Velvet Moon was created by Joelle Nealy. According to their website: The hour, midnight. You sit at a large desk, illuminated by the full moon watching you through an arched window Flickering candles limn the ink standish and paper before you. Sometimes the candle flames leap high enough to outline a glimpse of the room, a huge library lined with rich wood and filled with tomes of all shapes and sizes. Draped in luxurious midnight blue velvet, with the pale moonlight as your only companion, you see yourself in one of the fine paintings that give a haunting ambience to the room. Unshaken, you sit upright and reach for your pen. With notes of cardamom, a wood-paneled library filled with old books, black pepper, a velvet dressing gown, paper and ink and flickering beeswax candles. Velvet Moon is a water-based fragrance mist.
Reddit: It's fantastically autumnal, sitting squarely in between "cozy" and "dark academia". I get quite a lot of black pepper and cardamom spice - the cardamom is particularly interesting here because unlike most of Poesie's offerings featuring cardamom, there's no vanilla or other sweetness so it's not even remotely a gourmand, baking-spice cardamom but instead feels quite gothic and mysterious. There's a bit of beeswaxy sourness and some woody overtones all over a plush velvet base. This velvet feels sleek and luxurious and rather darkly magical - "velvet dressing gown" is actually a really apt description. There might be a hint of leather, but not a robust one, and I don't get any paper or ink bookish notes specifically, though again the whole effect really does feel quite dark academia-ish, tempered by the standoffish sort of coziness created by the velvet + cardamom. Velvet Moon is quite a triumph and I'm delighted that I took the chance on a blind-buy full-size. Highly recommended - if you're tempted, do give it a try! And if you miss out on this release, I think Poesie plans to continue restocking it. They don't want FOMO for this scent. Personally I think this would be a prime candidate to join their general catalog!
Unquie Things: Velvet Moon is a collaboration between perfumer Poesie and indie PerfumeTok darling uncommonsmells. With notes of cardamom, black pepper, beeswax candles and inspired by a dark academia midnight hour moment of being ensconced in a darkened library lined with bookshelves and brooding portraits, cloaked in velvet and moonlight, this is one of those times when I can get a perfect vision of what the perfumer what trying to evoke–or at least my version of it, filtered through my own perspectives and experiences. Before stories you may know featuring murderous campus cults and demonic professors opening portals to hell and Greek lessons gone weird or whatever, there was Lois Duncan’s 1974 book Down A Dark Hall. I don’t want to assume one way or the other, but if you are unfamiliar, Lois Duncan wrote twisty YA thrillers that usually touched on the supernatural, and if you know her for nothing else, you know of the movies adapted from her book I Know What You Did Last Summer. In Down A Dark Hal, five young women are chosen for a remote, mysterious boarding school called Blackwood. They begin to flourish academically and artistically even as they unravel and dwindle away, and you eventually learn the horrifying mystery of the school. I think Velvet Moon smells exactly like the scene from this iconic book cover that’s been emblazoned on my brain for the past 30-odd years: skin damp from the bath, soft with a gently spiced lotion, rich oaken panel walls, and opulent staircases, and the sweet golden glow of candlelight beyond which dark forces are lurking and hungry. This scent is currently sold out, but I hear that it will be back tomorrow, September 1st.
