maewitch

Ok, I always considered myself a foodie-type person when it comes to perfume, but after trying Fruit Moon I think I have to qualify that by saying I am a bakery-foodie-type. Because pure fruits? Not so much the orgasmic experience I was expecting. Which is not to say that this isn't very nice. It is. This is a super nice fruit salad, more tropical than anything, and though I definately can't pick out too many individual scents. It also fades ridiculously fast and without something more to hold up the array of fruit, it's interesting but not engrossing.

Mmmmm! This is like 13 and Embalming Fluid had babies, minus the respective tea notes. This is just lovely chocolate and citrus and a creamy-sweet under-layer. I don't get fig as such, but there is something fruity in here aside from the citrus. It's very subtle to my nose, however. Absolutely fantastic, I am sooooo happy I got this bottle.

This went from one extreme to another. From the bottle and wet, the spice was ridiculously overwhelming - and smelled like something I'd fry up for dinner. But a couple of minutes in, the spices ran for cover as the honey came raging out. I felt like I'd literally dipped my hand in honey. But now it's balancing out - possibly due to the influence of the skin musk - and becoming a much lighter honey scent, lightly dusted with an indeterminate but very pleasing spice. EDIT: Ok, this is pretty much the dry-down of Honey Moon - that is, honey. ALL honey.

OMG. The coconut...it's...it's...GOOD! I still can't believe this. I'm marking this day on the calender as the day I tried a coconut-heavy scent and it immediately smelled fantastic on me. No plastic, no weirdness - just immediate goodness. This is super-creamy, light, sweet musk.

This one doesn't really work for me. Wet, it has an interesting herbal-almond smell, but as it dries down it starts to reveal this musky-mossy smell that makes me think of my dog after she's rolled around in the grass. It's not precisely unpleasant, but not something I want to smell like. I may keep this for ritual purposes, but I wouldn't wear this as perfume.

This is probably the best rose scent I've tried so far, and one that I could see myself wearing regularly. I don't get the bergamot at all, just the most beautiful rose EVER. Most rose blends seem to sit on top of my skin, but this lovely oil is so creamy that it sinks right in, and my skin just seems to waft this natural rose scent, creamy, sweet and just a little spicy. It is luxurious yet innocent. I love it.

Old-fashioned soap. I wasn't sure what violets smelled like, and now I do - like the sweet perfumed powder one would find in a turn-of-the-century boudoir. Really, this smells...antique, somehow. Pretty enough in it's own way, but not my first reach for perfume. And it's so sweet, I can't even begin to associate this with a feeling of icy-ness or coldness. However - I CAN see this being refreshing, girly and soothing as an oil added to a cool bath in summer.

From the bottle, this was pungent patchouli, and not in a pleasant way. Wet, I got strong spices and a bit of the fruit, and that underlay of patchouli. It seems almost like this is trying to be two different things - fruity-spicy Holiday blend, and dark and earthy sexy blend. After a while the orange starts coming out more, and the disparate halves merge more smoothly. Actually, this is starting to make me think of, don't laugh, Hogfather from the Terry Pratchett books. This is a holiday scent, but back when Holy Day meant ritually stringing up a stand-in for your tribal deity so that everyone would survive the winter. Not entirely unpleasant, but I don't think I see myself wearing this.

Damn you, coconut. Thankfully this doesn't go plastic, but the coconut pretty much tackles all the other notes in the blend and kicks the stuffing out of them. This is coconut, and dust, and something like burnt sugar. It actually smells like The Star minus the lime crossed with the dusty-sweet drydown of Miskatonic University. It's like smelling something sweet and a little dry in the air the day after the carnival leaves, rather than all those foods overwhelming me at once. It's actually very nice.

This was a very generous freebie in a forum buy, and it's a scent I was curious about, but could not see myself really liking. Wet, I got a very strong and bitter herbal note, which I like. This faded, and I started picking up the tobacco, with something more dark brown underneath - almost like dirt, but not quite. Dry, this is tobacco, darkness and something like leather - actually this smells like the best part of Perversion, before the tonka took over. It's very masculine, but not in an off-putting way. I like it well enough on me, I think I might REALLY like the smell on a man.

I think if I lit an incense cone and then dumped a bunch of sugar on it and let it smolder, it would smell something like this - very sweet, smoky and a little burnt. It's not in any way a BAD smell. It's just no, you know...great.

Something about this reminds me of Hex, but only fractionally. I think there must be a note in here that is similar to the damp evergreen fir-ness in Hex, with that underlay of slightly spicy sweetness. All these notes are a mystery to me, so I have no idea WHAT I'm picking up - only that I like it. It doesn't quite smell like perfume, but something experiential and just a touch ritualistic. It has that half-bitter, half-sweet sort of smell that I associate with ritual herbs, both mashed up in a mortar and thrown onto a fire. This is a dry, crackly green with blackened edges and something a little golden running through it. Interesting and a keeper (at least the imp).

This seemed like far too many contrasting scents in one bottle - instead of complexity, I got cacophony. I can pick out the individual notes, especially the plum, the fig and a bit of the gardenia, but all together, this smells like one giant mess on my skin. Swap.

