kjirstiben

Another scent that I had to test twice before I knew what I thought! My notes from the first trial were: "peppery-smelling upon application. smells... spicy... on. leather, incense, spices. *cola in the bottle (Schwarzer Mond)" Not exactly enlightening, eh? Anyway, the second time around, I got better notes for my review. The Winter of Our Discontent goes on peppery, and stays spicy as it dries, but a leathery-musky scent emerges, too. The spiciness is probably a compound of the bitter clove and nutmeg described. It's definitely a woodsy perfume; woods with spices. Like a lot of wood-note perfumes, this one disappears on me after a fairly short time. I get a lovely mix of scents through the drydown, then an indefinable faint "dustiness" as the only remaining vestiges of the scent after a few hours. Hmmm. I liked this scent, but its disappearing act is a little bit annoying. Perhaps this would work better in a locket? I'll have to try it.

Initially on, I was immediately struck by the ozoney nature of this scent. It was slightly perfumey-sweet, with a certain almost fruity quality to it. For some reason I'm getting the impression of a magazine-fold perfume... As it continues to dry down, this is definitely a magazine-fold perfume on me (generally these give me headaches). I think it's the combination of ozone with "white" scents that is giving me this impression. That's what I got through the rest of the stages of this scent. I'm not terribly fond of it, though it didn't go bad on me--it's just not a combination of scents that I particularly care for. I'm starting to wonder if I have an uneasy relationship with frankincense... Sigh. Not a winner for me.

Le Père Fouettard goes on smelling like buttery, anise cookies. Interestingly, the night before I'd tried this I'd eaten one of these flaky, anise-flavored cookies! Not exactly what I was looking for, however--while I like the smell of baked goods, I'm not too interested in smelling like baked goods. So to my relief, the butter note burns off quickly and leaves behind a pure licorice scent. However, this is REAL licorice, not one of those plasticky things we eat in the U.S. It's not sweet at all, almost bitter in tone. There's a touch of the coal scent coming along with it. Very deep black scent. Quite delightful--though not in a to-be-expected, sweet Christmassy way. Around the three hour mark, the scent goes a little sour on me, but it rebounds shortly, coming back with an atmospheric, subtle anise-sweetness/woody/minerally. A very atmospheric scent. And in the final stages, this goes back to its original anise cookies scent... but not buttery, and this time very, very faint. Fun to see it make a full circle like this! I really love this scent.

A chilly, bright perfume: flurries of virgin snow, crisp winter wind and the faintest breath of night-blooming flowers. I had to test Snow White (2008) twice, because I was so confused by my first test that I wasn't sure what to write down. First on, Snow White smells soft, sweet, and powdery. Like vanilla or marshmallows, a little bit, but something else. It was naggingly familiar--I still can't completely place it but it's probably the coconut smell that other people have talked about. Whatever it is, it's very nice. Fluffy, sweet, and white. Unfortunately, within a half hour, this scent starts turning on me. It turns into something sour and stale and icky. I have this problem with a certain class of sweet scents--anything with sugar listed in the notes, often. Interestingly, the throw on this scent continues to be white, and sweet, and soft--I only get the sour/stale scent when I'm sniffing close to the skin. Sigh. I'm getting a scent locket--Snow White may be my first locket scent, since I love it, but not on my skin!

Kathmandu was a surprise. Initially on, it was all about WOOD! Wood and... eucalyptus? Mint? It was certainly something almost minty, anyway. Saffron? I don't think it usually has that smell... Otherwise, the most distinctive top note is cedar. (which I love--Tombstone is my #1 BPAL) Cedar and woods--the eucalyptus/mint scent goes away pretty quickly and leaves me with a swirl of wood and incense. I like this very much. Unfortunately, this one faded on me very quickly. Where did it go? I've been noticing a slight tendency for wood notes to disappear on me... without any of my long-term amping notes, this one sort of faded into nothingness on my skin. Gorgeous, though, simply gorgeous! I shall certainly be hunting down more scents with these notes.

After having had such wondrously good experiences with anything else I've found that combine honey and wine in the description (Delphi and Mead Moon), I had high hopes for Athens... and I wasn't disappointed. Initially on and in the imp, Athens smells of honeyed wine and some herbs... though the wine here is a touch more red than the wine in Delphi or Mead Moon... As it starts to dry, the scent develops a certain breath of herbs and flowers, even a touch of dustiness to it. It continues to be a honey/herbal, slightly dusty scent... the throw is noticeably boozy from a slightly larger distance. As it dries down, it continues to stay in this family. It eventually becomes a more respectable tart and honeyed scent that one only smells when sniffing close to the skin... I like Athens very much, and it's good to know that I'll have a GC alternative to fall back on when my bottle of Mead Moon runs out!

