shayelea

In the bottle: The more I smell it in the bottle, the more I smell lemon. There's leather, of course, but the lemon comes out the most. Maybe a faint whiff of tea in the background. Wet: As soon as I put this on, it reacted with my body chemistry in such a way that it smelled of...well...it was like rancid Irish Spring soap. It made me really nauseous, and I had to wash it off. I bet if I was able to make it to drydown, the tea would come out, but it just wasn't happening for me with this one.

In the bottle: Almonds, overwhelmingly. On second sniff I get lots of spices, too; foody spices and incensey spices. They're almost too much. Maybe a bit of honey or something mellower in the background. Wet: The spices are much mellower, and the almonds aren't so overwhelming. It's more cakey and less like, say, pure almond-flavored syrup you might put in coffee. This is suprisingly light for how rich it smells. Drydown: Huh. This dries down, for me, to a sort of pleasantly spicy "expensive soap" smell, mixed with the smell of tiny baby. Which is nice, since babies smell good and all, but I'm not sure I'd want to wear it as perfume on a regular basis.

In the bottle: At first, all I smell is a kind of nutty sweetness. After a few more sniffs, I was able to pick out some individual notes; definitely the honey, which is the sweetness, something earthy and spicy which I think is the patchouli and the clove, and underneath that a sort of green note that logically must be either the ylang ylang or the fig, since those are what's left, but I don't know that I'd peg it as either of those. Wet: The sweet, nutty scent gets even stronger. I can still tell there's the honey, and the spiciness of the clove, but this is a very well-blended scent. None of the notes stand out all that much. Drydown: This has gone powdery on me, which may be the fig, or it may be the ylang ylang - floral scents tend to do that. I can still smell the honey, and that "green" scent I was getting earlier, which make the powdery note a little less noticeable. A tiny bit of the nuttiness remains. Overall, I think I would rather wear Tiger Lily than this. After three hours: although, several hours in, the fig starts to come out a little more in this, without being overly-powdery, which is the first BPAL scent I've found that achieves this on me. I'll probably keep this one around. After six hours: Dude, it's still there! And now it smells like spicy chocolate. This is definitely an interesting scent - and it keeps changing. Smells warm on me without being overpowering or setting off my allergies. Nice, indeed.

In the bottle: Very, very sweet and sort of hard to describe. It's a nice, rich sweetness though, not at all cloying. Sort of a honey sweetness - I think this smells in the bottle a little bit like what Tiger Lily smells like on drydown for me. Weird. (I kind of got the same thing from La Petit Mort, which is maybe not surprising.) Wet: Not quite so sweet; a little more rich and a bit spicy. I think the amber starts to come out. Drydown: Just a little bit of an incensey-smell, but this is really nice - still nice and sweet, a little bit musky? Not sexy at all, unfortunately, but I just can't stop smelling my wrist. The big bonus of this one is that it never *once* starts to smell powdery. Woo!

In the bottle: Oh, wow. In the bottle I get dry tea and sweetness that isn't cloying, maybe a tiny bit of cream, and it's definitely cut by the pepper and ginger. In the background, I can just smell the linen, like a freshly-laundered line-dried tablecloth draped over the garden table for tea. Wet: Okay, here's the weird part - wet, and well into the drydown, I kept getting this strong, sweet/tart note that I was just sure was lemons and apricot. And no, I wasn't confusing it with March Hare. *g* I've only just now realized that, duh, it's the honey, which is odd but sort of marvelous. I don't much like the taste of honey, so I'm not intimately familiar with its smell, but this is really really nice. Drydown: At first I couldn't smell it at all except when I applied by nose to my wrist, and then all I got was the honey smell. But after about an hour the spicy vanilla and strong tea came out, mixing with the lightness of the honey scent, and the linen's there in the background, keeping everything in order. I love it. This smells so great on me. I usually try things out lightly, just on my wrists, in case they don't work, but after an hour or so I went back and slathered this all over my arms, neck, and chest. Oh my God. Yum.

