stellamaris

Bittersweet: the scent of forgetfulness, peace, and oblivion. Like asphodel petals on moonlit water. I hate to be the first review of this, but this is just Blergh for me. What ever asphodel is keep it away from me and my home. It is super strong and nasty. It reminds me of a giant white flower super anti hero with a really bad weight to lycra ratio who pounces out at me from the shadows and beats me with a ginormous white plastic flower. yeeech.

A new year’s blessing! Peony, China’s national flower, with bamboo for flexibility, orchid for luxury and elegance, pomelo for luck, plum blossom for perseverance, courage, and hope, tangerine for wealth, lychee for household peace, pine resin for constancy, golden kumquat for prosperity, pussy willow for growth, King mandarin for good fortune, cypress for longevity, and peach fruit to represent the fourth phase of Wu Xing. This year’s Lunar New Year blend also has an extra dollop of wild orange and flaming red dragon’s blood give you fortitude and strength, and, of course, to assist in scaring away the rampaging Nian. I am so happy I pulled the trigger on this little monkey with my Luper order. Wow this is so amazing, and very powerful. It goes through so many phases and is so long lasting, and every phase is so colorful and lovely. On my husband the wet was very citrusy, with seemingly the tangerine being right out front, and the dry down turned immediately into orchid! I love this, still exploring it. At the very end I smell the pine resin.

Because you might want to get a bit of shimmery color over the holiday without risking a moonburn, right? The scent of skin-softening moonscreen: coconut and sugared red patchouli. I expected this one to be super light and summer but was quite pleased to find the patchouli is glorious. This is beautiful.

Golden amber and galbanum with frankincense, myrrh, Balm of Gilead, vanilla-infused sandalwood, sand-smoothed leather, and Ceylon cinnamon. Wow. This is lovely. I thought it would be more aggressive and "resin-y" but it's actually a cuddly beautiful thing. Lovely cozy sandalwood. Beautiful and totally unisex.

Leanan Sidhe is one of my personal favorite although I would say it’s more of a tart floral then a forest scent. There were some awesome Trading Post things, hair oil and room sprays that were so incredibly forest and piney. Pine Forest at Midnight is amazing.

Providing Yule trees for the Miskatonic Valley community since the Year of the Black Goat! Our saplings are imported directly from the Land of Three Suns, and are cultivated organically while strictly observing the blood rites necessary for optimum growth. We have pyre-ready firewood for sale, plus free candy canes and hot cocoa for the kids! We also offer ceremonial flocking! Me first with my pitiful review...okay then! This one surprised me, I hesitated to even try it, I could not figure out what was going on just by sniffing the bottle. But I took the plunge today so here goes! First blast wet is the pine, but not Pine Sol baby, more of a soft sweet Christmas tree pine. Dry though it burns off to amazing, dark, gorgeous round resins. No powder, therefore no amber me thinks... This is fabulous, I think it may be the Yule sleeper hit, lovers of the "darker" BPALs will want this one, but it has the same sweetness of Onduris, without the snow note dominating. I do feel the fire thing, without being over aggressive, and I do smell a sweetness much like the one in July '11? 13, or Black Temple Burlesque Troupe, but this is not "foody" to me, it's more sexy, smoldering, than say, cookies.

A divination blend specially attuned to the Santa Muerte Tarot. Along with every card description, Lo Scarabeos accompanying booklet includes a postscript with additional advice, simple and direct, that each card communicates, drawing from the deep well of ancestral wisdom The advice of the dead. Wisdom dispensed from beyond the grave: black copal, golden chrysanthemums, myrrh, worm-slick soil, and gilded marigolds. This is so beautiful, right out of the mailbox. I think I need back ups. The copal is strong for me, it is sort of incense rich and flowery. Five stars.

[REDACTED] DRAGON Wipe-off marker on white board, 2012 This is [REDACTED]. He is a really, really, REALLY mean dragon. The meanest and greediest. He took the treasure with the gold. Now he's cracking into fire. Raw red ginger, pink pepper, red carnation, sweet clove, vetiver, heartwood cinnamon, and jasmine sambac. [Redacted] Dragon I cannot figure out what it is in the top note of this that makes me go Blergh! Stinky! if anyone can enlighten me? I almost think it's the ginger. But dried down this is amazingly fresh, and lovely. It doesn't smell Whoa Hippies in a Wizard's Store like some DBs (which I happen to love btw) but it smells fresh and airy, the carnation is very strong for me in this. I am glad I got this unsniffed, it's surprisingly Spring-like. I find that what I have tried so far in this series is very wearable, something you want to smell all day.

