KindKit

2012 version. In the vial: pine! Wet on my wrist, there's a strong pine, bitter black pitch, and sharp clove. The clove quickly becomes dominant and stays that way. I do like it though. It's got the dark, bleak quality I was hoping for from Talvikuu and didn't get.

In the bottle I get a nice cologne-y combination of musk and lime. Once it's on my skin it becomes much rounder and more complex, changing a lot through the drydown: mostly musk at first, with sharpness from the lime, a hint of sweetness from the lilac, and the tobacco leaf giving a gentle woodsy depth. As it dries, there's a stage where it's mostly the lime/lilac combination that I adore in Whitechapel, but tamed a bit, less spiky. The scent does go through a powdery stage, but it's brief on me. After a few hours the lime fades, which saddens me a bit, but I'm left with a nice combination of musk, tobacco leaf, and the rosemary that finally emerges, plus a faint hint of lilac. I really love this one. It's old-fashioned masculinity of the best kind, and, yes, gentlemanly. I wish I'd bought a bottle.

My first impression was that this would be way too sweet for me, but despite its dominant honey note, I really love Anubis. The myrrh keeps the sweetness from becoming cloying and the herbs add some roundness and nuance. I want to get a bottle of this at some point.

2012 version. I liked this a lot at first: there's cool northern pine and spicy woodiness from the birch. Unfortunately as it dries the pine disappears and the birch note becomes increasingly sweet. I wanted more coldness and airiness from this scent and it's just not there, at least not on me.

I didn't get pine (or mint, or cocoa) at all from this, just a rather muted incense-y smell. I wonder if I received the wrong decant, actually.

I got Baba Yaga as a frimp from the lab and finally got around to trying it. It reminded me a little bit of Season of the Inundation--they have an earthiness in common--but while I like SotI a lot, Baba Yaga doesn't work for me. There's the earth/dirt note, and then some herbs, with a hint of floral sweetness and feral patchouli, but somehow to me it smells a bit flat and off. The different notes don't quite harmonize, at least not on me.

Oh, the LIME, the beautiful beautiful lime. I adore the immediate hit of lime on first applying it, with just the slight lilac sweetness underneath. It does go through a brief furniture-polish phase on me, perhaps because of the citron, but that passes quickly and it's back to lime and the emerging lilac. I was nervous of the lilac, but it's not overpowering or too feminine for my taste, and it works beautifully with that lime top note. The first time I wore this I didn't put enough on and was disappointed when it seemed to fade away after about ten minutes. Now I know to slather this one; it lasts better that way. I need a bottle of this, because it's been a struggle not to wear it every single day and deplete my imp.

I opened the imp with high hopes, but was immediately put off by how overwhelmingly floral it was. It's not at all what I'd have expected from the description of the list of notes. (Is it the dragon's blood that's so floral?) Anyway, it had me immediately washing my hands to get the traces of the scent off my fingers. Not for me, although people less floral-phobic than me might like it.

Czernobog has a couple of notes that I really love, myrrh and vetiver, but somehow it doesn't quite work for me. It starts out nice, with some pine and a hint of vetiver mellowed by the myrrh, but it soon becomes muddled, indistinct, and a bit dank on me. Perhaps it's all the musks? I had hopes for this one but it's not a keeper.

I found this scent gentlemanly and warm, not demonic at all. It's very nice. Wet on my wrists I got a myrrh-like note that I suppose was opoponax, and a slight dry, barely-sweet hint from the neroli. But it's a very blended, discreet scent (not much sillage) whose individual notes don't stand out much, I found. As it dried down it was warm, rich, woodsy/earthy, slightly resinous, with the clove emerging a bit after thirty minutes or so. It began to be a bit powdery after a couple of hours, but then the tonka finally showed and balanced that out. There's nothing about this scent I don't like, but nothing that I desperately love, either.

Initially I got very strong nutmeg from this, which soon developed into a more rounded spiciness and an almost-organic earthiness underneath. I'm not familiar with sassafrass as a note, so I'm assuming it's the spiciness that isn't the nutmeg. There is something of the same spice bouquet that you find in good quality, natural root beer, but without the sweetness. As it dries, the myrrh comes out, bringing a warmth and a resinous, very slightly medicinal quality. The black poppy isn't detectable to me as a separate note, but I guess it contributes to the earthy/organic thing. Overall there's a spicy, faintly smoky complexity to this scent. After a few hours it turns to mostly myrrh, as myrrh blends tend to do on me. I wish it kept the other layers longer, but I like myrrh fine as a lingering base note.

This is a challenging scent at first, because initially there's a very prominent "after the flood" scent of wet earth and crushed, just-starting-to-rot greenery, with the resinous and slightly sweet myrrh note underneath--it's like floodwaters in a temple. But somehow it's not unpleasant, and on me the really strong dirt note backs off a bit after a few minutes to a beautiful earthiness the underlies the myrrh and herbs. After a few hours it's mostly myrrh (a surprisingly sweet myrrh) but that's fine with me as myrrh is one of my favorite notes. This is a complex and really interesting scent, almost like a story in olfactory form, which makes it fascinating to wear.

I got this as an extra in a PiF package, and I approached it with some trepidation because of the dread patchouli. I'm a longstanding patchouli hater--the smell of it has been known to make me nauseated. But I liked Mary Read in the bottle, so I tried it on my skin. And it was gorgeous. It has a lot of the notes I love in Jolly Roger (salt, rum, a hint of leather) but with a bit of spiciness from the sarsparilla and a primal, earthy note that is--you guessed it--the patchouli. I can definitely smell the patchouli in this, but it's used so judiciously and blended so skillfully (perhaps it helps that it's aged patchouli?) that it's really beautiful and I can understand what other people like about it. So, not only did I find a new scent I love, I've also been freed from my absolute terror of patchouli. I'll be more willing from now on to try scents that include it with notes that I like.

2005 version: Lots of lovely spices, especially cinnamon (it's a bit like those cinnamon brooms you see around at Christmas), with some evergreen-ness and a hint of juiciness to give it a "berry" quality. I can see why folks have compared this to Christmas potpourri, but I really like it. Unfortunately it doesn't have a lot of staying power. Within an hour and a half there's nothing left of it but a faint hint of spice. Nice while it lasts, though.

When I first applied this, it seemed hardly there at all, just a hint of rum. In my notes I called it "the amazing disappearing scent." But then a few minutes later it burst into life. Lots of leather, with the rum and tobacco as dark naughty background notes. On me it sort of goes back and forth between the leather and the rum dominating. There's a sweetness to the scent (the tonka and perhaps the chardonnay, the latter of which I never noticed as a distinct note), but it's extremely well moderated by the earthiness of the leather and tobacco and the sharpness of the rum. The rum fades out after a couple of hours, but the leather and tobacco still make for a great scent. I absolutely do not smell the coconut that other people claim to notice in it (thank heavens). In the brief time I've been exploring BPAL I've tried several scents that I like a lot, but this is the first one I would call sexy. And it really is, although in an unexpected way. The leather note isn't whips-and-chains leather to me, it's furniture leather, and the whole scent to me is very "discreet nineteenth-century gentleman's club where gentlemen of a particular persuasion could take their particular friends." It's an odd, old-fashioned, mannered or perhaps constrained sexiness, and I love it.