malanna

Midway smells foody in a dusty way. It's funnel cake with a bit of sugar tart and the salt water taffy makes it slightly salty (in minimal amounts; sort of like how a cake has a ton of sugar and a tiny bit of salt). It's pleasant enough, but it's not a scent that's like a perfume. Plus, it fades away really quickly.

I got Harvest Moon 2004 and I was really excited about Harvest Moon 2005, because of added components of apples, pears, and sugar. I actually think I might like Harvest Moon 2004 more, since it seems richer and isn't such a fruity scent. While Harvest Moon 2004 was more about the autumnal leaves, Harvest Moon 2005 seems to be more about the feasting that goes with the harvesting. The wine-soaked apples and pears cast a subtle edge along the florals, with the aloe making this scent a bit cool.

...a singularly chilly, delectably ice-rimmed perfume. Revel in the gelid polar frostiness that is Numb, and forget about the heat for a moment. Baby powder and violets. Numb's overwhelmingly powdery, almost as if bags of violet powder are being dumped over me. I like violet in some cases, mostly when the violets are sweet (e.g. Seraglio), but Numb is just way too powdery and overwhelming.

Freak Show starts out with a little bit of cocoa, pomegranate, fig, and bergamot. However, it soon turns into a fig, pomegranate, incense, and dry cocoa that melds with the incense. The slightly tart incense scent remains the same throughout the time I have Freak Show on.

This is like aged Snake Oil, with the incense and viscous vanilla, but a lot more resinous. I love aged Snake Oil, and I thought I liked this, too. At first sniff, it's so rich and deep and I just love it. However, the resin makes it too rich and it seems too overwhelming for me. It's a great perfume, but it's just too...dense.

This came courtesy of sarahmarie. Thanks, hon. Fée is very wham bam honeydew! An almost sickeningly sweet honeydew. However, after a while, it gets slightly musky in the way that Fae gets musky, a sort of sparkling fruity musk. The vanilla, lychee, peach blossom, and white tea and the honeydew meld together to produce an ethereal confection. The honeydew is there, but just out of reach. Fée is quite lovely for the concept it conveys.

Hellion starts out being all dark musk and scorched sandalwood (seriously, burning rotting wood), so it was a pleasant surprise to sniff it a half hour later and find that the wood was gone. Instead, it smelled like musk, a bit of plum, and a flower that sends you in a haze, like being in a poppy field (or so I imagine that's what happens when you're in a poppy field). It's not my sort of scent, but it's very sexy. It smells like the slinky woman in with the wavy coif that the detective is wary of in a film noir (the woman you see on TV, so she's black and white).

Shollin gave this to me as a snimp (sniffing imp, teehee). Three cheers to Shollin! :D Closet smells like berried bourbon frosting (the type of frosting flavored with fresh berry juice) over yellow cake (y'know, as opposed to white cake). The berries get a bit tarter over time, but after an hour or so, the two components meld, so it's yummy, buttery berry cake! Closet is nice, because it's foody, but the berry keeps it from being truly foody, yet it's not a gourmand-perfume type scent, so it's sort of in between, and I can't quite love it for that. Like everyone else said, it's a light scent and fades pretty quickly. Thanks, Shollin, for giving me the opportunity to try this. I didn't have to panic over the decision of whether or not to get it before it got pulled down.

Opium Poppy starts out smoky and a dark sort of musky, sort of like Haunted, with a bit of animalic musk to it. It's pretty consistent, with it getting a bit muskier after application and mostly smells like panting horse. I guess I can see how an opium house might smell like a panting horse....

I'm not sure I really get brandy from this. I think I get slightly dried apricots. I'm finding I don't like apricot scents, which always end up smelling rancid to me, and this one just smells like (not used) baby diapers. Ah well, I'm glad to have learned something.

Brisingamen starts out bam!amber, but it calms down. I'm not a huge fan of amber, but this reminds me of Haunted. It has a dark sort of muskiness with a hint of spice and the amber doesn't smell very soapy. All things considered, this turned out much better than I thought it would.

Osun smells like the honey straws you can get at farmer's markets. It has more of an edible quality to it than other BPAL honey scents. It does have a floral and green edge to it, too. The scent remains the same for the many, many hours I had on and is mostly a skin scent. I'm not big on honey scents, so I won't be waxing poetic on this. Still, I can see this being the type of scent that makes a significant other nuzzle you, because you smell so sweet and natural.

Gomorrah starts out being pretty woody, like a dry sort of wood, with a hint of currant. Fortunately, the wood goes away a bit over time, and the fig come out, but it's mostly date, currant (adds a bit of tang), and black herbs. It's sort of odd, the wood transforms into its essence, which sort of reminds me of vetiver. It's not vetiver, but it has that sort of feel. It's an interesting scent.

Ah, it smells like Fée, but better, because it's not so strongly cantaloupe nor is it so sickly sweet. In fact, it smells like honeydew and watermelons. After it's dried, it smells like syrupy something with herbs, and looking at the reviews, I would say it's grapes! Grape syrup with a hint of herbs. It's kind of yummy.... ETA: It doesn't last that long--it reaches the faint grape syrup stage about three hours after I applied it.