As light and innocent as your first time should have been. The fresh scent of lotus hidden behind lightly scented flowers, amber, and citrus. Is this the lotus I smell, this strange, nose-tickly-sweet floral? If it is, then lotus is on my list of things to avoid. Really, all I can smell is this note, and it is NOT working for me. I can't even pick up anything else in the blend. I don't think this is a bad blend...I think I just don't like what lotus smells like.

The orange blossom dominates for the first half hour, which basically smells like orange flower water on me. Nice, but hardly what I look for in perfume. I'm hoping for some rich deep chocolate to take over soon, but alas, it is not meant to be. The orange fades, the cherry refuses to show up, and the chocolate merely darts and flits around. I wanted the rich, melty luxe chocolate from Bliss, and instead I got musty, forgotten-at-the-back-of-the-goodie-drawer cardboard chocolate. Sadly, to swap.

At first, his smells a little bit like walking into a Lush store...the ylang-ylang and patchouli. Unfortunately, while I like that smell in the store, it's just plain unpleasant on me, and just gets nastier within minutes. Acrid, nose-tickling florals and something like food, only nothing I'd ever eat. This one is up there with Siren as just plain icky on my skin.

The clean, soft, perfect musk is what hits me first, and I am giddy thinking this is IT. And then...that strange...sort of woody...pencil shavings!!! Gah! But that phase passes, though some dry wood remians - sandalwood or cedar, I can't tell. It's a dry, crackling sort of wood, sun-baked and yet rich with oil, and it surprises me that I can wear this. It blends in with the soft musk, and the cool air. It is slow sex in the woods, on a still evening at the end of summer when the ground is still warm but the night air chilling.

No surprise here, my skin takes the honey in the honey mead and runs with it. That is definitely the dominant note in this blend, at least one me, and it sure is a nice one. The buttercream rounds it out beautifully, providing a lush, creamy base and mixing with either the rum or the hazelnuts to suggest something like coffee. This is not particularly boozy, nor is it as foody as I was expecting, which is an odd thing to say considering it smells like honey, cream and coffee. I guess I was just imagining something almost cloying in it's decadence, whereas this is more subtle and refined and incredibly light. It's down to the skin in mere minutes.

This is very...subtle. Innocuous, even. Yet it acquires complexity as it becomes more evocative of particular emotions and associations. I pick up the heliotrope, and some other light florals filling it out, and barely a hint of the pear. All these florals combine to give that freshly-washed-skin-in-the-summer-evening sort of feel. There's something about this that makes me think of summers at the mid-point of high school, when you're still relatively naive, but begining to come into a sexual power. This seems to capture the liminal quality of that age, and the nature of florals - sweet and pretty, yet are, when you come down to it, a plant's sexual organs. I think this is a scent that would be more appropriate to a time in my youth, so depsite the loveliness, I think it's a pass.

This scent is a complete mystery to me. I can honestly say that I've never smelled anything like it. At first sniff it seems almost overwhelmingly masculine...it smells like man, and lightnening, and rain and metal. Yet despite this quality, it's not at all off-putting, but actually comforting. I noramlly run from ozone-type scents, as they go overly masculine and sharp on me. But strangely, this is so much more blatantly manly, yet completely wearable. It does have that balance point between faint sweetness and very clean briskness that I found in Dirty, but much more complex and mutable. This may sound weird, but I think this is something I might wear to bed if I was sleeping alone and feeling a little vulnerable in the house. It's just so evocative of protective and powerful male, that it reaches into some primal part of my brain and soothes the lingering fears. EDIT: And now the fabric softener powdery sweetness. Too bad...off to swap with you!

This does smell a lot like Skadi, but less heavy on the pine and more floral, less icy and more misty. The flowers are very subdued, and I can't quite get a grasp on the rose. It does have that same quality of being both cool and foresty, yet also warm and soft. The pine fades somewhat, and sweetens, with a note in there somewhere that actually makes me drool the more I smell it. Where Skadi was a forest walk in winter, this is a stroll through a glen in the spring. Very beautiful.

So simple, and so good. More apricot jam than fresh apricots, this is rich and sweet, and only very lightly touched by clove, at least until the drydown. This is going into my regular fall rotation, but I think its complementary sweetness and spiciness makes it an appropriate scent for summer and winter as well.

The wet stage is pure cherry liqueur, and I get progressively more patchouli as it dries. I don't really like the middle part, as the combination of the cherry ans the rising incense is cloying yet pungent at the same time. And there is that strong sugared booze note that I get from Juke Joint that I'm not too crazy about. The drydown is nicer, and the cherry has completely faded. This smells very headshop-y on me. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the end product, but I think the mid-stage classifies this as a swap.

Ah, mint...I love you so. Why must you thwart me? About 30 seconds of mint, and then we're all down to a sweet, lime-tinged lavender, which may serve some ritual purpose. And that's all she wrote.

What possessed me to order so many rose scents? Cripes almighty. This is a nice blend, to be sure. The roses smell very realistic to me, and though I don't pick up the cinnamon, that's actually a good thing since it tends to hijack scents. Actually one of the nicer rose blends on my skin, as it blends in instead of hovering on the surface. But I'm just not sure I'm a rose kind of girl. I may keep this one as an anointing oil for ritual purposes, however.