In 1992, Issey Miyake released his own water scent. Far from nothing, Issey’s water promised to be light, refreshing, clean, and soft. However, the fragrance is quietly vile, more like fresh bottled sweat than water. It is a camouflage scent for an alien hoping to be detected as a real human body.

Helvetica The Perfume consists only of water. This is, apparently, the scent of nothing.

You are excited to finally own a special container of distilled water. Through this, you focus on everything about the perfume except its fragrance: although it has no smell, it works well as a placebo. You wear most perfumes to attract others, but as you wear Helvetica, only you are aware of its existence: a mirror that lets you reflect on your beauty, education, and cultural sensibilities. However, you notice the perfume is poorly titled. It is called “Helvetica”, a Swiss typeface that is far from neutral. Why not name it fondly after its 2 ounce container, allowing its contents, whatever they may be, to last beyond the death of the typeface?

There are moments you find use for Helvetica. Sometimes you spray Helvetica on the rubber plant to simulate conditions of a humid rainforest. Other times you use Helvetica to discipline your cat.

You awaken with the sun in a honeysuckle bush. Apparently, you passed out with your right hand in a large bag of barbeque Lays, and the left clutching fun-size salt and vinegar Utz. Your hazy mind vaguely recalls trying to make Fig Newton s’mores over the now smoldering bonfire. You hit the bong and go back to sleep.

You awake to a notification that every room in your office building is invaded by dew. The email explains it was detected at dawn by the cleaning staff. The dew makes their jobs easier, you imagine: the spider webs usually hidden within the lobby’s glass chandeliers are rendered visible by gummy droplets, the silk devices strung with stars moments before being Windexed to annihilation. Focusing on the lobby, you render the elevator’s up button in your mind: you notice its lime glow radiating a bit more than normal, and every so often a droplet races over the button and down to pool on the floor. Massaging make-believe dew between your fingers in the darkness of your room, you picture two giant tree frogs in the building’s basement, pulsating mucus glands keeping their skin moist and supple. You see their tongues, pink and glistening.

An instant of balsamic sharpness is enveloped in honey and smoke from coiled incense. The moment, trapped in languid substances, crystallizes into candy. It tastes similar to the candied salted plums a Chinese matron might have in a dish on her rosewood vanity. Beside the dish is a compass, an hourglass, and a candle, its single flame multiplied to infinity in the gaze of two facing mirrors.

Benignly minty and sweet. A nice boy on his first date with a girl way cooler than him that he met online. Despite its name, Cyber Garden is familiar and quite ordinary. It is the plastic plants at IKEA that privilege uninspired mimicry over celebrating and elevating its own artifice. It is regrettably not the verdant, immersive AR landscape I had hoped for, cultivated in a future so bright, that everyone must wear tiny round mirrored sunglasses.

At first whiff, it’s the Cinnabon at Penn Station: cream cheese frosting and a lot of people at once. The savory funk of life triumphs over the sweet decaying stench of subterranean NYC garbage. As first impressions fade, a subtler aspect reveals itself: Secretions Magnifiques is starkly similar to the smell with which you can ascertain that a carton of cream in the fridge has not yet expired. While sniff-checking the milk is but a brief part of a groggy daybreak ritual, that umami creaminess lingers on your skin all day. You become fresh milk, blended with the metallic dewdrops of perspiration that form immediately after a brisk morning walk under a cold sun.

Scrolling in the dark, you allow foreign whim to orchestrate your last conscious thoughts. As your world dies, theirs begins: dream meat.

In the garden of nocturnal perfumes, you find Clair Obscur. A small white flower emits its mist. A sign nearby tells you do not approach the mist or else you will get wet. But you enjoy it from a distance while remarking how light it is for such a nocturnal fragrance. Its angelic radiance cloaks you in anonymity: no one has to know your name here and it doesn’t even matter because no one follows you back anyway. You are a sponge. Feel free.

But perhaps seeking foreign content is a way to mask dealing with the everyday. There is a reason most dreams are nightmares. Commend your coping mechanism. Lead your followers in a human chain through the dark.

Like bars, movie theaters conceal grime in darkness and leisure. But at least bars reek of antiseptic liquors. The cinema makes no distinction between food, floral, and fecal. The same can be said for Pokémon. (And Pasolini). Unfortunately, the fragrance named for my favorite childhood media franchise smells like waiting in line for the restroom at a movie theater. Yellow butter substitute and cherry Jolly Ranchers combine in an unexpected accord that approximates pink liquid soap. And any illusion of sterility that triclosan might afford is quickly dispelled by a whiff of some mother’s powdery floral as she whisks her child—who waited 90 minutes for this moment to arrive—into a stall.

While Hinoki, the first of this series, is a pocket-sized cedar forest that grows on demand, Sugi is its lighter, hologram counterpart. This ecosystem apparition is filled with Japanese cedar, as expected, but also pepper, lemon, and iris. Nomads recharging at this node will discover that a clean, delicate powder remains for those who wait.