Nia

This sounds great. I'm not preparing a gift, but an introduction to BPAL for an online friend I'll be meeting for the frist time next week. She likes literature a lot and I think I'll show her: For roses: 2,5,7 OR Othello OR Black Rose OR Harlot. For lilies: Black Lily. For floral/amber: Aglaea OR Brisingamen For manly: Valmont OR Casanova. For spice: Al-Shairan OR O. For fresh: Baoban Sith (but Valmont is already a fresh blend) OR Empyreal Mist. For fruity: Bathsheba or Glasgow or Eve. For foody: Eat Me or Vice. I don't think she will be able to smell more than five imps in one day at the most, so selecting from this list is going to be very hard!

This smells like lemon sweets! A friend compared it to a childhood brand of lemon sherbet, The Boy thought it smelled like lemon mousse and I thought it smelled like a lemon cream cake. In spite of all these mentions of sweetness, it's not heavy or cloying at all. It's fresh and absolutely delicious, a "summer scent". It is a mild, but very long-lasting scent. I could sniff it hours and hours later. It is also very uplifting, almost aromatherapeutic, and it cheered me up no end on a long day.

In this complex mix of ingredients, all I feel is a nice floral with a touch of fresh fruit. It is a bit disappointing, as my favourite BPALs are normally fruit-and-flower blends, but here, the fruit ends up eaten whole by the rose. So, after a fun first explosion, it is a rose perfume with a bit of grapefruit waiving a shy hand from behind. The good point is that it is amazingly long-lasting, as I could still detect it after about six hours.

I tried several imps in a row, in the comapny of a skeptical friend who said she's not a fan of strong smells. After two or three, she agreed with me in that Valmont would surely smell this way, and even she liked it. We both felt it was very fresh, a good scent for the summer. To us it smelt unisex rather than man's cologne. It has nothing to do with other "real" men's scents like Casanova, for example.

Similar to Othello in the "spicy roses" department. It is not sweet, and it feels very dense, very "heavy". I can only describe it in comparison with Othello: this one feels less complex. As I already have a handful of spice scents, rose scents, and even in combination, I'm going to swap this in case it finds a more sympathetic owner.

I don't get individual notes; this smells like fresh green things, partly floral and partly herbal. It's really lovely, very clean-smelling, and I don't mean it smells of clean linen. The only problem for me is that it smells a lot like a fresher (greener, more lemony) version of Shattered, which is a little bit sweet and powdery. When I have used both imps more I'll pick a favourite or find more differences, but so far they're like twin sisters.

Wet: lemon. Must be the ginger, as BPAL ginger normally smells just sour to me. After a few minutes: I don't have enough imagination to visualise the linen, but yes, there is vanilla/cream, something very fresh, and ginger. No tea. It is a very original scent, something fresh and good for the summer, and complex at the same time.

On me, cherry scent smells of bitter almond, and I want to smell fruity, not like some almond liqueur. I don't think the cherry screams out so much, and it is the only cherry-based imp I have tried that I haven't had the urge to swap away as fast as possible. This is pleasant, and reminds a lot of a milder, spicier Port Au Prince. It must be the dragon's blood and the clove. I wouldn't buy a bottle, but it could work well on a "I want spices" day, or layered with a gentle floral.

Just a generic floral, and how I hate to use such a vague and negative label. The roses are obvious but there is enough of everything else to avoid the dreaded insecticide/ room freshener effect. The good thing about this one is that it definitely isolates one lilly because most of them go soapy on me. It is good to know that calla lily doesn't. I will only keep it because I only swap away the big soapy / mucky disasters, but this is not a memorable scent at all.

I don't feel the musk at all. Not new, as on me musk tends to become the invisible enhancer of the other smells. The roses are fantastic and the fear of smelling of room freshener is gone after a minute, when it warms up to my skin. I would have never thought that cinnamon and roses made a good combination; there's a hint of vanilla to sweeten and mellow it down. A friend said that Othello could not possibly smell like this, but to me it is a unisex scent, for men and women in a romantic mood and a taste for exotic stuff. A man smelling of this is definitely mysterious and sophisticated. The feel is also very Middle Eastern: this goes straight with Queen, Kali, Wanda and Bathsheba in my mental category of "bellydance class and performance scents".

Yes, I know this is a ritual oil. But the scent is just too off-putting, too distracting. I used it to anoint my mouse, my computer, and my fingertips. I noticed a smell that reminded of a combination of patchouli and honey. I can't concentrate with such a sweet scent, which is a shame. It's just very distracting as I cannot associate anything so sweet with work. To use up the rest of my sample, I created a little ritual that doesn't let me smelling the oil as I work. For about two weeks, I anointed my wrists, some fingers, and my forehead, just before going to bed. Nothing I can detect in it smells relaxing (like lavender or chamomile) but it worked wonderfully in making me feel less stressed, and as the description says, more open to change. I slept better not because I was more relaxed, but because I was boycotting my own self less. Habit, or its powers, made it a comforting part of my bedtime routine. Some of the problems I had last month vanished when I had a more positive attitude. In retrospect, the most noticeable effect of my use of Black Buster was that I had an urge to do things as they needed to be done. It is an anti-procrastination oil. I got another imp on the way from a swap and I'll save it for another "feeling stuck" emergency.

