—in a collection of scents that pay homage to such hedonists as Anaïs Nin, Catherine Deneuve in the film adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s Belle de Jour, and the gender non-binary designation ‘Mx’. Lie is, of course, responsible for some of the most beloved and notorious perfumes released by brands like Comme des Garçons (synthy sandalwood Wonderwood and gluey CDG 2011, for example) and Etat Libre d’Orange (Tom of Finland, Divin’Enfant, and the sexy body fluid polarizer Secretions Magnifique). I personally find Lie’s treatment of grassy and aromatic green scents the best in the business—including Eris’ Green Spell—and he’s previously  done some great takes on rose in the ELdO Eau de Protection, Tom Ford’s Café Rose, Maison Sybarite’s Bed of Roses, and Les Indemodables’ Rose de Jamal. Earlier in 2026 Eris released Mother’s Milk, a formulation by Lie that nestles a supple rose into a bowl of milk that evolves from creamy to animalic to woody.


Mother’s Milk is a pronounced, incandescent response to the extra passive ‘skin scents’ so trendy in recent years—there is skin, sweat, warm milk, all amplified in ways that affirm they’ve been blended by the nose who gave us the mix of blood, sweat, milk, cum, and seaweed in Secretions Magnifique. That earlier perfume is one I wear fairly often and share in most all of the smelling workshops I facilitate. Even without being told the inspirations for the scent, a significant number of folks who smell Secretions are put on edge, sensing danger, viscera, and transgression. One way of talking about Mother’s Milk is that its depictions of mammalian warmth are more easily pleasant but no less realistic than Lie’s earlier work. Here the body is sweetened with facets of roses, cocoa, and vanilla—a neapolitan of rosy-tinted creams. The timely cleverness of Mother’s Milk is that it elevates ‘skin scent,’ while rendering the sugared rose petals of the Delina era into something subtle and nuanced. The more time I spent wearing Mother’s Milk, the more I was reminded of a personal favorite of Lie’s work, the 2010 Montana 80 for Montana, which is a super milky take on sandalwood and rosewood, adorned with some light, fleshy white florals. And I find myself thinking, too, of Sofia Grojsman’s floral musks of the 80s and 90s; Mother’s Milk is, by comparison, more explicitly embodied than the stylized beige-nude mannequins of those department store designs, and the roses and their petals are also more dimensional and acutely described.

I realized after smelling Mother’s Milk that I’d been apprehensive about how easily it could be a gotcha one-liner of palatable breast milk allusions. I’d nursed similar anxieties before smelling the Vienna-based Wienerblut’s Freudian Wood, itself a milk scent also meant to recall psychosexual fantasy. That one has turned out to be hands down the most complimented scent I wear. And after a couple of months of intermittent wearing, I find Mother’s Milk to be nothing short of a miracle and a masterpiece. For all of its soft curves, it is unique, daring, and continues to surprise me with its evolution while wearing.

In contemporary phases of perfumery, there are more conceptual treatments of roses that draw attention to their thorns as well as their blossoms, their capacity for self-defense as well as seduction. Sometimes that is rendered with added sharpness, green-stem effects, or bitterness—or, in the aforementioned Eau de Protection, a trace of the coppery blood accord Etat Libre d’Orange has used in several of its perfumes to suggest thorns that have already pricked. In 2013, the visionary perfumer polymath Serge Lutens was interviewed for The Independent, in which he expressed that in wearing perfume, “you are giving yourself arms, weapons. Transforming a weakness into a strength, protecting yourself by making a stand. This is the main purpose of my perfumes—strengthening your inner self.” The aesthetics of suggestively weaponizing rose perfumes with sharp edges is certainly one way to attempt that kind of protective aura. But in spending time with these recent rose releases, I’ve wondered what they might propose about how we make use of our perfumes as tools for orienting to the times we’re living in. All three coax deeply tender qualities out of their floral focal point, emphasizing softness with grace and flourish, and contrasting the heady botanical conjurings with comforting confections.


