Falling down the Etsy rabbit hole is one of my internet-ish weaknesses, and upon one of these bottomless falls I came across this Dead Writers Perfume, which is made with “black tea, vetiver, clove, musk, vanilla, heliotrope, and tobacco.” The combination reminds me of an old, worn book and maybe a dude with a dusty velvet jacket using a feather pen to write an opus, and I got to wondering what perfumes based on individual dead writers might look like. A few ideas:

Ernest Hemingway: Salt water, rum, coconut and lime, cigar smoke, Spanish wine

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Gin, citrus, oak (prep school, amirite), in a champagne-flute shaped bottle with gold flecks in it

Jane Austen: Darjeeling tea, snowdrops and pansies (flowers from her garden), meadow grass

Dorothy Parker: Whiskey sour, vanilla, mandarin, white musk

Edgar Allan Poe: Poppies, absinthe, sandalwood, and mold

Flannery O’Connor: Church incense, soap, vanilla, ginger

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Jack Kerouac: Cigarettes, cheap beer, unwashed youth, patchouli, car leather

the Bronte Sisters: Heather, sea air, vetiver, primrose, black tea

Louisa May Alcott: Fir tree, red currant, blood orange, coffee beans

Tolstoy: Vodka, musk, black tea, black peppercorn, cedar

Sylvia Plath: Freshly washed linen, vanilla, daffodils, lavender

Margaret Mitchell: Musk, magnolia, tea, sugar, gardenia blossoms

Dickens: Cloves, tobacco, patchouli, brandy water, river water

Anne Sexton: Vodka martini, tobacco, lemon verbena, peppermint

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