The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Some With Arrows came out of Poesie's Fantastical Banquet Collection, a literary gamble where Shakespeare becomes a menu. The name lifts from Much Ado About Nothing, that play where Beatrice and Benedick spend the whole first half firing arrows at each other before finally admitting they'd rather be firing something else entirely. Joelle Nealy, who founded Poesie after years in publishing and treats each scent like a short story you can wear, built the fragrance around that energy: the sparring, the sweetness underneath, the moment just before the truce. Released in 2018, it sits in a catalogue of female-coded personas, but like every Poesie release, it's sold ungendered and meant to be borrowed.
What's interesting about this composition is how it refuses the usual gourmand structure. There's no vanilla anchor, no caramel scaffolding holding the sweetness up. The pear does the heavy lifting in two different registers (a green, almost-tart top note and a juicier fruitered heart), while cake and cupcake show up as gestures rather than fully built accords. It's pastry-adjacent without being pastry itself. The violet leaf keeps the greens alive into the middle phase, and lily of the valley adds the cool floral hum that prevents the sugar from tipping into cloying.
The evolution
The first thirty seconds smell like biting into a pear that's been chilled in the fridge, green and wet and a little bit aloof. Almost immediately the cake note arrives, and suddenly you're not at a fruit stand anymore, you're somewhere with a tablecloth and good plates. Mandarin and clementine flicker through the top like someone squeezing citrus over dessert at the last second. Around the fifteen-minute mark the green pear softens into something juicier, almost syrupy, and the lily of the valley opens up, adding that cool soapy sweetness that makes the whole thing feel clean even though it isn't. Violet leaf pulls the green back for one last bow. By the second hour, the cake and cupcake have faded into a soft sweetness that reads more as memory than ingredient, and the musk takes over.
Cultural impact
Some With Arrows belongs to a small wave of indie fragrances that treat pastry notes as a flirtation rather than a commitment. It wears closer to skin than most gourmands, which makes it sit comfortably alongside softer-solids like Solstice Scents Victorian Picnic rather than the louder dessert houses. People who gravitate toward it tend to want sweetness without the sugar-rush, a perfume that suggests dessert without announcing it. Within Poesie's own catalogue, it's one of the brighter, more playful releases, a counterweight to the brand's moodier amber and tea compositions.
