Spectral Doorway is a strange and unusual aura of ether, ghostly old pages, magic chalk and supernatural fumes dosed with funerary incense. It features top notes of funerary incense, soft chalk and bright cotillion; middle notes of artemisia, model trees and vapor; and base notes of vermillion, patchouli, vegan beetle, musk and decayed paper. This is a D.S. & Durga studio juice. Spectral Doorway is an eau de parfum, edp.
From their website: Beetlejuice is a favorite in Kavi’s and my household. Every Halloween we pull it out and watch it with the kids. It’s influential on so many levels. The lighter side of horror seems to me adjacent to an interest in the Spirit World and mythology. Beetlejuice’s set, costume, music, characters, dialogue, and effects all coalesce to create a masterpiece. This fume imagines that smoky scene when Adam and Barbara access the spirit world by drawing a chalk door on brick. The wall opens up to spectral fumes and muted light. Echos of funerary incense haunt the scene in the attic by the town model.
D.S. & DURGA SPECTRAL DOORWAY REVIEWS
Fragrantica: Spectral Doorway is mesmerizing! It’s beautifully effervescent, with a light, citrusy sparkle that has a playful, Pez candy like dusting, delicate yet memorable. It’s hard to put into words, but there’s an airy vibrancy that feels both nostalgic and modern.
Fragrantica: I missed Handbook when it was released a couple of years ago, so I emptied my pocket book for this one. Definitely an atmospheric little number - rubbery, powdery, slightly sweet. It reminds me of a lighter El Cosmico with a Pez Candy note which is probably how I’m interpreting the chalk.
Reddit: The opening is powdery. Definitely leaning towards the chalk here. It dissipates into a base that has a very, VERY similar chemistry to Deep Dark Vanilla with a tinge of lemony citrus and faint “new book” smell. But by far, I’m smelling a subdued DDV, and that’s what lingers 2+ hours later on my skin. If you like DDV, you’d more than likely enjoy this one. Some of the language on the front is mostly poetic for describing the scent (per SA description) like using “funerary incense” to describe this would be inaccurate IMO, DDV is way more smoky/rich. Or “vegan beetle musk”…whatever that is! Just go in expecting a variation of DDV and you’ll be fine, for better or worse. Overall I’d even say it’s a safe blind buy, which is rare for this brand, but if you want to buy into the Halloween hype without a polarizing scent then this could be for you! But be aware this won’t be the new, unique scent to add to your collection. I still bought it because I am a huge Halloween/beetlejuice fan and have no regrets
Patric Rhys on Fragrantica: It would seem perfumer David Seth Moltz, along with me, grew up rabidly watching this classic, and decided that he had to make the scent of this doorway’s opening. Well, he completely nailed it, making one of the quirkiest scents I’ve yet seen from the brand. You can almost smell a smirk in the bottle. I surely had one as I smelled. The scent is neither linear nor vertical, but it behaves in a rather cyclical fashion – things come and go, reappear, but all of it says in the same room, as everything swirls within it. That room is decidedly a damp, concrete basement. Mineral-laden petrichor humidity intermingles with the sparking mineral smell of stone or concrete. The first spray begins to fake you out with something that starts to lead toward a floral, but then quickly turns into dusty and leathery. It’s not a trendy leather either. It’s a thick, padded, old leather- bound book cover that lived in a cedar chest for centuries, wet with basement humidity and age. There’s an orbit of a cold dustiness that leans toward creamy chalkiness. It has a texture that hits the back of your throat and dries it. However, the feeling you get more than anything is comforting, like somewhere and everywhere you’ve hidden away a memory – old basements, forests at night, elementary school art rooms, dank wooden chests. This is truly the smell of literal nostalgia, the afterlife of memories. There’s a crack of light in this basement darkness. One of the notes is “model trees” and this is less of a reference to the model of Winter Rivers in the Maitland’s attic and more the smell of something deep green, too green to be alive and verdant, it’s papery and bitter, the smell of a color – a painted hunter green, with a little synthetic sharpness. Ultimately a woody smell, this isn’t any woody you’re thinking of. It’s a wood that hasn’t decayed yet, but is certainly about to. It’s still crisp with some cedary hints, but it’s muggy and brittle. Wearing it, you end up saying that you just came up from clearing out a basement, swirling minerals and dust stuck on your skin, along with cold humidity that keeps its chill. During its life, all described above pops in and out of olfactory consciousness at random points, but the olfactory story never gets muddled or lost. It being a homage to another story that makes my heart flutter aside, this was actually extremely well done, wonderfully fun, and as gross as the above description may have been for some, it was done with a lot of restraint. It is by no means an offensive scent. But it is a mood with a very tangible place and texture. Would you want to smell like this? Me, I enjoyed my Soho ghost with the most aura. I have a small collection of scents that give off an “Introvert, Do Not Approach” sillage and this is definitely one of them. I smelled like an artifact that you could observe, but not touch. Which, when on the NYC streets and subways, this untouchable feeling can be quite a comfort. You probably shouldn’t say my name three times either.
