Victory

BPAL leather is a hit-or-miss note on me. It can be fantastic, and it can smell as dry and desiccated as bleached cow skulls in the desert. I was really happy therefore, to find that Sara Pezzini's leather works wonderfully on me, since that's all I smell on my skin. If you've smelled the leather note Villainess uses, it reminded me of that. Honey is my wonder note, fixing everything for me, so I wonder if even though I can't smell it, the honey worked its magic on Sara's leather. As much as I'm delighted that this leather works, and it might be nice to layer with other perfumes, I'm not going to cough up that much money for a single note.

Lady Una to me is a close cousin of Comforting Plush Companion- the honey musk and vanilla are both the stars, which I love. While CPC is very much a cool weather scent because it feels so very warm, LU is the summer cousin. It is cooler, thinner (CPC is really a thick cloud of a scent that wraps you up), and a more vegetal scent. I think that vegetal note is the blackberry leaf, which doesn't smell at all like the berry to me. I don't smell the spices or green tea much. This has been getting good wear in my summer rotation. I find I prefer CPC to LU, but I am glad to have both. At some point I will run out of CPC, and not only will I have my bottle of LU but I can replace it!

Delight is one of those oils I'd think about when I was putting together imp packs and then strike from the list. I have Misgivings about florals, you see- with the capital M. I never think I like them, but then sometimes I'm really surprised by how well some of them work. Unfortunately, Delight is one of those oils that reinforce my mental "do not want" mantra. I find Delight and Hell's Belle to be quite similar not in that they are both screaming florals, even though the florals are different. They are power florals, take no prisoner florals. I think if someone else smelled Delight on me, they would like it, because I haven been complimented on Hell's Belle, but I just can't get it off me fast enough. I could smell the frangipani on the edges of the scent, which actually has a nice sweetness to it aside from the screaming. I had my mother smell it, since I thought it was more of something that she would like, and she thought it smelled old fashioned. So if you like florals who know who they are and don't mind saying so, this might be the blend for you. If you don't, then I'd skip it.

I smelled the cherry blossom only very briefly when I first applied the oil. I haven't smelled that note before, but it was nice and fresh and light. After the first minute or two, it's been all musk all the time. No vanilla at all, sadly, but I think the moss may be bolstering the musk. It's a nice musk, but I'm glad that i doesn't throw because I wonder if it wouldn't be a headache trigger for me. Not what I had been expecting, but perhaps this is what the voyeurs would be smelling- the musk of the two people who were getting busy.

This is a blend I've had my eye on for a long time because I love peach and amber, but never got because vetiver is a much-hated note for me. Many thanks to the lab for the frimp so I get to try it! Freshly on, Marquise de Merteuil is strongly reminiscent of Aglaea, which is a scent I love. It's the peach and amber, which are so good together. As the scent dries, the peach and amber step back a little and the florals and another note become more prominent. I'm not sure what the note is- maybe the galbanum + vetiver? Whatever it is, it smells really substantial. Vetiver usually smells like death to me, as in like a corpse, and while I recognize it here and don't love it, it doesn't smell like that. It's more hm, menacing yes, but more of a threat of death than death itself. The peach/amber flutter over it, trying to hide the vetiver, which is apt to the description. I actually like this a lot more than I thought I would, since the vetiver isn't quite so awful as usual, but I think I prefer Aglaea.

When the oil is first applied, I smell a really round, really deep amber. It's so familiar, but I don't remember where I've smelled it before. I know there's honeysuckle and passion flower, but it seems like there are other floral notes buried deep in the amber. It's deep and rich and hmm, not foody but I understand why it might seem that way to people. As the oil dries, I do pick up the bubblegummy note (what is it?), which happily does go away as the oil continues to dry. The passion flower slides in around the edges of the scent. I think I might like passion flower; it reads to my nose as a subtle, sort of clean and fresh floral note rather than a brassy take-no-prisoners scent. The honeysuckle is really subtle; I don't really notice it. Finally the pink pepper shows up. I hadn't smelled it before, but it is a really spicy, kicky scent. It is supported by the amber with tiny hints of flowers. I liked the amber better when it wasn't in combination with the pink pepper, like it was when the oil was freshly on my skin. It's a great amber. Thanks to the lab for the frimp!