Now this one was a conundrum. I went into my test of Florence knowing little of how I'd react to iris, and I've had some bad experiences with berries so far, but overall, very good experiences with amber and spices. So this was going to be a wild-card. In the imp and initially on, Florence smells like berries and a low-key floral. However, after a short time on my skin, I start getting a very strange plasticky note emerging. In a half-hour or so, the plastic scent is very pronounced--it's plasticky-powdery and semi-sweet--this is Eau de Barbie Head! It really does smell like a doll's hair. How very odd! (I've heard people talk about this before with other scents--this was my first experience with the doll-head scent.) I'd prepared to write the scent off completely, but a few hours later I re-sniffed, and, lo and behold, the amber had emerged and now all I had left on my arm, amping beautifully, was a sweet, spiced amber. Truly lovely in its end-stages! However... There are many other spiced ambers available that don't start out smelling of Barbie Head, so I will probably be turning to them for my spiced-amber requirements...

Prague is a well-behaved floral on me. Yay! (There haven't been too many of those...) It starts out a sweet, sweet floral, reminiscent of low bushes with bell-shaped flowers that you walk past, sniff the air, and start hunting around to find what's making such a lovely sweet aroma, eventually finding a patch of little bell-shaped flowers in a shady nook that smell like this. It continues to be floral in the drydown... it's strong enough even with the little bit I tried that I suspect it might be too sharp for me if I'd applied any more. As it is, it's very pretty and pleasant. After it dries, Prague is a greener and slightly less overwhelmingly floral scent. It fades pretty quickly, though, and in a matter of a few hours I have what smells like an afterthought of a floral-scented soap on my skin. A good scent, and a well-behaved floral... it might work for other people for whom some of the other floral notes are too sharp.

What a great start! Machu Picchu goes on smelling citrusy-greeny... a rush of lush tropical greenery and some tart, juicy fruits. As it dries down and for the first few hours, this oil remains tart, green, still a little citrusy in tone. Delightful--a fruity scent that isn't so sweet it makes my teeth ache! Over time, the fruit and green scents fade. A few hours in I have a faint "clean fruity" scent a bit like an Herbal Essences shampoo... very nice, but without the brightness of the scent's initial stages. The last stages of this scent are not as pleasant, however. There's a sense that the amber underneath is trying to break through the moist, green notes, and they don't want to give up gracefully--so the two competing fragrances battle eachother for a while, resulting in a sort of plasticky-powdery end stage. So I'm not sure what I think of this scent overall. I really truly loved the initial stages of this oil's fragrance--perhaps as a night-out oil or if I reapplied it a couple times throughout the day, it would work for me!

Hollywood Babylon is a fun, bright, sweet, sparkling scent. Going on, it smells like sweet strawberry bubblegum, but on my skin, it quickly develops a floral note that had me thinking "lotus?" but no, it was the heliotrope. The floral tone tends to amp a bit as the scent is wet, but backs off again during the dry stages--a boon, because this showed some slight tendencies toward being a disturbingly powerful floral-strawberry with possibly some headache-inducing qualities. Over the next couple hours, it turns into a very nice berry-vanilla-amber scent. Pretty, pretty, pretty. (Very girly and pink smelling!) Perhaps a little too frou-frou for me... it feels a bit like slipping on a pair of pink maribou-feathered mules and a feather boa to match, but very appropriate to the theme!

This was one of my first BPAL buys, but I had a hard time remembering what I thought of it in order to write a review of it. At long last, I've tried it on for the purpose of reviewing... Initially on, Scherezade is a whoosh of "New Age Bookstore." It is exactly that spicy, incensey smell that surrounds you in the shop and wafts out of your books that you bought there. I'm not sure what, exactly, the incense-smell is (suspect it is either patchouli or nag champa or some combination of the two), but I recognize it from those stores. As it dries down, the sharpness of the bookstore aroma is rounded out, and the scent fades somewhat. A musky smoothness is now evident, and over time becomes increasingly more evident. After a few hours, this has all but disappeared on me. I get a very faint smooth musky sweetness (I think this is what red musk does on my skin), and little else. It's a nice enough scent, but really nothing outstanding on me. The initial scent is a little too heavily incensey for my taste, and the drydown is so faint as to be barely worth the effort. I suspect this is just an artifact of skin chemistry! However, I now have a good idea of what red musk does for me (not much).

It looks to me like a large number of the people who tried and hated Gelt were more interested in it as a foody, chocolate scent--which it only is at its beginning. I like the amber part of it a LOT better than the chocolate (while I love brownie batter, I'd rather not smell like it for long), which made Gelt work really well for me! It's not a lightweight amber, though--it's amber coming on strong (and sweet, and golden, and delicious). I hope it works for you, too!

