bheansidhe

This is the sweetest and lightest of the dead leaves this year, and is surprisingly lovely. It's like the perfect kid's version of Dead Leaves. This is not a soapy floral violet. This smells like Choward's old-fashioned violet pastille candies, which to me smell like happy road trip memories. After the violet wears off, you're left with a light, simple sugared dried ivy note. I'm still working my way through the Dead Leaves and Blackberries from last year, so I don't need this one, but if you enjoyed that one, DL VC & SC has a similar vibe.

This is an opulent, bitter purple-black blast of the back room at a Goth dance bar. It comes off my skin primarily as incense and dark plum, and less as dead leaves and clove, with a background vibe that reminds me of the commercial Opium perfume. It squirms around a bit to become spicy plum, then plummy oudh, then clove-tinged incense, but never strays far from its basic spike-heeled leather boots and purple velvet dance moves.

It's been so long since I've had candy corn (squished or otherwise) that I don't remember what it smells like. When I was a kid I would smoosh them on my canines like vampire fangs, then spit them out when they started to dissolve. Wet, this smells more buttery and sugary than dead-leavey. I agree there's some wax in there. It morphs dramatically on my skin to somewhat bitter, earthy dead leaves and caramel, with maybe some dry pumpkin spice blend in the background. Edit: dries down to a light, pleasant dead leaves and buttery caramel with low throw.

Golden juicy lychee and peach - the classic "Dragoncon peach" note - over dark wet musks, sharpened by bergamot. On me, this wears like filthy dirty sex with a spray of peach juice.

I absolutely love cedar - They Lie Thus Chambered and Cold to the Moon was a big bottle buy last year - so I was pleased to try this one despite its lengthy list of bad-for-me notes. Sniffed, this reads like one of the more elegant and cerebral Shunga blends. It smells like it should be named The Pale Naked Moon Maiden Scorning The Embraces of the Pepper Demon Askishikawa As They Struggle By Moonlight In a Black Cedar Grove. Like, there is just SO MUCH going on here: big perfumey blasts of white and blue and black musk, the light floral notes, the dark wet tobacco and the dry cracks of pepper. The honeyed orange blossom plays tug-of-war with the black pepper-tobacco, yanking the blend from masculine to feminine and back. Mostly, though, it's blue musk and cedar. "Perfume pencil" kind of nails it. I do love pencil perfumes, but Chambered already fulfills that need, so I don't need a bottle. I'm glad I got to keep an imp, though.

This starts as a blast of big, chewy, in-your-face caramel and sweet pipe tobacco with some spiced cocoa steaming in the background. It softens almost immediately to a dry, sweet burnt sugar-and-caramel dusted with cocoa, plus the mellow blonde tobacco that I associate with the Ares blends (closer the Bulgarian than the French, which smells like ashtray to me). After a while I start to get a black sweetened demitasse coffee note in the background, but at no point does this read as a coffee blend. The caramel-and-tobacco combination reminds me a tiny bit of Red Lantern, but the cocoa and milk chocolate notes stay in the forefront. I also get an on-again, off-again hint of spicy Mexican chocolate. Unlike 99% of the Lab's chocolates, it never goes plastic on me. So if you have that specific problem with blends like Bliss, it might be worth trying Badgered. Mellow, sweet, dry, and only slightly foody.

Full disclosure: I love the actual mint plant, but I dislike* mint flavor or scent mixed with anything else** (the sole exception being Andes chocolate mint wafers). Further disclosure: 99.99% of any "honey" or "beeswax" or "candle" note goes horrifically bad on me, so this skin test is legit Taking One For the Team. Sniffed, this is a 50/50 blend of cool vanilla mint and the same juicy, golden-sweet peach note from some of my favorite past Dragoncon blends. I don't get the minty blast I remember from Lick It; this seems like the softer vanilla mint note of Snowblind. It takes about 20 minutes for the marshmallow to develop. The notes stay pretty true during drydown: candied honey, warm peach, and a touch of after-dinner mint. It has a pretty low throw, and the peach reads almost like a warm skin musk, so this would be a good "up close and personal" kind of scent. It's sweet but not in-your-face foody; you'll smell like hard honey candies, not a walking dessert case. *Mint in coffee is an abomination. **I know mint plus fruit is a thing, but it makes as much sense to my nose as mint plus steak.