I got a bottle of Obatala at C2E2 and... this is NOT the Obatala I know and love. It's a vaguely floral dark aquatic scent. There is no coconut or milk or shea to be found anywhere, and while regular Obatala lasts a day on me, this barely lasts two hours. I've aged it for two months, and I'll keep doing so but you guys, I hate it. I hate to say it because I love BPAL, but this is awful. ETA: I was RIGHT- that was NOT the Obatala I know. I emailed the lab, and apparently TAL Obatala was blended instead of BPAL Obatala.

Brian made this as a riff off of Ted's Citadel of Awesome room spray, and those of us who attended the C2E2 meet and sniff got samples of the spray. They had a big bag left over, so I am guessing that's how the ebay frimps came about (so I doubt we'll see this officially released, though I am of often wrong!). I sprayed this having read everyone's impressions, and yes, I think there is definitely anise in here. On the very first sniff I smelled wine, very much like that in Wanda, but it dissipates immediately. Then there's a brief flash of greenery, followed by the anise. The anise really really tingles in my nose, even after I've moved away, and it's not nearly so awful as I usually find anise, although it's still not my thing. That's fortunate, since the anise fills the room. I wonder if there's any juniper in here. There's something medicinal, almost mentholic, not exactly minty but maybe in that family. Maybe that's the geranium? I sniffed hard for honey, which is my favorite note by far, and I can get a vague impression of it. I think it's making the anise and medicinal notes more bearable for me, which it has a tendency to do (oh honey, how I love you). It isn't sweet, it's just sort of being a hall monitor and making sure everyone stays in line. I feel really fortunate to have the sample of this, thank you labbies for bringing it to the meet and sniff!

I think my skin must be doing something very strange to the bat, because I don't really smell anything like what everyone else smells. First out, there's an... almost vanilla-like scent, I think. I'm not sure how to describe it. It is foody but almost a baked smell rather than fresh. I almost catch a flicker of melon, but I think that might be me projecting more than anything else. As it dries, there is a very brief flash of almost lemon, before it finally settles into very weak green tea. It isn't sparkly on me at all, it's really flat. Kind of a disappointment.

Wow, Gun Moll must be incredibly tuned to the wearer, because folks have such different experiences from each other, and definitely from me. On me, the gunpowder absolutely explodes. It reminded my mother of Brimstone- that gritty smokiness. Maybe the clove is adding some power to the gunpowder boom. Underneath that (far underneath that) is a very spicy perfume- the tobacco leaf, the clove, and the tarragon. I think there is some amber there maybe, or honeycomb making it round. At the point, Gun Moll makes me think of a moll sitting in a nightclub while her gangster mows rival gangsters down. She's dressed to kill (sorry, I couldn't help it) and the thick smoke clings to her and almost overwhelms her perfume. In the later stages, the gunpowder dies down and the spiciness lifts a bit, and I can smell the skin musk and amber and honeycomb. The skin musk here is total love for me- so often skin musk smells unwashed and gross, but here it's gorgeous. It makes me think of the moll having come home, bathed, and getting ready to entertain her man. I love, love, love this part. I wish it didn't take five hours to get here. I don't ever distinctly smell any fruits or florals. I am hoping that as Gun Moll ages, that last stage will creep forward as the oil mellows, and that the gunpowder settles.

Oh, yum. The strawberry faded pretty quickly on me, leaving the champagne notes, but I love them. They're sweet, sparkly, and so fun. As the blend dries, it gets sweeter. I don't have anything like this in my collection, and it is so fun. I love how sparkly it is.

In the bottle and wet on my skin, this is really creamy with a little vanilla and a little sarsparilla. I was worried about the sarsparilla because I don't like the smell of root beer, normally, but it's good. As it dries, the sarsparilla comes out more, although the cream overtakes it again when it's totally dry. It's really good, and I'm sorry they sold out.