In the bottle: I really liked this in the bottle, which is funny because I wasn't expecting to. This was an imp to fill up a swap that needed three items minimum. In the bottle I get lots of spices, but primarily cinnamon, under which is a very faint breath of a rich but light flower - which I think is gardenia. I usually find gardenia a little too heavy and powdery, but it's very light here, so that's promising. Wet: Ooh, now the cinnamon really comes out. The flowers I don't smell so much when it's wet. Drydown: The more this dries down, the more the gardenia bursts through, and the more it smells like "fancy bathroom soap." The cinnamon is still going strong, so I'm hoping maybe the gardenia will calm down a little. ...Unfortunately, the more time goes on, the less impact the cinnamon has, and the gardenia goes a little sharp and soapy. It doesn't smell bad on me, but it's not going to be one of my favorites. Rats, I loved this at first. The first one I tried from my new batch. (I'm not seeing hardly anyone mention gardenia - which is funny, because I tweaked to that right away. Maybe it's not gardenia, but just something that smells like it on me? On the other hand, a lot of people are saying they smell amber in here. I don't actually know what amber smells like, but I was hesistant to try it, since resins don't always like me. But nothing about this went fantastically wrong on me, like with some of the scents I've tried, so now I'm excited to try more scents with amber.)

In the bottle: Hm. When I was a kid I had a "perfume-making" set. Of course most of the "oils" that were in the set smelled pretty hideous all around - very soapy, from what I can remember. This, in the bottle, smells exactly like one of those oils, soapy and sharp. It's very strange. Fortunately, it mellowed a lot once I put it on. Wet: I'd never thought of ginger as a soapy scent, but just the other say someone I know said it went soapy on them. And then I put on Kumiho, and immediately the ginger started smelling soapy. Nice soap, though. Like you'd buy at an expensive boutique. Drydown: Still, unfortunately, mostly soapy. The tea comes out just the tiniest bit, but you know what this really smells like on my skin? Lemon verbena. Weird. Overall, it's not a bad scent. It's very fresh (obviously) and smells very expensive. I just don't think it's for me.

In the bottle: when I first opened this, I thought it smelled as unbearably sweet as I found Lady Macbeth, but I think that must have been a little bit of scent transfer or something, because after having my imps separated for a few days, Carnal's true scent came through. I smell a very spicy orange scent, bright and sweet orange mixed with something I would have pegged as clove had I not known it was fig. Wet: at first, the mandarin is foremost, sweet and tart with just a hint of spiciness beneath. This first wet stage is really the only stage where it actually feels "carnal" to me. After a few minutes, the spiciness started to come back out, and I'm still thinking clove rather than fig. But not at all in a Christmas-y type way. It smells rich and sophisticated without being heavy. This would be the perfect autumn scent. Drydown: After about an hour the orange starts to fade, and underneath the clove scent I'm finally getting some fig. Oddly, when I sniff my wrist it does smell a little powdery, which seals it: BPAL's fig turns powdery on me. I'm not going to pout too much, though, because I really only get the powder when I put my nose directly to my wrist. It's much less powdery than, say, Intrigue or Nemesis. I like the wet stage a bit better than the drydown, but I can always reapply. I'd probably want to anyway, because for such a rich scent this is oddly light on me, and is already starting to fade after a few hours.

In the bottle: Sweet, a bit tart, a little bit of a bite. It doesn't really register as pomegranate in the bottle, just super, super SWEET. I was afraid I wouldn't like it, though it wasn't quite as sickly-sweet as I found Lady Macbeth. Wet: Super sweet right at first, though not as much as in the bottle; quickly fades to something approaching a pomegranate with bite (the vodka, I'll assume) and then spends a very weird few minutes smelling like laundry detergent. Woolite, to be precise. Drydown: Ah. Much better. After ten minutes or so the Woolite smell goes away and I smell like one of Illuminations' pomegranate candles, which is actually what I was hoping for because I LOVE that smell. Sweet and rich and like a sugary pomegranate. There's also a hint of the alcoholic bite underneath keeping it fresh, but it doesn't smell boozy. This is a very light scent on me. I think it'll be perfect for summer days, and nights out with the girls when I don't care about what the boys think. *g* Not that it's unattractive, but it doesn't smell "sexy" on me. Just delicious.