A raucous, fiery glitter, all pumpkin orange with glints of vine-green. Swatched at Will Call. Definitely a fiery glitterbomb. Gold, bright orange, and red-orange glitters, accented with tiny pinpoint black and green glitters. I seem to remember a bit of a holo flare; little red holo and gold flecks, maybe? Halloween on a nail! Much brighter and more orange than the photo on the site (on my monitor, anyway). One coat was good but semi-sheer coverage, and two was solid glitter. I'm sure you could do some great layering with it, too.

The combination of the sweet Snake Oil resins and the salty nutty prank base make me think of caramel corn, which makes me think of this blend as a mashup between Snake Oil and Midway. It's been years since I smelled Midway, so I may be off base here, but there's still a jolly dark carnival vibe to the blend. I don't get any aquatics; I do get salt, but it's what I think of as the "dry salt" base of Jolly Roger (and Gingerbread Jolly Roger, one of my favorite blends!). Within the hour, though, this settles down to a lighter, nuttier, but still recognizable Snake Oil, except that Snake in a Can smells gold where straight Snake Oil smells mahogany, if that makes sense.

I love the cucumber and blue musk notes for when I want something springlike or feminine, and the bitter blackcurrant-and-tobacco tar Dead Leaves weenie was a surprise hit, so I took a chance with it. This one wants the heat of your bathwater to bloom, I think. It smells like I'm floating in the inky blue-black waters of a Roman bath in an underground hall. The almond blossom lends a touch of warmth, but it's primarily blue musk balancing the sweet mimosa and the astringent, bitter-juice blackcurrant. Think "sullen, deadly sea siren taking her beauty bath." I may sell a decant out of my bottle because I don't see myself reaching for it often enough to use it all up before the shelf life expires, but it's actually really gorgeous and unlike all of my other bath oils, which lean toward resins and warm notes.

[No additional description given.] Of the five DL blends I tried, this one one smells the most dead-leafy when wet, with a strong, bracingly bitter edge. The leaf-ness of the dark tobacco marries really well with the leaf-ness of the DL note. The blackcurrant is tart and astringent and *just* fruity enough to keep the blend balanced and wearable. This is outdoorsy and cold and wild, not tame and pipe-shop. It takes a softer, more dried-fruit aspect as it wears. I didn't expect to like this one as much as I do. ETA: bought a bottle! That's how much I liked it.

I love Perversion and Wild Men, so maybe we have some skin similarities? Doc Constantine (Sheer musk, cedar smoke, fir needle, chaparral, black amber and leather.) The Black Rider (Black leather, oppoponax, tobacco, and BLACK amber.) Sarah, The Mother Bear (tonka bean, soft brown leather, myrrh, white sage, gurjum balsam, Ceylon cinnamon bark, red sandalwood, sweet tobacco, and a touch of gunsmoke.) Crowley (Infernal musk, red patchouli, lilac cologne, mahogany, lemon rind, oakmoss, leather, and vanilla husk. ) Bread-and-Butterfly (Its wings are thin slices of Bread-and-butter, its body is a crust, and its head is a lump of sugar.') Kali (This perfume is a blend of the sacred blooms of cassia, hibiscus, musk rose, Himalayan wild tulip, lotus and osmanthus swirled with offertory dark chocolate, red wine, tobacco, balsam and honey.) Intrigue (Black palm with cocoa, fig, and shadowy wooded notes.) Ranger (buckskin accord with Terebinth pine, Russian birch, black ironwood, elder bark, hay, armoise, juniper, patchouli, galangal root, Spanish moss, and cabreuva.) Golden Priapus (vanilla and amber with juniper, rosewood and white pine.) LE: Phoenix and Dragon, Lupercalia 2016 (Incense-blackened oudh and bourbon vanilla with tobacco absolute and 9-year aged patchouli.) Dead Leaves and Tobacco (2015) Pan Twardowski and the Devil (2015) (Brown leather, bay leaf, tobacco leaf, lavender, and oudh.)