Hunter is golden hides scent to me. The hides note reminds me of Coyote also, which is a very good thing. I didn't smell the clove or sage particularly. In some ways, this is a version of The Lion that I can wear, since the cinnamon in The Lion makes my skin react. The scent makes me think of a lion sunning itself in the bright sunshine of the savanna. I like it.

The Girl is one of those oils I had wanted, talked myself out of, thought about again, talked myself out of, and missed. And it's really nice; I like it. To me, The Girl is a wonderful dense vanilla musk, similar to Inez's, with a limning of silver birch that made me think of the silver lining on a cloud. It's a really neat olfactory effect. Fortunately for me, I have Inez, although that's a very dry, desert-woman-like vanilla musk as opposed to a limned vanilla musk, but I'm not weeping for having missed this.

Harikata is a cool honey scent (rather than a thick honey or a warm honey or a golden honey) backed up by the osmanthus. I suspect that the vanilla flower is contributing to the cool feel and I don't smell either the ginger or the musk, which would have warmed it up. I've discovered I'm not a big fan of osmanthus, unfortunately, and I'd like this better without that note. I'm very glad to have gotten a chance to sniff this though, because I'd always wanted to.

Man with Phallus Head opens with honey, my favorite note. The honey then gives way to.... er, what I would imagine a man with a phallus head would smell like? Really musky, like the phallus head's been trapped in jeans all day. Like, not freshly washed. Um. I think that it's not just the smoky musk creating that impression, the ambergris and sandalwood and tonka are combining to create it. It's a sex smell without necessarily being a sexy smell. Following that, the black currant comes out. It surely does make me think of a phallus. Wow.

This had the potential to go so wrong, and it didn't! Snake Oil is an utter fail on me, so it was with some trepidation that I gave this a try, even though I love honey so very dearly. At first, it's purely O on me, although the honey seemed more sour than it does in O, and it's strong. After a while, it backs off and leaves the Snake Oil, which is muted and not ashy, for once. After that fades, another honey moves forward, one that is sweeter than the first honey and not as strong.

I got to try this at the latest Chicago meet-n-sniff, thanks to whoever brought it! I find Milk Moon '07 to be a really comforting scent and I like to wear it at bedtime, so I was really happy to get to sniff this. At this point, the fruits of '07 have really just added richness to the oil, so I don't smell a tremendous difference between them, although if I had smelled this incarnation when my '07 was fresh it would have been really different. The milk and honey are so comforting and snuggly together. Honey is my favorite note of all time, and the Lab's milk and cream notes are very good on me as well, so together it's amazing. Warm, snuggly, comforting, and wonderful. I love this, and if I didn't have the '07 version I'd want this so very badly.

On my skin, Whoso List to Hunt is the scent equivalent of sitting alone in a broadleaf forest in November. It's brown, brown, brown, and it makes me think of the brown earth with brown leaves lying on the ground and brown tree trunks with naked branches. I think I mostly smell the oak bark and the moss, but if I really concentrate, I can catch a hazy impression of the amber and maybe a tiny, infinitesimal idea of rose. To be fair, maybe other people would smell the rose more strongly on me- I can sometimes smell it clearly, and sometimes rose is in an olfactory blind spot. It's a really striking scent impression, maybe a little drier than I was hoping for, and without the lovely brown musk note the Lab does which I had also hoped for, but I like it. I'd hoped for a forest-y scent, and I got it! I'm not sure I'd wear it enough to justify a bottle, but I think I will keep my imp handy for those days that I want to look toward autumn.

I'd been wanting to try Hellcat since I got into BPAL five years ago, so I finally took the plunge and got an imp. I love honey, rum, buttercream, and almond, so it was a must try, so long as the hazelnut didn't act up. And happily for me, there's no hazelnut. But unfortunately, when the oil is on my skin, there's virtually no scent. In the imp I smell the lovely almond, but on my skin I can only smell what's probably the buttercream with a faint, faint edge of alcohol. I think Hellcat may be a scent-locket scent only because I don't want to give up on it.

