paper & parfum ~ my yr of rest & relaxation
scents of detachment for you to wear while you read my year of rest and relaxation
Welcome to Paper & Parfum
Perfume and literature live where language meets emotion, acting silently and unexpectedly as transportive portals. While words linger in the mind, perfume sticks to the skin. A line can reopen a wound; a scent can summon a decade. Both carry memory, often without permission. I find that fragrance clings like honey to time, pulling us somewhere we don’t always expect to return.
Welcome to my series of pairing Paper & Parfum; because sometimes the most intimate stories aren’t just read—they’re scented.1
My Year of Rest and Relaxation isn’t about healing, it’s about dissociation. Ottessa Moshfegh hands us a narrator who has everything and nothing: beauty, money, time, and an unbearable proximity to her own existence. The unnamed protagonist decides to drug herself into a year long sleep. Suspended in time with nothing but pills, VHS tapes, and the desire to vanish into sleep. What she seeks isn’t rest, it’s absolution. Silence. A clean white wall where a personality used to be.
Underneath the icy absurdity and dark humor is something tragic; grief that has calcified into detachment and femininity treated like a costume you forgot to take off. The novel reads like walking through Bergdorf’s on Ambien: expensive, soft, surreal, and deeply sad.
The novel pulses with a strange kind of decadence and glossy nihilism. A desire to become blank enough to begin again. It’s a story about self-erasure, precise control, and the fantasy of becoming someone new without ever leaving your apartment.
Each selected scent captures a layer of that experience: sterile apathy, curated beauty, chemical fog, and the soft rot of emotional decay. These are perfumes that smell like sleeping in silk sheets stained with mascara.
So here’s your Paper & Parfum guide for a woman who turns dissociation into an art form.
For the Sterile Apathy of Sleep ~ Juliette Has a Gun Not a Perfume
Notes: Cetalox (synthetic ambergris), amber, musk, woods
Why it Fits: This is barely a perfume. Which is the point. Clean, molecular, synthetic—Not a Perfume is the scent of nothingness, of a freshly laundered void. It doesn’t evolve. It doesn’t bloom. It sits on your skin like a chemical secret. It’s the olfactory equivalent of white walls, Ambien dreams, and the kind of beauty that’s hard and cold and doesn’t need to explain itself.
Worn while reading, it enhances the novel’s core aesthetic: detachment masquerading as elegance. It smells like sleeping through your own life and not minding.
Alternatives: Glossier You (especially the solid), Escentric Molecules 01, Maison Margiela Lazy Sunday Morning
For the Artificial Glamour of Beauty ~ Dior Hypnotic Poison
Notes: Almond, jasmine sambac, vanilla, musk, licorice
Why it Fits: Hypnotic Poison is beauty as weapon with intimidation and allure that defies gender. So much so that it was infamously banned from some restaurants in the 1980's when launched. Sweet, toxic, and impossible to ignore, it’s the scent of a woman who looks immaculate while spiraling. It opens like a marzipan daydream but dries down into something animalic and a little off. Like lip gloss over a nosebleed. Much like the narrator: aggressively desirable on the outside and deeply unwell inside.
This is the scent you wear alone in your apartment, in wine stained silk nightgowns with perfect hair. A velvet curtain over a panic attack. Plastic intimacy. Perfumed decay.
Alternatives: Mugler Alien, YSL Black Opium, Jean Paul Gaultier La Belle
For the Chemical Fog of Dissociation ~ Byredo Super Cedar
Notes: Transparent cedarwood, warm amber, soft musk
Why it Fits: Super Cedar feels like a quiet, foggy day indoors — warm, slightly dusty, and softened by layers of clean wood and subtle amber. It feels like someone who hasn’t left their bed in days but still smells like fabric softener. Super Cedar is the smell of existing outside your own body and floating above a bed in soft clothes with nothing left to think about. It’s for the parts of the novel where time loses meaning, when sleeping feels like time travel.
This fragrance mirrors the novel’s pervasive haze to portray the chemical fog of numbness and withdrawal when reality thins and the world outside the window feels distant and unreal.
Alternatives: Le Labo Another 13, Maison Margiela Replica Whispers in the Library, Clean Reserve Skin
For the Ache Beneath the Numbness ~ Narciso Rodriguez For Her (edt)
Notes: Musk, orange blossom, osmanthus, amber
Why it Fits: There is a softness in the book. Buried deep beneath the cruelty and sedation is a silent sort of yearning that never quite announces itself. Narciso For Her is that ache. It’s intimate, clean, but not innocent. The musk is quiet and ghostly, with a pale floral heart and a touch of warmth that feels almost like remembering how to feel something.
This is the scent for the moments in the novel where nothing seems to happen, but everything hurts. Where time floats, and grief is something you wear close, invisible, constant.
It smells like the ache beneath the numbness. Like standing in front of a mirror and not recognizing your reflection but pausing, for a moment, because it’s beautiful anyway. This is the scent of not crying, but still hurting. The scent of wanting to be touched without being perceived.
Alternatives: Glossier You, Prada Infusion d’Iris, Kiehl’s Original Musk
For the Ending (whatever that means) ~ Juliette Has a Gun Lipstick Fever
Notes: Raspberry, violet, iris, vanilla, patchouli, powder, cedar
Why it Fits: Lipstick Fever is a performance of softness: powdered iris, plush woods, and a hint of sticky fruit to make it just a little dangerous. Perfect for the moments in My Year of Rest and Relaxation when the narrator’s detachment reads not as weakness, but as a radical act of self-possession. Wearing it feels like standing behind glass: visible, admired, untouchable.
Powdery, intimate, and just a little haunted. Lipstick Fever smells like a vintage vanity in an empty room. It’s makeup and melancholy. It smells like the narrator waking up (maybe). Or at least sitting in the wreckage of herself with the lights back on. There’s something theatrical about it, like a woman playing herself too well.
This is the scent of post-fantasy: of picking up your body after a long sleep and wondering if you still fit inside it.
Alternatives: Guerlain L’Heure Bleue, YSL Parisienne
Perfume isn’t always about attraction. Sometimes it’s about detachment. Disguise. Memory. Mood. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, scent becomes a ghost of grief, faint but lingering. Wear these fragrances while reading or while disappearing.
Thank you for reading this selection of Paper & Parfum. If you enjoyed, feel free to add the series on Instagram to follow the Soft Notes unofficial official book club.
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1 Images sourced from Pinterest and carefully curated into collages.
lovely piece. It seemed to me, to glance again trough the pages of this book with your words and the notes of the perfumes
The last pairing is so spot on!