Tamora goes on soft, fruity, and milky/creamy. It's sweet, almost a little baby-powdery or plasticky in nature, just at first (though this stage doesn't last for longer than 15 minutes). As it dries down, the peach--and it is definitely peach that I'm smelling here!--asserts itself more and more... becoming almost overwhelmingly a peach-pie scent. But then it starts to soften. After an hour, I'm left with something that reminds me of a peach marshmallow! Something, anyway, that's very sweet; a frothy, light-colored candy scent, with a hint of fruit to it. And an hour after that, the scent has turned into pure amber and vanilla (both scents that I amp--and like very well!). If I sniff hard at my wrist I can almost pick up the aftereffects of the peach, but not quite. Very interesting! What a morpher! I thought for the first half-hour that I wouldn't like it, but its later stages are lovely.

Such a lemony scent... but to me, it doesn't read lemon, but instead pure lemongrass. I keep thinking of Thai food... Yum. But back to the point... Phobos goes on strongly, sharply lemon--lemongrass, actually--in nature. It's so strong that it's almost too sharp at first, but as it dries down it softens. After drydown, it becomes a greenly-lemongrass scent. Still citrussy in nature, but greener, softer, sweeter. Still pure lemongrass. (Still making me think of Thai food.) As I wear it, it continues to get softer and greener in nature. After a few hours, the overtly lemongrass nature of this scent is replaced by the softer lemon verbena note--this is something I can wear instead of looking for something to eat! I like Phobos--it's a very unique scent experience and one of the better citruses, in its long-lastingness, that I've tried to date. (Schrödinger's Cat is another one.)

Wow!!! Gelt went on in a rush of brownies-baking chocolateyness that filled up the room. I was amazed, because so far, all the chocolate scents I've tried are fairly understated and powdery-cocoa in nature. Not so Gelt in its initial stages! After a half hour or so, there's still a sense of chocolate in the throw of the scent, but up close to my wrists what I smell is amber, the purest amber that I've smelled since the solid single-note amber perfume that I bought in my wannabe-goth days in early high school... (back in the early 90s) This is the amber that I fell in love with back then, this is the amber that I've been looking for since then... After a couple hours, the scent is all amber and only amber. I still have a peripheral sense of chocolate, but it's very much a leftover and only faintly registering. The scent, like a good amber, lasts and lasts, only getting sweeter and mellower throughout the day. What a delight! I recommend it highly to amber lovers, and to chocolate lovers (with the caution that the chocolate does get replaced by the amber over time). Mmmm.

Nuclear Winter is minty--but a non-foody minty, if that makes sense--going on. It has a greenness to it that I didn't entirely expect, when I read the description. It was distinctive and sharp enough, for the first few minutes, that I found myself sneezing a few times. It has a touch of an edge, something akin to ozone or eucalyptus. This scent softens over time, while retaining its overall character. After a couple hours, it was still mint and slush and chill, but as it mellowed it took on a more mossy tone. Something that started out sharply blue-green and zingy ended up a dusty silver green, covered with half-melted snow. Nuclear Winter is all about ozone and mint, and it's one of the first mint scents I've tried that remains a mint scent over a day's wearing. It's a bracing scent without being "fresh and green" the way many refreshing scents are.

Hanerot Halalu goes on just like it smells in the bottle--sweet, slightly smoky beeswax. Precisely what you smell in a rolled beeswax candle, it's sweet and a lot like honey without being nearly so sweet as honey scents can be. As it dried down, it went through a slight sour phase (I've been having this trouble with several of the Yules), but pulled through it and returned to a softer version of its initial smoky, waxy, honeyed self. I was surprised at how foody this ended up smelling... it was almost too rich for me. It may be one that I have to put on sparingly. Truly, a beautiful, evocative holiday scent... something warm and cozy and comfortable, like sitting beside a fireplace in days of chill and darkness.

This is the greenest of grassy scents that I've ever tried--and I've been trying for ages to find something that smells as lovely as fresh-cut grass. Grass and leaves, leaves and grass... from when it's first put on to when it fades away, it hardly changes at all, save to become a mellower version of itself. I found myself searching for any other adjectives to put to it than "fresh, green, grassy," and so on. If you like green scents, you'll like A Blade of Grass. I suspect, too, that it would be fun to layer with other simple scents... to give an authentic green note in the background.