In the bottle: Super-sweet fruit. I'm finding that a lot of the fruity BPALs smell "too sweet" for me, in the bottle. I can pick out kiwi and pineapple, and something floral in the background that must be the peony (it doesn't smell like jasmine.) Wet: Almost immediately I can smell the ginger and pink pepper, and the fruits, which aren't quite as sweet. After a few minutes the fruits and pepper fade and the peony and jasmine seem to be the primary notes. On drydown: Still peony/jasmine, but the white tea starts coming out behind it. This is a very relaxing scent, which I think is interesting because I'm not normally a florally person. Either they don't mesh with my skin or they smell fine, they just are very "perfume-y," which I'm not into. But this one smells like it belongs on me. It reminds me of another very familiar scent, but I can't put my finger on what it is. But whatever it is, it has good associations. This isn't my favorite scent by far, but it's very soothing and I'll be keeping it around. EDITED, later: After wearing this awhile (and taking a shower, which amazingly enough did not wash this away completely) I've figured it out - this smells like my grandmother. She wore Estee Lauder's Beautiful, but it had a very particular smell on her that I don't get out of the perfume itself. But Mi-Go smells on me the way that smelled on her. It's so weird - I looked up details on Beautiful and they don't appear to share many of the same notes. This is AMAZING. She's been dead eleven years, and I never thought I'd smell that again. It's actually bringing tears to my eyes!

In the bottle, this smelled like a sort of undefined heavy-perfume scent (rose and patchouli?) with a bit of a bite, which I'm guessing was the ginger. Wet, it stayed pretty true to that, except the bite wasn't really there. On drydown, I'm getting that sour almost-dill-pickle scent like I got from Intrigue, which made me think without checking back that there was some kind of exotic wood in this one. Yep. Cypress. For some reason, on me woods = dill pickle.

A dizzying eddy of four teas brushed with light herbs and a breath of peony. Huh. In the bottle: Hm. Smells sort of fruity-sweet, with a bit of a sharp green scent? It's a pretty, light scent, though I don't smell any tea. Wet: ...and it smells like soap. Sort of like Dial soap. Drydown: Now it smells like Dial soap, and a scent I remember from when I was house-shopping, which I later identified as newly-applied latex paint. SO WEIRD.

Oh. My. GOD. A long time ago, I was first introduced to the wacky ways in which perfume interacted with individual body chemistry by putting on some Tuscany Per Donna which belonged to a friend of my mom's. And it smelled fantastic on me - the friend, who actually sells perfume at a department store, said it smelled better on me than anyone she'd ever experienced. Unfortunately, perfume allergies run in my family, so not only was my mom allergic to it, I became allergic to it as well. I finally figured out that it's usually the alcohol that gets me with perfume, which is why I was so pumped to try various BPAL scents. And Dorian smells on me the way Tuscany Per Donna used to, only better. In the bottle it's a moderately strong musk-and-tea scent, with maybe a whisp of sweetness floating through. Wet, the musk stands out a little more than I'd like, except that it dries down absolutely perfect. (It helps that the musks aren't strong musks - if they were I'd probably be headed right back to allergic reaction.) It's strong, bitter tea tempered with a wonderful vanilla, and mixed with the musk to keep it from smelling foody. And yeah, I can maybe smell a tiny bit of lavender-spiciness in there too, which is probably why it calms me down to wear it to bed. I feel a right idiot - this was a lab freebie, and so far the other scents I actually ordered have been various levels of horrific on my skin. Maybe I should just let the lab pick my scents from now on, eh? *g* This lasts about six hours on me; after that it kind of reverts to a very faint spicy vanilla. But that's not unusual - I've never encountered a scent that lasted all day on me. And for a glorious few hours, it's got PLENTY of throw - I'm sitting here typing and it gives me this wonderful satisfying almost-taste in my mouth. I'm in love.

Gomorrah smelled a bit too strong for my tastes in the bottle - I think I smelled some of the rich fruits (fig, date, etc) but it was very heavy and powdery on my skin. I'm beginning to think maybe it's the fig, which would be just tragic, because I have a fig scent from another perfumer, and it smells delicious on me. There was also an element of something much darker in here - it made me think of patchouli. I don't know if this contains it or not, but patchouli and me don't mix. Sigh.

In the bottle this smelled very lilac-y, which is fine, because I like lilacs. Maybe I should amend this to "spring flowers." *g* Wet, it turned into lilac-and-lemon, which was yummy, but on drydown the lemon disappeared and it was back to lilac. This one smelled good on me, but it wasn't really "me." I suspect I'll keep it around for the dreary midwinter, unless someone wants it in a trade.

