calivianya

This is a very clean, fresh scent. I smell mostly lavender and white musk, with ozone and a warm, ripe fruit - the blackcurrant, I'm guessing - in the background. It's prettier than I had thought it would be. This is a keeper.

I agree with the description of this scent as smelling like an ashtray. This just did not work for me at all. I didn't even put it on my skin - the wet smell was too bad.

This is all gorgeous sweet beeswax. It is definitely one of the more interesting perfumes I've smelled from BPAL - you don't really expect perfume to smell like beeswax. This is such a cool company. I can't decide yet if it's a bottle purchase or not since I'm not sure if I'd wear it much - I like my scents to be more noticeable and this is very subtle and light. I might have to buy a bottle just to sniff it over and over again, though. It really is that pretty.

Olive blossom, honey, smoky vanilla, cinnamon, jasmine, sandalwood, and champaca flower. This is a cinnamon floral. At first sniff it reminded me a bit of Sacred Whore of Babylon, in that both of these made me recoil. Defututa is more bearable on my skin than Sacred Whore, but not by much. I washed it off almost immediately.

In the bottle: pure lavender Wet on skin: Initially very sharp lavender, but after a few minutes I get sweet lavender with amber, and a hint of something that reminds me of Door - the nicotiana, I'm sure Drydown: Whoa, what happened? It's gone. I'm sad I sprang for a bottle of this unsniffed. I was absolutely right, it smells PERFECT on me... but I lose it after 15 minutes. I'm so sad about this. Edit: I finally got a clocket, and this is now one of my absolute favorite scents since I can get it to last. It's beautiful.

I'm either going to wear something calming and soothing, like Dorian, or something happy, like Sugar Skull. I have to be at work, and I can just tell that all of the staff scheduled 'til 1 AM instead of 11-11:30 PM are going to be running around and getting in my way while I'm trying to do my job. Not to mention all of the drunk guests I'm going to have to deal with. I am not looking forward to tonight.

I was hoping for a green, herbal sort of honey scent based on other's descriptions, but that's not quite what I'm getting. To me, the greenish notes are not sharp green, but more like warm, wet green. It brings to mind images of wilted plants in summer heat. This one is not for me.

Wet: Gorgeous black tea with a hint of pepper. Drydown: Within 10 minutes the pepper starts to exert itself more. I have discovered I don't really want to smell like pepper and think this would be much better without it. The linen is also coming out more, making this smell very clean. Clean peppery milky tea is not really my thing.

Wet: This is a very high-pitched scent to me. If the darker notes, like the wood and leather, are here, they're playing hide and seek with me. So far, this is just a bright and happy floral/citrus kind of smell. It smells like commercial floral perfume. It reminds me very distinctly of something I've smelled before, but I can't think of what it is. Drydown: More of the same, mostly. The scent is slightly deeper, but not obviously enough for me to figure out which notes are making themselves known. Manhattan and I were not meant to be.

In imp and wet on my skin: Citrus! I'm not sure what's giving me that impression, maybe the combination of the tobacco and woods. I smell citrus that's not quite citrus plus vanilla. It smells very, very clean. I feel like I have smelled orange-scented dish soap that smells a lot like this. Drydown: More of the same. I don't know how my skin chemistry turns this into orange-scented dish soap, but it does. I had such high hopes for this one. I think I'll let it sit a while and try it again in a month or so, just in case.

Velvet smells like straight up cocoa and vanilla in the bottle. Wet on my skin, the sandalwood starts to peek out. As it dries, the sandalwood becomes the most prominent note, though I can still smell the cocoa and vanilla distinctly. I can't pick out the myrrh in this blend. It's pretty, but it's just a touch too foody for my tastes.

Oh, this is delicious. Perversion is a boozy, leathery, gorgeous blend. It's a lot sweeter than I expected, probably from the tonka. It doesn't morph on my skin at all, and it lasts. This is totally a winner, maybe even a new player in my top 10. We'll see.

I was really excited for this blend, so I tried it immediately after getting my freezing cold mail out of the mailbox. In bottle: I could smell Snake Oil plus peppermint. It smelled absolutely delicious. Wet on skin: Wow, this has a lot going on! Once again, I got a Snake Oil sort of vibe from it, and the chocolate peppermint was the second most obvious on my skin. It actually smelled wonderful, not foody at all. The mint added an interesting contrast with its cold to the warmth of the musks/resins. It's very complex; I love it here. Drydown: Oh no. For all its many notes, WILF dries down to pure red musk on me. I can't even express how disappointed I was with this. Snake Oil doesn't do this to me, other red musk blends don't do this to me... save one. I whipped out The Infernal Lover, and that's exactly what this smells like on me when dry. I don't think I particularly amp red musk, or I'd get it more obviously in other blends, so I'm a little bewildered here. I'm hoping that this was a fluke, and that if I give the oil time to sit and roll it around more before I use it next time I'll get more staying power on the other notes. If it stays as is, I'll probably either sell WILF or The Infernal Lover - I love red musk, but I don't really need two blends that are pure red musk on the drydown. Edit: After letting it sit undisturbed a few days, I tried again. The wet stage is very similar, but the drydown changed. Red musk is still the dominant player by a long shot, but this is not single note red musk anymore. I may be keeping it after all.