In the bottle, Lune Noire is all flowers, and I'm a little worried because a lot of flowers turn into something screaming and unlovely on me. However, when applied (sparingly) to my wrists, while the scent is floral, I can also smell some fruit (the pear) in there as well. I keep catching whiffs of gardenia as this dries down--but not immediately on my wrists. It's as I move my hands that I smell gardenia. My mother always wore gardenia perfume... Over time, this turns into a soft gardenia for me. I'm sure there are other notes in it but on me, it's almost a single-note. I quite like this--one of the first very floral fragrances that I've truly enjoyed!

The Magi went on smelling fizzy, very much like lemon-lime soda. But immediately after that I started to get a disturbing "men's cologne" vibe the likes of which I haven't gotten since I tried Fascinum. As it dried down, I found that though I was still getting "men's cologne" from farther away, up close my wrists smelled nice. Sort of fruity-citrusy, and mellow. Unfortunately, this is just too bright of a scent for me to enjoy. It feels sharp-edged, even after it's been on for hours. Funny, because I thrill to Midnight Mass... I think that the citrusy, fizzy aspect just isn't working for me. Oh well! You win some, you lose some...

Another no-cinnamon Cinnabon scent suggestion: I've worn Tombstone and heard, "Who smells like cinnamon rolls?" from my coworkers... my theory is that the vanilla in it smells just like the vanilla icing on Cinnabon rolls! So, if you're not looking for cinnamon (I've found that cinnamon scents don't stay true on my skin), you might go the vanilla route for a similar type of experience... I wonder what gives the store's scent that non-foody character, though? Perhaps the yeasty bread component? Butter? Has there been a BPAL to capture the smell of fresh-baked bread? Mmmm. That would be good.

You know, I'm wearing Gelt today, and was shocked by how strongly amber it is... For all that it goes on smelling like fudge brownies, once the chocolate burns off (which it does in less than an hour), it's pure amber... amber like the solid single-note perfume that I got long, long ago and loved. Has anyone else tried it?

I thought Troll was going to be scary... in anticipation of being knocked off my feet by a tsunami of vetiver and smoke, I applied this oil with a very sparing hand. I'm glad to say that I needn't have--Troll was delightful and I wished all day that I had more of it on! Initially on, I smell vetiver, spices, and deep evergreens. As it's on it starts to sweeten up to an almost Christmassy scent (like a candle?). Interestingly, something in here almost reminds me of the chloriney smell you get from swimming in a pool. Over time, this turns into spices and greens. Someone who went by and smelled me said it was "pretty" and thought the name was odd for something that girly. (Though at times I turn scents really sweet--that might be what has happened here.) I really like what I get from Troll--it's a sweet, spiced evergreen scent, very much a Christmas with spices in the air and a Douglas Fir in the living room window. I imagine that as the Yule season gets going, I might find some use for this. One note: I found that the skin where I'd applied this burned a teensy bit for the first half-hour or so. I wasn't sure if I was imagining it or not. Not worth missing this delightfulness for, though!

I'd been putting off testing Kubla Khan, because I discovered my rather *ahem* uncomfortable relationship with jasmine after I bought this oil. Sigh. However, when I opened the bottle this morning, the scent I got was... buttery. So on it went. It turned to pure floral when I put it on (very lightly--didn't want to risk being followed around by the florals of doom--and their accompanying headache--all day), and spent the good part of an hour amping in rose/jasmine glee, with a heavy-handed opium harmonic layer. Headache potential here... But it never achieved the Perfect Storm of olfactory pain... shortly after I'd had it on for an hour, I realized that the scent seemed to have resolved itself. I was getting a floral backdrop to a foody sweetness--definitely the dark vanilla mentioned. Interestingly, from time to time, I'd get whiffs of pure opium. The drydown on this is interesting... it's a sweet/musky combination that had me confused, but upon reading through the notes I'm pretty sure I'm getting a vanilla and leather end stage here. Kubla Khan is very nice... exotic, heady, and everything it should be to live up to its eponymous poem. (Is it too nerdy that I want to be like someone in the movie Amadeus and say "Too many notes!"? I find that, as a rule, I tend to prefer the simpler scents where I can really tell what I'm smelling...)

Bess went on strong! It was grapes and mint and lemon times one thousand! After I'd applied it, the scent toned down quickly, though--the grapes became softer and an herbal note, the rosemary, tempered all that sweetness. By about an hour in, Bess was almost all rosemary in scent, all herbal. I actually found myself having a hard time believing there was rose in this--I tend to have a hit-or-miss relationship with rose, but it almost always makes its presence known. Distinctly. Not so here, though. Bess continues to be soft grape-mint-rosemary, a fresh herbal-fruity blend that is not at all strong. If this is what a historical scent is like, I think I like the historical scents! At the end of its scent-journey, there is a breath of roses with some fruit--all of this is a barely-there have-to-sniff-for-it sort of thing, though. Lovely. Very original! And enjoyable to have that kind of connection with the past.