Shollin

First sniff: Pineapple and ginger and grapefruit, immediately – it’s sweet and spicy and tart all at once. It’s a bit of an olfactory assault from the bottle, but a pleasant one. Wearing: Fresh ginger grated over fresh pineapple with an undercurrent of Grand Guignol’s apricot brandy. It’s intense without being loud. I like.

First sniff: Wow, that’s loud. Screamingly neon-bright sweet-tart fruit and rum. Wearing: My nose insists on interpreting this as pina colada even though there’s no coconut in it. It’s the kind of fantastic frozen fruity tropical drink I want right by my lounge chair at the beach.

First sniff: Like sweetpea, gin appears to be a note that messes up any scent it’s in for me. Which makes me sad, because the outer edges of this are beautiful tropical fruits and sweet pineapple, but the gin is really overwhelming. Wearing: Fizzy and fruity and sunny… but yeah, too much gin. Dangit.

First sniff: If I hold the bottle right up to my nose, the gin is pretty much all I smell, with a tiny splash of tropical fruit in the background. From farther away, the blueberry is what wafts. I don’t think I’ve ever had a scent do that before. The second half of my reviews usually starts with Wearing: but this time... Spilled on my desk: Due to my own severe klutziness, I’ve been surrounded in a cloud of this stuff every time I've been at my computer for the past several days. I’ve also been sick for about the same period of time, so I now have a bad association with it and don't want to try it on. It’s headachey-boozey blueberry and it needs to go away.

First sniff: A very manly coconut over warm wood and a waft of bright tartness. Wearing: Musky coconut heaven, and a little bit of lemon.

First sniff: Tropical paradise! Creamy coconut, sweet flowers, bright fruits, soft musk. Absolutely drop-dead gorgeous. Wearing: Huge bright tropical blossoms and just a hint of coconut (weird, because coconut usually stands out on my skin). It starts out very sunny and bright and just shy of being headachey-sweet, and dries into a beautiful creamy soft sweetness. Fantastic.

First sniff: Yellow-green and a bit medicinal. Quiet and reflective, dried flowers and herbs and incense. She’s sad and confused, not angry. Wearing: It’s very soothing, despite the emotional inspiration. Yellow grass and cool evening breeze, a wind-rippled field in the moonlight.

First sniff: A hot, rich, sunshine-bright floral. This tryst is taking place in broad daylight with all the windows flung wide. Wearing: Sun-warmed flowers, sun-warmed sheets, sun-warmed skin, blazing yellow and electric orange and flamboyant and exhilarating.

First sniff: Honey-dipped incense and warm wood. It’s skin-warm and almost spicy in its resinousness (is that a word?). Wearing: The waft is all golden glorious honeyed amber. It’s very reminiscent of a resiny O. Sadly, the resins get louder and louder over time, and turn into the sweet-sharp edge I’m unfortunately very familiar with. I had such high hopes.

Her lover is away on a long journey, and she is pining for him. Sleepless and disconsolate, she counts the days until he returns: blue iris, fennel, dark musk, verbena, and a drop of star anise. First sniff: Bright lemon and licorice over a bed of powdery flowers. I want to drink these flavors in a tea. Wearing: It’s all lemon and powder. Lovely for tea, not so great on my skin.

First sniff: Fresh, soft, airy and slightly powdery flowers. Wearing: Ooh, yay! I always forget how much I like orchid on my skin until it gets there. It’s gone from airy-powdery floral to fruity-creamy floral. The rose is still trying to assert its powdery self, but the other notes are keeping it in check.

First sniff: I adore the phoenix made of snowflakes on the label. The scent in the bottle is very white indeed, and very very sweet. Wearing: A very strong white floral sweetness with a sun-on-snow brilliance. It’s dazzlingly beautiful, but it’s just too much.

First sniff: I blame the wisteria and iris for this, but it just smells like powdery candy. Cold, powdery candy. Like frozen SweetTarts. Wearing: Lime-flavored cotton candy. I can’t figure out why it’s so off-puttingly sweet. After several hours, the candy powder fades, leaving a gorgeous honeysuckle-vanilla warmth. I wish I could get that from the beginning; I don’t think it’s worth wading through all that powder.

First sniff: Frozen green apples. Incredibly tart, incredibly crisp, incredibly cold. Wearing: There’s a hint of warmth and sweetness creeping in, making the apples even more tempting, even more dangerous.