I love this, actually. Spanish Moss was a favorite note on my skin, while Oakmoss went sour and too masculine. Tomb Moss reads a lot like Spanish Moss with added notes of dry salt, fresh moist dirt, and what I think may (logically) be concrete. Despite the mossiness and saltiness, it's not an "aquatic" on me. It's lighter and sweeter and drier than I picture tomb moss to be. In fact, if you had told me this was really the "dead leaves" note, I'd buy it. This is more like what I expect from a dead leaf accord. Contemplating a bottle! I bet it would layer well.

LURID BONBON Dark chocolate dotted by cacao nibs, laced with black currant, Bulgarian lavender, white musk, and thick resins. Terry Pratchett invented a color called octarine, described as "alive and glowing and vibrant, and incidentally a kind of greenish purple." So, if this analogy helps at all, Lurid Bonbon smells like octarine dark chocolate to my nose. Chocolate itself is warm and fuzzy and matte, while lavender and currant and white musk are sharp and scintillating, so you would logically expect this combination to fight itself, but it doesn't at all. The resins marry the two poles beautifully. The chocolate component is dark, and has the same feel as the chocolate in Chocolate Stout Cupcake, but where that was a brutal chemistry mishap, Lurid Bonbon was a bottle purchase after I skin-tested at Will Call. This reads as a musk/resin perfume with a chocolate haze, rather than a foody-forward chocolate blend, though YMMV. Very sexy and adult, with tons of throw. One of the very few chocolate BPALs that succeeds against my weird chemistry.

Sniffed at Will Call! You know the old Warner Bros cartoons, where a character puts a seashell to their ear to hear the ocean and instead a giant wave sploooshes out and fish jump out their other ear? A Sea Ghost was like cracking the bottle to sniff and being plunged into a technicolor (well, mostly blues and greys) oil painting of a shipwreck - all salty spray and groaning dark timbers and rattling chains and wailing gales and noctilucent waves. I wanted to go back and smell it again, but there was only one bottle in stock and it sold lickety-split.

Sniffed wet: oakmoss-dominant dead leaves and lea-heh-heah-EATher. This is definitely a "wet" masculine fougere type. Oddly, even though clove's usually the 900 pound gorilla in the blend, the leather completely smothers the clove at first. Clove's a fighter, though. Eventually I smell it around the edges - at this stage it's like a hit of spicy aftershave. The bourbon vanilla may as well not be there, unless it's just the glue softening the sharp edges of everything else. Dry, I just get "clove-spiced fougere." This is too much of a dude fume for me, and the least dead-leafy of the five I tried. It's oakmoss all the way.

I don't specifically get "blackberries" at first sniff, but I do get an astringent-sweet dark berry note, crisp green leaves, and soft wet leaves. I think she may be using different DL formulas, because this one smells much more herbal and much less like the oakmoss base in DL Lavender and DL Cardamom. Here, it's the blackberries that sing. DL and Blackberries is sweeter, fruitier, and more summery than DL Blackcurrant and Tobacco Tar, but not candy-girlish. There's still a wistful feel of early autumn and of gathering a ripe final harvest before the cold sets in. It does sweeten up as it wears, but it doesn't lose the realistic berry-ness. I love this the most after several hours of wear; it's like a lingering berry lip stain of a scent.

