greylen
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With this baby coming back (squeee!) I decided to help beef up its review page. I remember when this was released as Banshee Beat and the ill-prepared retail outlet that was selling it and all of the ridiculous chaos that ensued. I think I had a bottle from that release but had to go apeshit on ebay for it and I believe I've actually used it up. Most of what I currently have was from the Lab rereleases and of course I got some from the most recent rerelease. Patchouli and vanilla are among my favorite notes on the whole so I knew it would be a winner. Dare I call RR Snake Oil's hippie cousin? I think I do. It blooms so gloriously on my skin in the same way as Snake Oil. The 2025 Lab-fresh RR definitely has more of a "green" scent poking through the heavy patch and vanilla, but not cannabis-y at least to my nose and my stoner ass knows what weed smells like LOL. Some other scents that have a cannabis note (Hippie Ghost, some of the previous 420 offerings) it is VERY true, like almost toooo good. But this is HEMP like the way hemp rope smells, none of the skunkiness. The Body Shop's hemp line has this patchouli-ish but also fresh/green vibe and fresh RR reminds me of that (but much more nuanced), because the vanilla hasn't gotten dank and syrupy and deepened from aging. I own several bottles of BB and RR (not as many as our 27 bottle gal!) as well as the RR hair gloss and atmo and bath oil. I think I love it just a little. It has sillage like whoa and lasts on the skin forever, so bear that in mind if you're trying to go for low-fragrance, this ain't your best choice!
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I don't know how they get the luminescent warmth feeling into the blend, but Beth does it! I can literally smell the warmth.......... like, being a scent freak ever since I was little I used to dribble whatever perfume oil or essential I could find onto my light bulbs in the lamps in my room, which is a fire hazard, but I wanted the smelllllllll and hadn't discovered the myriad ways to scent a room and/or couldn't afford them or wasn't allowed to have them but this has that quality of... brightness. It's a big pop of citrus up front with this and then it calms down and lets the resins bloom. It has such a luminous quality that says SOLSTICE to me. Not your typical heavy sticky smoky church incense scent (you want Midnight Mass for that). If I didn't know this was a Yule, I would say it was a spring/summer scent. Bought from the Lab, likely keeping.
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Holy balls. TALs are under-reviewed as a rule so I'm going to try to review them, even if I honestly forgot what some are used for and need to look it up. This I have just gotten recently and needed a bit of a bump to get shit done so I tried it... Scent: It smells like a fizzy lifting drink--- ginger, citrus, sassafras, very rooty and quite strong , and I feel like it's a mana potion that you drink in a game out of a pretty little glowing bottle -- DO NOT DRINK THE BPAL!!!!---- but it smells drinkable and you may be able to make a cocktail or mocktail using some of these flavors, who knows. Also I had a bit of LUSH's Dirty body spray on and the two kinda play well together. Smells masculine and the Dirty bumped that up. Magickal effects/method: I wore this on my skin and it helped almost immediately. It helped me have the clarity to complete what I needed to do. I don't feel like it's made me jittery or anything like the psychic equivalent of a Red Bull. I think overuse of it might do that to someone though. Bought right from the Lab. Definite keeper.
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Whoooaaaa that's CARAMELLLLL. Nice quality pralines (but I don't smell pecans, so like the mixture before you add the nuts), caramelized sugar and then the perfumey amber comes out--- I always experience golden amber as syrupy, sticky, and rich anyway. The amber mixes with the praline and codes as a really strong vanilla like the most succulent high quality buttery vanilla caramel candies. I don't smell much patchouli but maybe it gives it that chewy dark note like the way it acts in Banshee Beat, giving it an almost chocolatey feel. I purchased this bottle from the Lab and I'm likely going to sell it. I do love a good golden amber but there are other amber blends without quite as much caramel-ness that I prefer.
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Wow. This smells DELICIOUS to eat. I get a salty yeasty tang in the bottle and the herbaceous notes come rolling up behind. It's even giving me the nose-tickle like when you smell a chunk of steaming hot fresh bread that you savagely ripped off the loaf and slathered in butter which is now dripping off your bread. On the skin the lavender and rosemary come forward quite a bit. On the drydown it goes back to a buttery-yeasty-salty place that I'm not hugely fond of. Butter/cream/milk notes aren't great on me generally, though there are exceptions. I'm also a bona fide Lavender Slut which is why I grabbed so many from this line. Beth is a wizard. I want to eat this so much that I went to a local bakery that has Lavender Rosemary bread (not a baguette tho) and bought some to slather in Irish butter and devour. Nom nom nom. However, I'm okay not smelling like it. I purchased this direct from the Lab. I'm likely putting it up for sale.
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This is gorgeous and has only gotten better with age. I love cherry flavored stuff as well as scented, but too much can be reminiscent of a particular type of public restroom air freshener. Bleh. This blend doesn't do that. It's red jammy cherries and the spun sugar kinda steers it into Mr. Sketch marker territory initially but the incense makes it more headshoppy with a hint of sweetness in the background on the drydown. I bought this from the Lab when it came out and have several bottles.
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I had waffled on this scent for years since it came out, liking it when smelled at an MnS or Will Call (sigh... memories), but not enough to own it. When the scents related to That Guy's work were being discontinued, I picked up a few backups of other scents I liked, and took a chance with Bast. On my skin, it's all honeyed and powdery, not giving much of the amber or vanilla, two of my fave notes, and they're kinda hiding in this blend on my skin. This was a 2024 bottle, so it's relatively "young" and smells like a nice skin scent but nothing super unique. Honey (and cocoa/chocolate) are iffy for me and can go musty. They don't here. It's pretty but there are much much deeper scents with more sillage that I like better in this eastern-spicy-incensey kinda vein, like Scheherezade, but my bottle of that is verrrrry old so maybe this will get better with age and. Glad I took a chance. I bought a bottle from the Lab. Currently I plan to let it age because I think that will help it.