A COMMENTARY Ripe apricots and neroli-tinged red musk with bergamot, bitter clove, and vetiver. This is really delicious. The vetiver is sort of like an "earthy " or dirt note, but it's tamed by the red musk. The apricot is sharp in the best way. The clove is there but very tempered also. This is fascinating, very different from anything I have but I really like it. Very lush. Not foody.happy to report the vetivert takes a hike pretty quickly, and the apricot remains with a gentle but present red musk. I love the drydown.

Dry patchouli and white sandalwood oozing with lesions of labdanum, wet red cherry, and opoponax. This one is super strange, but some how very wearable. First of all, the oil is a very dark grey. Looks like motor oil. It's heavy and complex, but approachable. I have been wearing this everyday since I got it. That is all.

Ibis and Jacquel was a small, family-owned funeral home: one of the last truly independent funeral homes in the area, or so Mr. Ibis maintained. Most fields of human merchandising value nationwide brand identities, he said. Mr. Ibis spoke in explanations: a gentle, earnest lecturing that put Shadow in mind of a college professor who used to work out at the Muscle Farm and who could not talk, could only discourse, expound, explain. Shadow had figured out within the first few minutes of meeting Mr. Ibis that his expected part in any conversation with the funeral director was to say as little as possible. This, I believe, is because people like to know what they are getting ahead of time. Thus, McDonalds, Wal-Mart, F. W. Woolworth (of blessed memory): store brands maintained and visible across the entire country. Wherever you go, you will get something that is, with small regional variations, the same. In the field of funeral homes, however, things are, perforce, different. You need to feel that you are getting small-town personal service from someone who has a calling to the profession. You want personal attention to you and your loved one in a time of great loss. You wish to know that your grief is happening on a local level, not on a national one. But in all branches of industryand death is an industry, my young friend, make no mistake about thatone makes ones money from operating in bulk, from buying in quantity, from centralizing ones operations. Its not pretty, but its true. Trouble is, no one wants to know that their loved ones are traveling in a cooler-van to some big old converted warehouse where they may have twenty, fifty, a hundred cadavers on the go. No, sir. Folks want to think theyre going to a family concern, somewhere theyll be treated with respect by someone wholl tip his hat to them if he sees them in the street. Mr. Ibis wore a hat. It was a sober brown hat that matched his sober brown blazer and his sober brown face. Small gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. In Shadows memory Mr. Ibis was a short man; whenever he would stand beside him, Shadow would rediscover that Mr. Ibis was well over six feet in height, with a cranelike stoop. Sitting opposite him now, across the shiny red table, Shadow found himself staring into the mans face. So when the big companies come in they buy the name of the company, they pay the funeral directors to stay on, they create the apparency of diversity. But that is merely the tip of the gravestone. In reality, they are as local as Burger King. Now, for our own reasons, we are truly an independent. We do all our own embalming, and its the finest embalming in the country, although nobody knows it but us. We dont do cremations, though. We could make more money if we had our own crematorium, but it goes against what were good at. What my business partner says is, if the Lord gives you a talent or a skill, you have an obligation to use it as best you can. Dont you agree? Sounds good to me, said Shadow. The Lord gave my business partner dominion over the dead, just as he gave me skill with words. Fine things, words. I write books of tales, you know. Nothing literary. Just for my own amusement. Accounts of lives. He paused. By the time Shadow realized that he should have asked if he might be allowed to read one, the moment had passed. Anyway, what we give them here is continuity: theres been an Ibis and Jacquel in business here for almost two hundred years. We werent always funeral directors, though. We used to be morticians, and before that, undertakers. And before that? Well, said Mr. Ibis, smiling just a little smugly, we go back a very long way Egyptian embalming compound: beeswax and fir resin, myrrh, natron salt, cassia, palm wine, lichen, henna, and camphor. This is beautiful, very complex. The beeswax is the most prominent on first spraying , along with a sort of milky cassia thing. This is an intriguing and complex scent but very easy to love

The intoxicating perfume of exotic incenses wafting on warm desert breezes. Arabian spices wind through a blend of warm musk, carnation, red sandalwood and cassia. OK! It took me a couple of days, but I can smell this now. Some days I can't smell certain oils, it's very weierd. I like this gloss. It's very nice and creamy, with a spicy undertone. I like this combined with a lot of my oils, it's not too aggressive.

