Damn Rebel Witches is a twist on its slightly older sister in the @reekperfume family, Damn Rebel Bitches, with the same base of blood orange and hazelnuts and malt, wrapped into a darker bundle with tobacco and smoke and a herbal prickle of lavender.
It is not a roaring blaze of birch and cade, but the first smoke from next door’s chimney reaching you across a sharp afternoon, or the cold ashes on the stone flags of last night’s fire. Quiet, again, but with a trick of persistence: it fades into the background, then catches your attention by stepping backing into the light just as you had dismissed it as a shadow. It has a presence, and a deceptive low-voiced strength.
In the Very Old House, there was a different type of fireplace in every room, from the bedroom’s neat duck’s nest grate and the chipped-enamel kitchen range to the bare brick monster in the drawing room that always smoked and spat and growled as it devoured wood. There was the skeleton of an old bread oven on one side, space for a low chair on the other, and a clear view of the sky when you ducked into the towering chimney that formed the building’s spine. This house always played tricks with time; standing inside the shaft of smoke-blackened bricks, stars bright above, I was never quite sure into which era I’d emerge.
Some things are comfortable in the way that they persist–houses that shelter generations of lives, learning nurtured across centuries, stars that shine across millennia–and then there’s the poison that returns, again and again, corrupting us with fear and loathing.
In this era, crackling with the mistrust of knowledge, and the surging waves of attacks on women’s rights to bodily autonomy, we still need more defiant witches and bitches to fight back. If we are the granddaughters of the witches you didn’t burn, how can we best set things on fire?
(This travel spray was a no-obligations gift from Reek that I will continue to wear with pleasure. (As with Damn Rebel Bitches, the perfumer is Sarah of 4160 tuesdays)
originally posted 31 May 2019