Empress Dark

I was really looking forward to this, because I am a hopeless Japanophile and anime fiend and I just fell in love with the description. Vial: Citrus. Blegh. It's a really pungent lemon sandwiched between some heavy green notes, with ozone trailing behind it. Wet: Still citrus, but the flowers are making themselves known. The green reminds me of grass, but not in a good way; instead of freshly mown lawn, it's more reminiscent of when our doberman used to eat it and vomit it up in clumps afterward. (For those of you who haven't scrolled downward in disgust, hold on, it improves, I promise.) Drying: This has now become a battle between the orchid and cherry blossom to prove once and for all, who is the seme and who is the uke. (A little pervy-yaoi-fangirl humor for you there) Dried: Okay, this is more like it. No longer a screaming queen, it's toned down into a rather harmonious blend of the two flowers. This is nice. I can work with this. But where's the fruit, dammit? Three hours later: Oh. There it is. In short: I like it enough to use up the imp, but I'm not certain if I want a big bottle; I'll have to test-drive it at work first.

This was an unexpected frimp in an order off Thorne on another board we post at. Warning: Rampant Ren Fest nostalgia lies ahead. Vial: Rose lying under a sharp green scent. Wrist: Green is gone, now it's just ROSE...but not the same "pure rose" oil I'm familiar with, that they dab the leather roses with at the Ren Fest to make them smell like something other than cow hide. This is more of a dried-opening-night-bouquet kind of rose. Drying: Do I detect a faint bubblegummy note? Dried: Okay, this is really interesting. It smells just like the Sunshine bath crystals from the Global Scent Company. I don't know about the other Faires around the country, but Global Scent always sets up shop at the AZ Ren Fest every year, and my first year there I actually bought a vial of those crystals for the express purpose of sniffing them. I had no idea there was any sort of rose element to them--I couldn't describe the smell, I just knew I liked it. So, in essence, it became soap, but that's not a bad thing in my case, because it was a soap attached to a comforting adolescent memory. Jury's still out on a 5ml, though.

I've had Szepasszony on my "potential imps for first order" list and have been debating back-and-forth with myself whether or not to get it. This just convinced me. If I could smell like a song, it would hands down be "Aqua" by Yoko Kanno, from the Arjuna soundtrack (the show's not that great, but the music is damned gorgeous). It's huge and wet and atmospheric, echoing with voices that speak a completely unintelligible tongue (it's actually pure nonsense) but ring true with lust and longing and heartbreak. It makes me think of two desperate lovers going at it on the floor of a house perched over the ocean, with the French doors flung wide open and the sounds of the thrashing sea floating in on a monsoon wind. At midnight. Then again, I'm a BPAL n00b, so maybe there is a scent sort of like that?