The perfected winter rose, dew covered and freshly cut. So. I never could wear Rose Red as a perfume oil. There is something in it that mixes with my skin chemistry and turns bad. I lose that sweet rose top note, and am left with despair. I ordered Rose Red HG hoping that the top note would stay, and was not disappointed. I now have the perfect HG for all my rosy needs. Rose Red is beautiful, and very strong. Rose lovers, buy this, hoard it. It is lovely.

Wow this is strong! And I’m happy about that. Beautiful

Pretty! Just got it so it seems very light

Snake Oil, 51, Mad Hatter, The Red Queen, Sheherazade

PLINY’S PHOENIX The phoenix, of which there is only one in the world, is the size of an eagle. It is gold around the neck, its body is purple, and its tail is blue with some rose-colored feathers. It has a feathered crest on its head. No one has ever seen the Phoenix feeding. In Arabia it is sacred to the sun god. It lives 540 years; when it is old it builds a nest from wild cinnamon and frankincense, fills the nest with scents, and lies down on it until it dies. From the bones and marrow of the dead phoenix there grows a sort of maggot, which grows into a bird the size of a chicken. This bird performs funeral rites for its predecessor, then carries the whole nest to the City of the Sun near Panchaia and places it on an altar there. - Pliny, Natural History Wild cinnamon and frankincense. Well, you had me at Wild Cinnamon, but all I can smell right now is the frankincense, which is just fine by me. After snoofing my other Pheonix decants, I know why this was the first must have bottle, this is the clear winner to me. The frankincense is so deep, sometimes I just suck frankincense right up and it's so sad (Midnight Mass, I'm looking at you) but this must be some other super powered one...trying to fight the urge to hoard...

FORGIVE US OUR VIRTUES, FORGIVE US Who has known all the evil before us, Or the tyrannous secrets of time? Though we match not the dead men that bore us At a song, at a kiss, at a crime-- Though the heathen outface and outlive us, And our lives and our longings are twain-- Ah, forgive us our virtues, forgive us, Our Lady of Pain. Pale frankincense, styrax, East African black patchouli, cinnamon leaf, rosewood, and palisander. This is the same frankincense from Midnight Mass, I am actually able, thanks to BPAL, to distinguish between the different ones. This is not the heavy handed frankincense of Penitence, or the rich one in All Souls, but an elegant Midnight Mass one. This is heaven. Frankincense lovers, buy this right now, it's beautiful.

And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense? now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old mans heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.

 Hyper-aware, swirling with delusions: orange blossom, lemon balm, and clove. I love this, its very pretty. The lemon balm is super lemony, a plus for me. Very fresh.

GOLIATH BIRDWING White sage, lemongrass, lemon balm, dusty beige musk, and drops of anise. I have been really impressed with how quickly my orders are getting to me, I had been told that often there is a monumental wait time, but I have not experienced this yet. My Goliath Birdwing landed yesterday. It's quite lemoney and nice, a good change from Lemon Bats as it doesn't have the sweet vanilla note. Don't smell the anise yet, but I have only had it on for about 2 hours. After about an hour it settles down to a medium musk. Wait...maybe that's the anise, I will have to reapply and let it sit.

Have I reviewed this before? Lately this is my favorite DB, it’s sweet in a Snake Oil way. Evocative.

THE WET NURSE AND THE OLD MONK Red sandalwood, peach, white tea, and champaca. Ok this gets my vote for Name Which Inspires Most Horrifying Images... But I had to buy it because it sounded so delicious, and yes, it is. Very fruity and lush at the top, peachy but grounded, I guess that is the red sandalwood, champaca is present in the background but not aggressive. I can't smell the White Tea yet, but I didn't wear it that long. Fresh, lush, not cloying.

This is beautiful! It starts out classic Dead Leaves, then the dry down is sweet violetl

Wow. Being a collector of so many types of Snake Oil, I have to say this is gorgeous. Even fresh it’s rich and thick, maybe my favorite Snake, right up there with Temple Viper

Sweet red wine, blood orange brandy, summer honey, white figs, black grapes, Marasca cherries, and a twist of plasma. In the bottle this smells very much like wine, sort of like the red wine in Obsidian Widow, but on the skin the sweetness of everything else blooms. I love this one.