First sniff: A riot of sweet, powdery flowers – rose, violet, jasmine. I suspect this will not go well for me. Wearing: Sweet and floral and very perfumey. It isn’t powdery, which surprises me, but it’s sweet enough to give me a bit of a headache.

First sniff: A very rich, sweet and slightly spicy floral. It’s cozy-warm and velvet-soft. Wearing: Sweet and strong and wild, a passionate woman who knows her own heart and goes her own way.

First sniff: Very dark and menacing, with a lighter splash of stormy-air-ozone-sea-spray in the afterscent. Wearing: Cold and dark and wet. There’s a bit of wood, a bit of moss, a bit of stone, but overwhelmingly it’s just cold and dark and wet and not somewhere I want to be.

First sniff: Spring flowers and greenery plus… soap and incense. Bah! Wearing: It’s just too darn soapy. Sweetpea is usually the culprit when otherwise-good scents turn to soap, but it’s not listed here and I can’t figure out what’s making it not work. Dangit. I can smell enough of the good stuff underneath that I know it would be awesome if it weren’t for the soap.

My original instinct was Stardust too, but I do really like the idea of wearing something appropriate at midnight to get me off to a good start for the year... so I may dig out my bottle of White Light for a clean, calm dose of kicking-out-the-old-crap.

First sniff: Rich, musky cocoa with the vague idea of fruit whispering around the afterscent. It’s endlessly deep, and very intriguing. Wearing: The immediate skin-scent is completely devoid of cocoa; it’s more of a swarthy patchouli muskiness, and on my left wrist there’s still that hint of unspecified fruit. Within a couple of hours, it’s completely gone. It was lovely in the bottle, but it doesn’t stick to me at all.

First sniff: Soft, sweet, ghostly floral, with a little bit of chill in the air. Wearing: OMG JASMINE. Good Lord. It’s very subdued and well-behaved in the bottle, but then it gets on my skin and throws a wild raucous jasmine party and invites all its drunken loud jasmine friends.

DXXXVII First sniff: A vase of fresh flowers sitting on the windowsill of a bakery, so when you lean in to sniff them, you smell soft bright flowers first, surrounded by warm homey baking spices and brown sugar and maybe a little bit of pie-fruit. Wearing: Who put licorice in my vase when I wasn’t looking? The warm bakery spices are still wafting around the edges, but the flowers have turned into a big bouquet of black licorice tied with a red bow. The licorice eventually dries away into a pure bakery-spices scent, but it’s really weird while it’s there. Previously reviewed by wichapi. CMXXXVIII First sniff: A very cold, crisp, dark berry scent. Wearing: Frozen wine grapes. It's pretty, but not a big standout. MXXXV First sniff: A single blossom in a winter garden. Cold air and sweet floral – it smells like a single flower and not a bouquet, but darn if I can figure out which particular flower it is. Wearing: Is it a jasmine variant? It’s not as screamingly sweet as the usual jasmine, but it reminds me of the more-restrained version in The Perfumed Garden. And it’s cold. Winter jasmine. Last reviewed by SueDonym, who sent me this lovely batch of Chaos. MXXXVIII First sniff: Resiny, sharp and dark – I’m betting it’s frankincense, and I’m betting it’ll hate me. Wearing: Sharp-sweet incense with something powdery dusted over. Resins and I do not get along. MCXXXIV First sniff: This one is really spicy and almondy. My decant is a little more than a sniffie (enough for a couple of tests), so there’s not a lot of oil in here, but the scent is really big from just those few drops. Sweet almond and baking spices. Wearing: It’s a very “hot” sweet scent, and I feel like the spices should be leaving red spots on my skin, but fortunately they’re not. Sweet cinnamon, sweet almond, and lots and lots of warmth.

First sniff: I think this is the richest ozoney scent I’ve ever smelled. The stormy-air scent is most prominent, but there’s something warm and golden and metallic underneath it (and it’s definitely a warm metallic, which isn’t something I’m used to either). Truly fascinating. Wearing: It’s a mad scientist’s laboratory, lightning and metal and fire and unidentifiable liquids bubbling away in beakers. It’s weird. And I really, really like it.

First sniff: Ooh, this is very green. Grassy, minty, wet, cool, fresh. This would be spectacularly refreshing on a muggy summer day. Wearing: It’s beautifully leafy-green and cooling, and as it dries there’s a gorgeous hint of green fruit. Very, very nice.

First sniff: In the bottle, it’s an enormous, screamingly red cherry reined in just a bit by deeper notes. Wearing: The waft is all sweet cherry/almond, while the deeper bits, the musk and resins, cling very close to my wrists.