High John the Conqueror is more pleasant than I'd expected it to be. Fruitier, too. It smells vaguely of grapes with a hint of clean herbals, à la Come to Me. I'm not sure if it works as a voodoo scent, so I may just be passing this on. I'm glad I got to try it, though (thanks to the swapper who included this! even if I can't remember your name ).

I got this scent as a snimp from Shollin. I'm very picky with scents and I didn't actually think this would be a scent I'd like and keep, but I really wanted to try Twenty-One and had it on my wishlist because I desperately wanted to smell martinis in perfume form. Or martinis period. I, not having the one in twenty-one and not fond of drinking, have never had a martini. So I'm super happy to smell this. And since I've never had a martini, I'll just have to take everyone's word that this smells like a martini. It's a nice, clean, crisp scent with a bit of bite. Martinis, yay!

Fae: sweet peach muskiness Desdemona: sometimes, I'm not so big on the bite (especially in the beginning), but it's a nice, somewhat water floral that isn't too floral Bordello: sweet candy (even if it doesn't last long) I have high hopes for the Excolo scents that start with an o.

I tried this at an Austin meet up and rather liked it, so I put it on my wishlist. This is a frimp from the lovely dpoulsen21. Berenice starts out gorgeously. It's all soft and white; it smells like white musk and stargazer lily single note. I say single note, because while I love, love, loved the single note, I haven't been so into the stargazer lily in some BPAL scents. It definitely smelled like Antique Lace without the linen, which for me means that it wasn't sickeningly sweet vanilla, a very good thing. So yes, I really loved this stage. After an hour, the aloe really comes out and only gets stronger over time. It's not bad with the aloe, but I really liked Berenice in the first stage. Ah, well. I'm happy to have gotten the chance to try it. Thanks dpoulsen21!

Urania has a bit of a sharp tang to it at first. It made me go, "Oh, hello, white floral soap--wait, no, high end detergent?" Soap isn't quite so astringent, I think. However, after three hours, it's lost that astringent bit and smells very soft and lovely, sort of a watery floral, which I'm thinking is due to the ozone. There's definitely white musk and Moonflower, but I'm not sure what else is in this scent.

Basically, I ordered this because of the similiarities with Smut I'd heard about. I don't think I'd gotten my Smut order by then, so I didn't know that I wasn't so big on Smut. Basically, this is honey and red musk. I sort of thought there was peanut butter in the beginning, but then again, it might've been the power of suggestion (I really should stop reading reviews before I test scents). It's incredibly strong, perhaps not so much in the throw aspect, but more in the sense that it seems to clog up every one of my scent receptors (or whatever they're called). It's like that feeling you get when you breathe water up your nose before it's gone high enough so it can get down to your lungs; it's just incredibly overwhelming. After a few hours, it smells vaguely of...Snake Oil musk. Now, after six hours, it's finally fadind and is mostly honey with a splash of musk.

My review of Dragon's Hide was lost to the great abyss when the forum went down, but since Dragon's Hide was pretty straightforward and I'm too lazy to go through the whole testing process, I'll try to do a review from memory. Dragon's Hide started out much sweeter than I expected. I had expected the dragon's blood to not be as strong, given the leather component of the scent. However, the leather is just hiding in the background. Even though the leather comes out over time (a slightly smoky leather) and comes to meld together with the dragon's blood, the dragon's blood still remains rather sweet. In this scent, dragon's blood is the note that's immediately apparent when you sniff, and only after processing it a few seconds do you go, "Ah, there's leather." When Dragon's Hide has completely sunk in to your skin and has become a dry scent (after several hours), the leather is more apparent.

13 doesn't quite smell like white chocolate to me. It's almost too perfume smelling to smell like white chocolate. Still, I can pick it up sitting behind everything. I was reading through the Retail Therapy forum, and some people were talking about how some body product smelled like 13--chocolate and oranges. This really confused me, because all I remembered 13 smelling like was perfumed chocolate. However, after testing 13 (Thirteen, for ease of searches) again, there is indeed orange. But not orange like the Cadbury chocolate oranges you can buy at the grocery store. No, this orange is like the zest off of a tangerine: highly fragrant, slightly bitter, and not at all juicy. I think the tangerine zest is partly what makes 13 smell so perfume-like. All in all, the scent is very consistent, strong, and long-lasting. It's just not foody enough!

This smells like driftwood, which, presumably would be the black cypress, oakmoss (lots and lots of oakmoss), with a bit of frankincense. I'm not sure what oude smells like. I know that Holiday Moon had oude in it, and this does not have shades of Holiday moon. All I can say for Danse Macabre is that it smels of a perfume version of rotting log.

Pink Moon starts out smelling sickly sweet on me. If there are strawberries, it's strawberry syrup rather than fresh strawberries. The sweetness of the syrup mingles with the pink florals to form a dense, almost stifling fog of scent. After a while, the fog clears a bit and the syrup evaporates off to just leave honey and the pink florals. Actually, the pink florals basically smell like the lunar blend with a bit of pink sugar. This actually isn't a strong scent and doesn't waft that much.

When I first sniffed this, I was like, yummy coconut wha? However, upon careful sniffing, I could smell the earthiness. Queen of Clubs remains sweetly earthy while the coconuts fades away in the first hour. I think I can pick up some amber, red currant, and vanilla the first few hours. Queen of Clubs just gets earthier with more incense over time. Overall, a nice scent, but...earthy scents really just aren't for me.