Is it masculine? Is it feminine? Time for..... *drumroll* tiebreaker review! However you interpret the "dead leaves" note, this blend is dominated by a sharp, chilly, medicinal lavender when wet. I can see where the previous reviewer got a cologne-y vibe from the mossy, musky base under the lavender. To me it's unisex, but there's nothing soft or feminine about it at this stage. I'd actually peg this as a lavender and oakmoss blend if I were sniffing blind. It becomes softer and more soporific as it dries. Long-wearing, too: I put some on before bed to test its sleepability, and I woke up with my arm smelling fantastic for the rest of the day. I liked it better after 12 hours of wear, honestly... and NOW it's soft and more feminine-leaning. Like many of the dead leaves-and blends, I get "expensive Anthropologie fall candle" instead of "perfume." I actually like this on my skin, but to me it begs to be poured into an oil warmer to scent my room. I also think it would be a great fall sleeping blend (if your bed partner approved). Conclusion: may not be your cup of tea for perfume, but I may buy a bottle for scenting a sleep pillow or warming in a burner. And if this ever gets released as a Post candle, I'm scraping together the coin to buy one.

I don't get any marshmallow, except as a bit of sweetness toward the end of the drydown. Unlike 99% of lilac and mist blends, this is neither soapy nor green. It's a balance between the dry white orris and the misty pale floral notes, with a touch of earthy moss. I agree with the comparison to Moonshine and Mist; it also feels very much in the Ars Moriendi line of ghostly, ethereal blends.

This is a dry, earthy, husky patchouli-and-woods blend, with ambrette lending a nutty warmth. This isn't the toothy, gnarly patch in Banshee Beat. It smells autumnal and polished. It has a very male feel to it, but it's nothing like a cologne; more like a carved and oiled wooden statutette of a forest god. I normally pass on anything with orris, but this one is beautifully done.

Peach, white sandalwood, golden amber, gurjum balsam, leather accord, and oudh. On me this was lighter and greener than I thought it would be - I suspect it wants a bit of aging to soften the balsam to my personal tastes - but on my friend it was ALL peach and leather and oudh, which was her personal idea of a Really Good Party. There's nothing dark in this scent. I get blond woods and golden resins and young fresh-cured leather, with peach keeping it juicy at the edges. Works for any gender.

Like zeezee, I picked this up and was immediately struck by its similarity to Silkybat - which I happen to still have a small amount of, lurking in my fridge. Sniffed side by side, they are kissin' cousins. Silkybat is rounder and more mellow, whereas Love Swing does have a woodsy sharpness on top that reminds me of The Antikythera Mechanism. It smells much more like either of these than it does like last year's Black Cardamom and Vanilla, which I also sniffed side-by-side with The Love Swing. I love this. It loves me back.

GLITTER-SHOT CRÈME An impertinent charmer, sugar-dusted, electric mint. Juke Joint is the glitter turquoise vinyl upholstering the booths at your favorite bowling alley - the one that wasn't retro-new but really truly built in the 50s, but it was in that little town your grandmother lived in that you hated to go visit in the summer, because there was nothing to do but watch TV and bowl, and it was only years later when you were a grownup and the alley was long gone that you realized how amazingly cool it had been. Speaking of your grandmother, the crelly base is the same turquoise as the vintage atomic-print formica on her kitchen counters, and the flat silver glitter in this polish is the same dull metal sheen as the counter's metal edge banding (that snagged sweater cuffs and caught toast crumbs until everyone gave up trying to clean the cracks out). And floating in this turquoise crelly base with its flat silver sand-scatter are pinpoint aqua sparks: a bloom of insouciant aqua jellyfish: gorgeous and deadly in this Aegean-blue surf-tumble, so that you don't dare go in the water, but you look and look and look at it. So if you want to paint your claws with vintage 50s glitter vinyl, your grandmother's formica, and luminous jellyfish, with a smooth and workable formula to boot, Juke Joint will make you a happy camper.

#54 Wet: Weathered woods and pungent vetiver. Dried: Woods, softened vetiver, and something balsamic or benzoic in the back. Actually quite pleasant if you like vetiver. Gender-neutral, but would probably smell better on a guy.

157: A strong blast of a sweet spiced booze note, like buttered rum or hard cider, and tons of burnt-sugar fruitcake. The fruits are earthy complex ones, like dried plums and figs and mincemeat, dusted with cardamom and allspice. It feels very Victorian Christmas Dessert. In fact, it's like Christmas Pudding, Butter Rum Cookie, and Hard Cider Cake had a three-way love child. Winner, winner, chicken dinner.