By making the “making-up” as substantive as all the powdery, creamy notes Prima Rose carries, the scent invites its wearer backstage where magic is revealed in its making. It’s no less real for having been constructed, practiced, rehearsed, and performed. For the duration of Prima Rose, roses are tossed forward in appreciation, but rather than falling to the stage, they hover, suspended in time. A shimmer-dust quantum flicker holds together the overture, the candies and gifts delivered to the dressing room, and the bows taken in an all-at-once exquisite exhalation.


Faux Rose follows on the grand characteristics of boudoir living: a space for retreat, for circumspection, even scheming. Boudoir may be where the makeup and dressing and bonbon devouring occur, where too illicit liaisons are sought, or even a pretty, private liaison with oneself—but at its etymological root, the boudoir is for sulking. Fainting couches, smelling salts, burn-books, and diaries, as well as jewelry kept secure until a need to liquidate, affording women historically rare access to independent funds: these entangled operations all have close-range à la mode equivalents and are signaled in ways alluring and ironic by the Faux Rose house.


Mother’s Milk is a radical gesture with which to anoint oneself, following on an assertion made by Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde in 1983: WE CAN LEARN TO MOTHER OURSELVES. As with the defiance and deviance implied elsewhere in Eris’ line, Mother’s Milk strays from simple facts of biological reproduction and parenting, offering instead a type of psychic nourishment fed from the surface of the skin inward toward the heart. It’s beautiful, but part of its beauty is its animal frankness, the evidencing of flora and fauna from which so much of the history of perfume is structured.

Cinema provides the plant monster Biollante as an embodiment of a rose that is elegiac and beleaguered, misunderstood and therefore attacked. I experience Biollante as queer for the ways she never asks to exist in a world or society that rejects her, and for the ways she struggles against a widespread impulse to eradicate her. An argument could be made that the rare trait in rose perfumes that I restlessly hunt after is a queered femme resignation in a rose garden, and that I do so in order to struggle with my own sense of survival.


Another film reference urgently asserts itself in my mapped imaginaries whenever I contemplate roses—indeed whenever I contemplate power, love, queerness, confessional literature, cinema itself. At a key turning point in the 2005 film adaptation of V for Vendetta, which originated as a comic by Alan Moore (which was, as it happens, released within the same year as Godzilla vs. Biollante), Natalie Portman’s character Evey has been abducted, held prisoner, violated, and tortured. In her holding cell, she is slipped a bit of writing on toilet tissue, authored apparently by a woman named Valerie who is portrayed in flashbacks with voiceovers by Natasha Wightman. In this brief, handwritten autobiography, Valerie narrates her childhood discovery of her attraction to other women, the traumas of rejection when she came out to her parents, and how she met her partner Ruth with whom she set up house. Describing the home they made together, she writes, “Our place always smelled of roses. Those were the best years of my life.” Then, the film tells us, sometime around 2018 she and Ruth watched in despair at rapid cultural shifts following widespread wars and the rise of fascism, recounting, “I remember how the meanings of words began to change, how unfamiliar words like 'collateral' and 'rendition' became frightening...I remember how 'different' became 'dangerous'. I still don't understand it: why they hate us so much.” Valerie describes Ruth’s abduction by a totalitarian government, and then her own, and it is from her imprisonment that she reflected on the story of her life. Hovering over images of her own torment, the character considers, “It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses and apologized to no one.”

I had roses. The fragility of the blooms expressed in these perfumes always presages an underlying gravitas, a play of contrasts between the lightness of a life lived so very briefly within the arcs of linear time and history, against the inevitability and permanence of death. And in periods like this one when freedoms, rights, and livability are being contested for so many different populations in a worldwide power upset weighted to the advantage of compulsory repression and suppression, it’s meaningful to assert that we have roses. That we make no apologies. That our identities are pluralistic, spliced from fragrance and flower, haunted by ghosts and trauma, bound up in desire and fantasy that need support and spaces of repose. These recent entries in my ROSE QUEST grant me just such support for orienting toward femininities in excess, for becoming a singing rose monster, and for helping in the mothering of myself.