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I love lavender and lemon and Happy Baby In A Long Dress is a hot weather favorite. I haven't smelled HB in awhile to compare here but I'm sure I'll get to it. I'm going through my whole collection to do reviews because I'm bored and underemployed. Anyway LLB starts out a sweeeeet lemon with a little bit of the pastry note and something herbaceous going on in the bottle, but on my skin it goes to a clean soft lemon with a bit of powderiness, maybe that's the lavender influence? Not super lavendery in the drydown. I also love to eat lemon bars and lemon lavender flavored things. I need to try and make this. I find Ina Garten's lemon bar recipe to be the best. Blind bought a bottle, planning to keep it.
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I love Snake Oil, but some variants are hit or miss for me. This is a HIT and just keeps getting better with age. It's got a gourmand pastry note but it doesn't go cloyingly buttery for me. This makes Snake Oil smell.......... edible. One year for my birthday I wanted a Snake Oil cake and didn't really have much to go on to craft such a thing except it needed lots of high quality vanilla. A person who had professional baking experience helped make a recipe which is....somewhere, but this kind of reminds me of that. It was delicious!
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For the Yule bottle variety: Soft candyish lavender comes through with an almost condensed-milk like scent that burns off thankfully for me, which is not unusual bc I think that's what you use in making this? Then it's not suntan lotion coconut, but like burying your face in a bag of sweetened shredded coconut. The coconut kind of elbows its way to the front on my skin and its almost too sweet for my taste and bordering on buttery on the drydown, but it's growing on me. For the Black Friday GWP imp variety: I think maybe a different lavender is used here? The lavender is a lot more forward and it's way less sweet. I kinda like this better than the bottle, but honestly not feeling the need to hunt it down at this time. There are so many lavenders from the Lab that I love already.
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Ohhhhh this is complex and pretty. I think this is what I wanted Hexxenacht to be but something in that doesn't agree with me, perhaps too much of the "burned" campfirey smell, whereas this has more of the incensey goodness and the glowing skin musk and yes, it evokes flame to me but not as the central focus of the scent. I am a complete slut for amber and it grounds the scent beautifully.
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As a non bearded person with a rather tenuous relationship with facial hair (PCOS), it's weird that I would buy beard oil for myself, but I could not resist these two scents! I used them as a light hair oil and a light body oil. The dropper top dispenses the perfect amount for short hair, but needs to be worked in with your hands as opposed to the hair gloss sprayer. I like the beard oil formula and regrettably wasted a bottle of Dorian beard oil on an ex. As to the scents, I bought Masala Chai and Vanilla Cardamom. I thought they might be redundant, but hey, it's BPAL, not the worst thing to get stuck with. This review is for Masala Chai: Oh my fuck this is delicious. This is a spicy, rich, deep cup of tea with no milk. The jaggery (brown sugar) gave me pause in the description bc I don't do well with the molasses/caramel end of the gourmands, but it just serves here to deepen the sweetness. This oil would make a great base to layer on something like Bengal. It just makes you smell warm and spicy.
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This is all strawberry Starburst or pink Quik or even Hershey Strawberry syrup. Lots of very sweet pink strawberry-ness with a touch of the greenness of strawberry tops, not as much of the marshmallow notes that I love, but the gross things that milk/cream can do on my skin aren't there either. It's a fun scent but I feel very similar to other pink moons, strawberry moons, etc and I will likely end up death-matching it against those blends.
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I'm leaning into cherry recently. I've always loved to eat cherries of all kinds but fruits are hit or miss notes for me in perfume. I know Dragons Milk lists no cherry but I love the cherryesque honeyed sweetness of it and also loving the Cherry Incense Luper scent (hey, I should review that!) and Fairy Lobster Foam starts with a big blast of that screamy delicious maraschino cherry. I also get the condensed milk in the can smell at first when I open FLF but it calms down into powdery soft vanillic marshmallow that I smell in TKO and the rare AF Marshmallow Poof. The milkish smell is popping up here and there and it's not a note that I love so much. I'm sure it will settle, but this is a like, especially around my one lover who favors cherry scents, but not a hoardable love. Cherry Red and Cherry Incense are absent of the milky-syrupy note so I favor those.
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I'm not a prototype chaser generally. They feel "incomplete" largely to me as they are by their very nature, but sometimes it's fun to experience the BPAL creative process this way by getting to smell a "rough draft". I wasn't able to get this when it came up but it came up on FB for sale so I nabbed it. I am a slut for lavender especially with vanilla so I was all about this. I would eat this. I want to make lavender buttercream frosting now. It's not as foody as TKO. I find TKO to be poofy lav vanilla with a bunch of marshmallow, which this blend lacks. Lavender Buttercream starts herbal, goes through a little powdery phase before the vanilla buttercream shows up to smooth it all out. I can see how this was going to be a Lilith, especially when they were younger, the scents were very simple and childlike, but their love of lavender has continued. Is this something super unique and special that you should sell your soul for and chase down? Not in my opinion. Is it nice? Yes! It will stay happily in my sleepy lavender subcollection of bottles near my bed, I sleep with a CPAP so I can't really smell while drifting off, but I try to make it a habit to dab some on and/or scent my pillows and stuffies to calm my brain for sleep. Doesn't always work, but smells great!