“What is conscience? I make it up myself. Why do I suffer then? Out of habit.”
There are nights I spray perfume just to sit in front of the mirror and feel like a woman who knows something. The scent clings to my skin like memory or motive, and I think: maybe if I smell good enough, I’ll be good enough. Maybe if I wrap myself in woods and milk and spice, I’ll skip the messy middle of becoming and land straight into personhood. Scent as shortcut. Identity via atomizer.
Because perfume, like morality, is built in layers. There are top notes—the things people notice first. Your charm, your timing. Your texts back. Then the middle: the parts that develop, deepen. The emotional undertow. And finally, the base—what lingers. What stays after the performance fades.
Lately, I’ve been wearing Dirty Rice by Borntostandout. The name alone evokes something comforting but slightly wrong. (It also makes my mom laugh.) The scent opens with almond and bergamot—familiar, warm, a little bitter, like someone who still hopes but not naïvely. Then comes basmati rice, milk, peony. It smells like skin right after you’ve cried (on someone, maybe after they’ve left.) Then the dry-down hits: sandalwood, musk, cedar, vetiver. It’s earthy, grounded, unflinching. Like someone who’s done the thing and decided to sit in the consequences.
(Moral philosophy in a bottle! Buy now!)
I’ve been reading The Brothers Karamazov slowly over the past few months like it's a philosophy seminar and a séance all at once. Dostoevsky doesn’t ask if you’ve been good. He asks if you’ve been honest—with yourself, with others, with God (whatever that means today). He writes people as they are: flawed, brilliant, miserable, and trying.
And I see myself in all the brothers, like most do.
Some days I’m Ivan. Detached, performatively rational, quietly burning from the inside out. The kind of reasoning you can hide behind forever and still feel smart doing it. Even when you’re wrong.
Other days I’m Dmitri. All appetite and guilt, stuck in a loop of wanting and ruining. Dmitri wants too much and he wants it all now. He drinks, he begs, he spirals. He’s in love and embarrassed about it. His guilt is operatic. Naturally, I relate.
And then there’s Alyosha. He believes in love the way some people believe in pilates: gently, consistently, with results you don’t always see right away. (Trying to do both everyday but it’s difficult to remember.) He forgives people who don’t deserve it. He listens when everyone else is shouting. He’s the one I (we? I don’t know you) want to be.
It’s hard not to think about all this when you’re trying to flirt.
I remember a date, a month or so ago. I wore Pear Gelato by Theodoros Kalotinis, a scent that smells like joy without backstory: pear, vanilla, waffle cone, milk, sugar. It’s soft, flirty, disarming. I didn’t want to come off like someone who reads 19th-century Russian literature for fun. I wanted to be light. Sparkling. Vanilla-sweet.
And then I started monologuing about Dostoevsky halfway through a matcha latte, full Ivan-mode, explaining how the book doesn’t hand you answers, just mirrors. That the question isn’t “Are you good?” but “Do you love?” That maybe morality isn’t about right or wrong, but how you live with what you’ve done.
She smiled politely. I think she changed the subject. Honestly, a mercy.
Perfume and personality—both are forms of curation. That day I wore something airy and inviting, but my soul reeked of cedar and moral fatigue. I wanted to be light, Alyosha-light. But I talked like Ivan and felt like Dmitri.
“For everyone now strives most of all to seperate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life, but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation.”
That line follows me like a scent trail. Because I’ve done it. I’ve tried to become myself in isolation, hoarding solitude like a virtue. Thinking if I stayed quiet long enough, read enough, withheld enough, I’d become someone whole. But it doesn’t work like that. You don’t become whole by disappearing. You become controlled. Maybe even clever. But never known.
Alyosha doesn’t disappear. He doesn’t rationalize away feeling. He stays. He listens. He loves people where they are, not where they should be. He chooses connection—even when it’s humiliating or hard or doesn't fix anything. I want that. I want the grit of connection over the gloss of cleverness. I want to say, “I love you,” without needing to sound impressive first.
I don’t know if I’m good. I’m not sure I even believe in goodness as anything other than branding. But I know I’m trying not to vanish. I still wear perfume at night just to remember I have a body, not just a mind. I know I’m learning to reach out even when I’m tired, to say Hi without irritation. I still believe in the part of me that wants to be better, not just look better.
Perfume won’t save me. Neither will Russian literature. But both remind me of what I’m made of.
Almond and sandalwood. Shame and sweetness. Ivan’s cold detachment, Dmitri’s frantic longing, and a little flicker of Alyosha—somewhere in the base notes, still hoping.
And maybe that’s not moral clarity. But it smells like truth.