Yesterday Haze Eau de Parfum by Imaginary Authors Review

Yesterday Haze is pink. Pale, dusty rose pink. It’s formed around a nondescript fruity note, pale pink, marketed as fig but not distinctly fig enough to recognize. Just a vague pink fruitiness.

And a little bit doll. Pink plastic doll. Like a pink fruity scented sort of doll. Like a strawberry-scented novelty My Little Pony toy — not one of those bouncy round ones modeled after the modern TV show, but one of the original ones from the 80s through early 2000s, one of those ominously hippopotamus-looking things with the coiffed hair and the eyes that have seen some shit.

But just a hint. Imaginary Authors’ Yesterday Haze isn’t too distinctly faux strawberry or anything. Nor is it nearly as overtly, sharply synthetic-smelling as perfumes that are trying to smell like plastic (like Aether Arts Perfume’s Cyborg Queen) or ink (like Akro’s Ink or Wallpaper* Steidl’s Paper Passion). It’s not even as clearly plastic-y as the sharp and jagged vanilla-laced plastic of Etro’s iconic Heliotrope.

Yes, there is something plastic-fresh in the opening. It’s almost an almost aquatic sort of freshness, except it isn’t salty. But beyond that point, the doll and toy association is more about the simplistic fragrances applied to them than the literal smell of their component plastic parts. This is a faint suggestion of doll’s head, the sweet pink berry scent applied to it, buried in nostalgia and dust.

So much dust. Bitter walnutty dust. Bitter, baleful dust. Warning dust. Storm dust. The dust of dust haze, dust devils, haboobs (ha, boobs). The choking dryness of the Dust Bowl, that most horrific game in American college football history. The bitter windswept dust of memory and forgetting.

There’s just a little light fluffy sweetness lifting it all up. Whipped cream, woody notes, and tonka bean. So much soft powdery iris, more dust, plastic and bitter nuts and sadness.

Yesterday Haze is well-named. This is definitely dusk and dust and haze. It’s memory and reflection and nostalgia. It’s sepia-tone memories of pink-berries-ad-whipped-cream-topped milkshakes and the dry walnut powder at the bottom of a burlap bag, of crops and clouds and the foreboding of oncoming storms.

Pink fruity sweet plastic dolls. Hint of light sweet whipped cream. Bitter and powdery dust. A light, forlorn, dusty, dazed air. Soft and cushy but light, like an air mattress with a really soft topper and old magenta sheets.

I wouldn’t call this perfume juvenile or playful due to the dolor of the texture. Something about Yesterday Haze is far too doleful and gloomy, too mournful and morose, too wretched and forlorn to be a cutesy perfume for middle school girls.

But then, isn’t being a middle school girl one of the most doleful, gloomy, mournful, morose, wretched and forlorn experiences out there? This is the pink and dusty cerise and pale cherry red aesthetic of a fruity perfume for girls just becoming young women, juxtaposed with the nostalgia and looming darkness accompanying that time.

Some note pyramids call the walnut note in Yesterday Haze walnut bitters. Oh, it’s bitter alright, but nothing here feels quite boozy to me like alcoholic bitters. It’s just a dusty, musty, loose and airy sort of bitterness, a light pink bitter sunset cloud.

Some note pyramids mention a tree bark note here. Many people note woodiness as a dominant quality of Yesterday Haze. I don’t think I would call this woody. If it is, it’s the finest, lightest, dustiest wood, more sawdust than wood.

Perhaps a certain milky, creamy sort of woody accord fills out Yesterday Haze, giving it expanse and space, but it’s not a defining property. Maybe there’s even an idea somewhere in here loosely inspired by sandalwood, or amyris wood, or even massoia wood. Something simultaneously creamy and dry.

But it’s been atomized, obliterated into bitter walnut-wood dust, no particular defining woody characteristics left.

The iris note here doesn’t feel quite like most powders. It’s pink and it’s powder and it’s a little like plastic, but somehow it doesn’t feel at all like cosmetics. It’s just a cloud of something very soft.

This is definitely a very light, floaty, dust cloud type of powder rather than thick dense rich gourmand doughy-vanilla sort of powder. But oh, is it ever pervasive.

You wouldn’t expect it due to that delicate fruity-dusty texture, but Yesterday Haze may be one of the longest-lasting perfumes I have ever encountered.

Rarely have I ever met a perfume so incredibly pervasive and long-lasting for so little juice. I never even intended to try on Yesterday Haze; I’d just been handling the vial, opened it to take a whiff, and all of a sudden everything around me, my skin, my clothes, my room — all of it smells irrevocably of Yesterday Haze and I hate it. Not because Yesterday Haze is objectively very objectionable, but because I’m sick to death of everything around me smelling like a fake plastic cloud of bitter dust and pink fruity notes.

It’s been two weeks, Yesterday Haze. I’ve scrubbed everything. I have no idea where you are emanating from. You’re an Eau de Toilette. How are you even lasting this long? Please just let me go.

I’ve also, coincidentally, been having an intense few weeks of feeling like I’m losing my mind. What started as a multi-day migraine morphed into a maddeningly intense bout of my OCD pervading just everything all the time. And all of it, all of it smells like Yesterday Haze. It’s so hard to snap out of a space, a chunk of time you’ve decided in your brain is one continuous episode, when it all keeps smelling just as it did. Infuriating.

So, unfortunately, I think I need to cleanse myself of Yesterday Haze and never try to wear it again. But that isn’t to say I’m not impressed. It’s a wonder of a perfume, startlingly evocative and paradoxical. It’s soft and pink and powdery and lightly sweet, reminiscent of scented plastic toys, and yet it has such a profound heaviness to it. It’s light and fruity and dusty yet lasts a freakishly long time.

I’m impressed, and also a little scared. Hats off to Josh Meyer and Imaginary Authors for this gloriously weird pretty-in-pink beast of dust storms and bitter nostalgia.

Where to Find Yesterday Haze Eau de Parfum by Imaginary Authors

You can find samples, decants, and full bottles of Yesterday Haze EdP at Scent Split.

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