Hmm, I'm not sure about Opium, but I looked up the notes on Sephora's website: Tangerine, Plum, Cloves, Coriander, Carnation, Lily of the Valley, Rose, Myrrh, Opoponax, Castoreum, Cedarwood, Sandalwood. Based on those notes, I'd say you could try Belle Époque - Sweet opium, Lily of the Valley, vanilla, mandarin and red sandalwood. I imagine the tangerine and mandarin would smell fairly alike, and they share the lily of the valley and sandalwood notes. I'm not sure if this is close or not, but that would be my best guess.

Whoa, this was atrocious on me. I'm not sure what did it - I like red musk, I like pomegranate... maybe it was the tobacco note. Whichever it was, wet on my skin I could smell the red musk and the pomegranate which both smelled wonderful, and something disgustingly spicy in a bad way, not in the red musk way. Maybe red musk just interacts differently with pomegranate or something, but this smelled vile. Oh well, all the better for my wallet.

This scent is absolutely stunning! It is an instant favorite. It smells very rich and juicy - almost apple-y - which was not what I was expecting from the notes. I imagine it's the rooibos making it sweet. Unfortunately, after about ten minutes I had to bury my nose in my arm to smell it at all, and shortly after that it was totally gone. I have never had my skin eat a perfume so fast. How unfortunate. This would have been an instant mad scramble to track down a bottle if it hadn't disappeared so quickly.

This is the most wearable scent with rose and violet that I have come across. Either of those is usually enough to make me turn my nose up at a blend. What I'm picking out the strongest in Libertine is the chamomile, the bergamot, sandalwood, and something else woody - the rosewood I guess - which is a combination I do like. The rose and the violet are both behaving themselves and stick nicely in the background. The rose becomes stronger and stronger as it dries down, until rose is the predominant scent. It's a shame it couldn't have stayed in its original form; I quite liked that, but this rose-heavy blend is too much for me after all.

I'm agreeing with other reviewers that this is very sweet. It definitely surprised me. I'm not nearly good enough at picking out notes to make a decent stab at what's in it, but it smells very floral at first. Maybe a little bit of jasmine? As it dries down more sweetness comes out to complement the florals... but then it turns to powder on me. It is staying very close to my skin and doesn't have a lot of throw.

This is very floral to my nose throughout all stages. I think I amp floral scents in general because I'm not getting the white musk and woods scent that I was hoping for. This smells like a commercial lily-based perfume on me. Oh well.

Patchouli's not my best friend, and honestly, neither is black musk. I'm not sure why I thought this might work on me, but oh well. The black musk is very dominant, and so, this is not a blend for me.

I wore Sugar Skull '07 today. It seemed to fit Christmas well enough, as I associate Christmas with great food and great desserts!

Version: 2007. In the bottle I smell sugary BOOZE like whoa. If I didn't have a bottle, I'd be scratching my head and wondering if this was mislabeled. Wet on my skin, it keeps the strong booze impression, but the sugars and a slight hint of sweet red fruit appear. Once dry, it looses whatever was giving me the impression of booze and is mostly sugars with a hint of sweet fruits underneath. And it lasts, and lasts, and lasts. I'm really glad I bought a bottle off a forumite unsniffed; this really is beautiful and long lasting. It's a winner.

This is a very interesting scent! As other reviewers have said, this is not a sweet vanilla. I don't think I would pick it out as vanilla at all if I wasn't aware of the notes. It is a very green smell, very dusty, and I can smell the leather quite clearly. It smells like old books sitting on grass to me. After about 30 minutes, the green smell becomes much weaker and the leather takes center stage. At this point, I really like this scent, but I think it may be too masculine for my tastes. It is very unique, but I'm not sure it's for me.

Meskhenet is a lot sweeter than I expected. I'm not sure which note brings out this impression in my mind - it may be the hyssop or hibiscus, as I'm not terribly sure of those, but it is pleasantly sweet. The frankincense gives it some spice that keeps it from being entirely sweet and I'm also getting a green smell as well, maybe the river reeds? All I know is that this one is lovely, and I definitely wouldn't mind having a bottle. ...I don't know if this is aging or what, but I'm wondering what the HECK I thought was so good about this. Maybe my skin chemistry has changed. This now smells a little like cleaning products plus pepper; I am very disappointed.

Oh, I love this. Wet, Eshe is very nearly indistinguishable from Nefertiti to my nose, and Nefertiti is a great love of mine, but for the staying power. I'm not surprised - both have white sandalwood, myrrh, and North African herbs/embalming herbs, which I suspect are roughly the same blend. Where this starts to differ from Nefertiti is in the drydown. Nefertiti stays herbal and does not turn floral to my nose, whereas the jasmine begins to show in Eshe after a few minutes. I'm not sure of the smell of orchids or paperwhites, so to me this is purely Nefertiti plus jasmine and I love it. This is a keeper, and maybe a bottle purchase.