Hm. I got nothing sweet or herby or like cola at all out of this. Just a very heavy "perfume" scent that I wasn't able to identify - maybe that's what people are describing as incense, or a very heavy floral? - and then as soon as it started to dry it went powdery, with maybe a little bit of spiciness in the background. This one really didn't work for me, alas. *g*

By far, our most popular scent! Magnetic, mysterious, and exceedingly sexual in nature. A blend of exotic Indonesian oils sugared with vanilla. As soon as I opened the bottle I had a bad feeling that Snake Oil wasn't going to work on me. It smelled too heavy for me. When I put it on, the vanilla came through for a few seconds, but then the spices took over. I do like smelling spicy, but all I got out of this one was a patchouli-type scent, which I just can't handle at all. No vanilla once it started to dry down, which is odd, because vanillas are usually very strong on me. I guess this is what I get for wanting to be one of the popular kids. (Heh.)

I must have the weirdest body chemistry ever. This smelled very green in the bottle, and I could detect a bit of the tea underneath. Wet on my skin, I got a lot of tea, some unindentified green stuff (herbs? moss?) and a sudden burst of yummy fresh-mown grass (without the often-accompanying allergies.) And then as SOON as it started to dry, it went all powder. Heavy, heavy baby powder. POWDER! How disappointing. Teas are usually great on me!

This smelled almost unbearably sweet in the bottle, and stayed that way wet and all the way through dry-down. I finally had to wash it off because I kept getting whiffs of it (it was very strong on me) and I just couldn't take it. I think part of the problem is that it smelled kind of fakey-sweet with a bit of tartness. I don't mind supersweet scents - sugar scents are great on me. But I think the sweet wine was just too sweet. I didn't get any thyme, ever.

In the bottle this smelled sort of sweet with a spicy basenote. I was, appropriately, intrigued by it. It smells a little lighter in the bottle than some of the others that I received with my order. When I put it on, the spicy, woody notes dominated for a minute or two, and then the cocoa and the fig really stood out, with just a hint of those spicier notes in the background. Unfortunately, after about half an hour the cedar was all I could smell from a distance. I had to sniff my wrist to get the cocoa or fig at all, and while I was still very pleased with the scent up close, I wasn't sure about how it smelled so much like a head shop from afar. Now, after about an hour, I'm getting only a very faint scent from afar, and the scent when I sniff my wrist is vacillating somewhere between dry talcum powder and cocoa/fig. Nuts. The cocoa and fig were really lovely. This makes the back of my throat feel dry. Also, why do I think I smell dill pickles in there somewhere?? (That's got to be the sourish cedar smell, I guess.)

This turned instantly soapy on me. A fancy rose-scented soap, like those hard bricks of soap wrapped in gold foil with the rose printed on the wrapper. I smelled like my grandmother's bathroom. When I opened the bottle I thought, "Yep, that's pomegranate and rose, all right." But the rose just took over once I had it on. After an hour or so the soap scent faded and it just smelled rosy - not perfume-rosy, but not fresh-rosy, either. It was too strong for that. Weirdly enough, if I rubbed my wrists together? It smelled like crushed or wilting rose petals. Two to three hours in, I was just beginning to smell some sweet pomegranate behind the rose, when it abruptly faded almost to nothing, except a rosy bit that was pricking my nose, so I washed it off.

This is my first BPAL review - heck, this is my first BPAL scent! Purchased off eBay, just came today. In the bottle: BUTTERSCOTCH. Boy, howdy. After reading the other reviews I can see what people mean when they say they smell mint and sourness (to me it's more like creme fraiche than sour milk) but my first thought is that it smells like spicy butterscotch, with a little bit of some kind of light, desserty spice. Wet: Not so much butterscotch as milk & honey, with some kind of fresh spring flower wafting through. It's just a hint of a gardeny smell, like having tea and biscuits in the garden. However, this also reminds me of coconut suntan oil, but more sophisticated and less sweaty. It leaves a sweet taste in the back of my mouth, like I just finished a butterscotch lifesaver. The milk & honey is all I smell unless I sniff my arm directly. Fortunately, food scents really like me. On drydown: I only put a bit of this on at first, because I can have some pretty severe fragrance allergies. (Being allergic to a perfume you're wearing? Pretty miserable.) It faded really quickly, no florals, the buttercream scent mellowed, and I got a faint astrigency that I think must have been the mint. But it was gone so quickly that I reapplied, a bit heavier. Now it's a soft milk & honey smell, and I'm definitely getting the mint and I still think I smell spring flowers. Maybe lilac?