I like anything with honey or with a combination of sweetness and rose for these purposes. So far the list includes: Wanda, Kali, O (aka Ooohh ), Queen. MMmmhhhhh.............

added: Manila = Miranda. Yum.

on the imp: strawberries?? On me: hhmmmm, there's fruit, but not strawberries. The patchouli makes it smell a bit dusty/earthy, just on the brink of what I don't like. The musk, as usual, isn't very noticeable. It's as if the fruit is on one dish of the scale, the patchouli is on the other. And the musk? the musk is the scale. Let's all just hope that the patchouli stays under control.

I have to confess that I have tried this in the hopes of distracting my nose from the complete disaster of Fire of Love. I'm in the proccess of trying out many new imps, and I have noticed that if I hate the first blend in the day, it predisposes me against the rest. The contrary also happens: if the first imp of the day is really nice, I will enjoy more the other imps I try on the same day. I would prabably be more enthusiastic about Bengal if I felt calmer and my nose less filled of Fire of Love, but anyway. The honey is very obvious. The cinnamon, too. cinnamon-pepper-clove-ginger-sweetness only needs one thing to smell like chai, which is tea. So, I smell like honeyed chai, because my brain is filling up for the tea's absence as it has never experienced the above ingredientes without it. I don't detect the musk, but that's normal because all that soft musks do to me is amplifying and harmonising the rest of the ingredients. It's the leader of the orchestra: doesn't make a sound, but the rest would be chaos without him. The only reason why I'm not thinking of getting a bottle is that there is a lot more honey than spice, and I have quite a few honey blends at the moment.

wet: something ugly and medicinal. At first, it smells almost like dirt. The medicinal note seems to be a bit like pine, but since I dislike it so much, it reminds me of my most hated blend, Kathmandu, where the problem is the cedar. The ginger must be what is making me smell of fruit gone bad, but bpal ginger doesn't go normally bad on me. In my family, we make compost out of fruit peeling and other vegetable waste. On me, this smells like mature vegan compost: not like things on the process of getting rotten, but like wet, fertile, sweetish earth. I don't mind that smell in the garden but I don't like it on myself. I can't even give it a chance to see if it waorks the way it is supposed to.

either my sense of smell is broken this morning, or this is mislabelled, as what I smell is a very gentle, pleasant floral. This is like a field of flowers with a very naughty demon lying lazily on them, soaking up the sun! Wet, it smells of jasmine (!), or more precisely of Eos. The musk is very subtle (my skin loves bpal musk, it makes things blend better), and I can detect honey, flowers (must be the lillies), and warm spices. The balance goes more towards the flowers. My skin turns some lillies into soap, so this blend was good in order to isolate calla lily, which isn't doing anything nasty.

I assumed I would not like this. The citrussiness surprises me, and like others, I feel something close to lemongrass. This is mysterious as it is hard to pick up individual notes and it doesn't smell at all the way I expect incense to. I only swap scents that absolutely don't work, and, although I would never wear this as a perfume, I think it would work well as a room scent. It's woodsy and dry, a little bit bitter, with a sweet undertone.

in the imp: Banana. Wet: flowery bananas!! Dry: a very sweet blend with a perfect balance of flower and fruit. This reminds a bit of Lush Miranda soap, although it is even sweeter. The banana is not so prominent and it is hard to pick up any individual notes. A very good thing is that the sweetness calms down after a while. It makes me feel like buying Miranda so I can layer!

A mournful, poignant scent, thick with foreboding. Soft golden amber darkened with a touch of murky black musk. The lovely chai_girl has sent me an imp that looks really old because the label is a completely different style. in the imp: no amber, no musk. Very sweet lemon. Wet: Still a lot like sweet lemon, with something spicy. And that is the way it stays. I don't detect much amber, it's more the musk. It is a bit old-ladyish, though.

I can say little apart from the fact that this reminds me of Ladon, which I prefer. It is very complex, warming, comforting, pleasant. The odd thing is that, because it is warm and with dragon's blood like Ladon, the association of ideas makes me smell apples in this. Apples, chamomile and dragon's blood. mmhhhhhh......

I am wary of this one, as I hated Obatala and I don't normally like coconut as a perfume, but this has enough flowerr in it to make the coconut behave itself and not go rancid or smell like artificially-coconut-flavoured yoghourt. As usual, BPAL musk makes friends with my skin, and if the floral butterflies that twinkle about are orris, I love orris.

Yesp, bubblegum. This smells to me a lot like anything pink Lush has ever done. it layers like nothing with Rock Star soap (vanilla) or with Snow Fairy (bubblegummy, with a hint of musk). It smells exactly like the lab's description says. Even so, it's not overwhelming, as I would have thought of such a sweet scent. I prefer fruit-sweet or honey-sweet, but this would be lovely layered with a unsweetened floral.

in the imp: this certainly smells as if it had a couple hundred ingredients. It's very complex and very flowery. On my skin, it is still just as flowery. The mandarin and the flowers are perfectly interlocked, as if they were plaited together. The pepper is just enough to stop the other notes from being too sweet and too much. I can't really detect the laurel.

A light, pure scent: white musk, green tea, aloe and lemon. Mild. Really mild. Milder than Baobhan sith. So mild it's barely there. Where is the scent everyone raves about? I need to trace a comparison: This: white musk, green tea, aloe and lemon. Baobhan: Grapefruit, white tea, apple blossom and ginger. I detect no musk at all. The grapefruit in Baobhan did a better job than the lemon is doing here. I have two options: applying the whole imp in one go, of swapping away. Let's find a better home for it.