I'm not sure what to make of Chaste Moon. When it's wet, I can smell a little rose, a little gardenia perhaps, and a little milk/cream. There is some similarity to the other nocturnal blends of my collection like Blue Moon and especially Nuit- the rose to me smelled very much like the white rose in Nuit. But when it's dry, the scent keeps making me think of lotion and soap. The only other blend that makes me think of soap is Santa Muerte, so this is not at all a common reaction for me, but I do see that some others have had a soap correlation, too. I don't know if oils age out of the "soapiness", but I will have to hope that this one does. And I hope that the creaminess comes more forward, or I'll have to try layering it with Castitas or Love's Philosophy.

Ever since I got into BPAL five years ago I had been meaning to try Regan, so with the price increase looming, I bit the bullet and got an imp. I should have done it five years ago- Regan is wonderful. First the orchid shows up, and it's such a cool note, it's really refreshing. It's sort of like sliding cool flower petals across overheated skin. I did wonder where the vanilla was, and as it dried, the vanilla popped up. The orchid and vanilla twined together to create a very cool vanilla. I have warm vanillas, foody vanillas, I've tried the mineral vanilla of Black Opal, I love them all, but this was really really pretty. As the oil continued to dry, I'd take one breath and smell just orchid, another and smell the vanilla, a third and smell them together. Sometimes I thought I smelled stephanotis- I wasn't previously familiar with either orchid or stephanotis, but there was a faint other floral. Once or twice my mind played a trick on me and I thought I smelled cherry, but I love cherry and vanilla together, so I'm guessing nobody else would smell it. Sometimes I'd get a little annoyed because I'd smell hoping for the orchid + vanilla together and only smell the vanilla, or want orchid and smell both, or want vanilla and smell orchid, but actually I sort of like that about this blend. It's so changing. A lot of times, once the oil settles it's that way for the duration of the oil's life on my skin. But Regan is a tricksy, tricksy oil. I may have to pick myself up a bottle, yes indeed.

Sudha Segara is such a pretty scent, but yes, so very insubstantial. I can hardly ever smell it, although my mother complimented me on it when we were in the car together, so it must have some throw. With that said, in the four and a half years I've had my imp, it's never gotten weaker. It smells like what I'd like my skin to smell like- shining, clean, warm, and glowing. It is milky, and the honey, ginger, and ambrosia notes twine into it beautifully. I want to love it, I want to smell like this, but it is so faint that it makes it hard for me. But it is so pretty.

This is a real head-scratcher for me, because I smell lilac and smooth lavender but they're not listed notes. Can't be the gardenias because that note's always very high-pitched and screeching to me and what I smell is very soft (in feel, not strength) and smooth. The only real experience I have with plumeria is my mother's body lotion but that's got to be what I'm smelling. Plumeria is a tropical scent, which this isn't, so I suspect the pear and other notes are adding their influence to moderate the tone. There isn't any morphing on my skin, which is ok because whatever floral this is, I like it. It's like standing under a lilac bush (or really, I guess a plumeria plant) on a spring/early summer night and just breathing in the perfume. My mother has a bottle that I enjoy using when I visit her, and apparently my skin chemistry does very different things to the oil than hers does- I have not smelled it on her that I recall, so I can't report what the difference is.

Morocco is indeed a dry, desert-like scent. It's in the same sort of family, to me, as Inez and is faintly similar to Western Diamondback. As a comparison, I find Western Diamondback to be bleached skulls deathly dry, and my bottle of Inez makes me think of a vanilla musk perfume worn by a desert-dwelling lady (as opposed to someone else's bottle I sniffed, which was a warm blanket of glorious gold amber, but that's another discussion). I don't really smell the spices separately. As a side note, I think it's amazing how different we perceive the scent "colors". I'd say hands down this is an off-white, so when I see people describing it as red or saffron or pink I think, really? wow. I want to smell it on you and see for myself!