tajana

You know what's sad? The 2006 April fool's update was the first one I ever noticed when I first took interest in BPAL but I was a wee high school kid with no money and no BPAL sniffing experience so of course, I didn't buy or try Underpants. I didn't think I ever would, but, uh... I guess curiosity got the better of me! Underpants has the rummiest rum note I have ever sniffed in a BPAL. It's super boozy. On the skin it has a brief moment of that plasticky sort of smell... it must be the cream. That passes quickly as it warms up, and then it smells the same way for the entire duration of its wear length. A little goes a very long way and it lasts for many hours, which is just as well, considering how hard it is to track this stuff down! It smells like vanilla ice cream decorated with saffron infused sandalwood sticks, served up with a liberal splash of rum. Not gotta lie, it does smell delicious. Though the vanilla and cream and are the strongest notes, the dry woodiness of the sandalwood gives this a solid, perfumey base that makes this sexier than I anticipated, and the aggressively alcoholic nature of the rum note makes this more grown-up than the usual foody fare. As a saffron addict, I love the intense saffron note here, and it plays very well off the rum-drenched vanilla and sweet cream. In recent times I am amping saffron more than usual, which is fine by me. I would slather this on pretty often if it was a GC or easily accessible LE, but there are zillions of other vanilla-focused BPAL scents out there, and I think that the not-quite-so-gourmand saffron scents I already have (Bastet, No. 93 Engine, Oblivion, Pallas Athene) are even better on me.

Yeah, looks like I'm not the only one who was scared by cumin! I would never willingly scent myself with a noticeable cumin note. Amber usually goes powdery and nondescript on me, so I just passed over this one, despite the fact that some of my favorite notes in here. Luckily I got to test this anyway! Cumin's characteristic stinkiness is absent, as far as I can smell. The antiqued amber is warm and sweet and creamy, and creates a very snuggly aura. Mandarin and osmanthus are shiny and cheerful, adding a pleasant sort of brightness and sweetness to the top of the scent without making it noticeably fruity. The frankincense and myrrh are really subtle on me but they deepen the amber and make this smell classier. The Ceylon cinnamon is definitely Ceylon cinnamon and not some rude candy or cassia scent. It is soft and scrumptious and compliments the touch of cedar beautifully. As friendly and warm as the cinnamon is, it's the saffron that steals the show. Its brazenly golden spicy smooth sweetness grows to dominate the dry-down. I love saffron, so this is fine by me. This smells supremely comforting and rich. A burnished gold scent, glowing with warmth. I do wish that the cedar and osmanthus were stronger, but I really enjoy this scent as it is. It's very easy to wear.

This by far the strongest "white tea" note I have encountered in BPAL! I think I've tried most of the white-tea based, simple GC scents, but none of them are as potent or as enchanting as this one. This does smell like a white Earl Grey with violet. That clean, sort of floral crispness of white tea is amped up high with a juicy, sparkling dose of lemony bergamot, and rounded out and softened by the fuzzy, gentle violet leaf. I have an instant fondness for it because it's a dead ringer for the cheap-but-tasty white peony tea I always grab from Whole Foods when I need a quick white tea fix... but with the added sophistication of violet. Deliciously juicy (I think it's the citrusy touch that's giving this impression), invigorating, and just plain pretty. Stronger throw and much better lasting power than I was expecting, too!

The top notes to this are a freshly floral osmanthus and white peach, just barely ripened, with that soft and fuzzy skin quality. The delicate nectar-like notes play well off the fresh, distinctive rosewood. Rosewood, bolstered by red sandalwood, is really the star of the show, which delights me. The sharper, vaguely spicy aspects of the dry wood meld perfectly with the delicate peach and subtle dose of creamy vanilla. The osmanthus note takes things to the next level, boosting the floral side of the rosewood and just generally enhancing the fruity-floral, springtimey, refreshing aspects of this scent. I love osmanthus tea, and I love wood notes, it's no surprise that I'm head over heels for Belle Vinu! One of my all-time favorite BPAL scents. I can wear it anytime, anywhere and net compliments.

The bergamot, tea, and cucumber make for a cooling scent when freshly applied. Perhaps it is the power of suggestion, but it does have a bit of that glowing green vibe. However, the glowy cucumber/bergamot tea notes seem at odds with the foody, baked notes beneath. I smell like I've layered two discordant scents. The cake adds a dense and heavy sweetness that really weighs everything down, and the bread and biscuit notes don't sit well with me. Smelling like dessert can be iffy, but smelling like lunch and dessert is just weird to me. After this dries down the fresher notes really fade out, and I'm left with a residual splash of tea over a too-literal yellow cake and biscuit smell. Even later on, it's just spongy white cake. It was an interesting blend to try, but it's not for me! Too bad, 'cause I love the concept and I'm predisposed to enjoy Earl Grey scents.

At first I get Plum, plum, PLUM with an undercurrent of spices. Not like baked goods, like dark, dry clove and cinnamon with possibly a mixture of other spices, like nutmeg and allspice blended in as well. As it dries down the very bright and juicy plum note softens a little as it becomes more balanced out with the fiery spice mix. It smells really festive to me, reminding me of the late fall/winter holiday season. With time the spices settle down and begin to remind me less of mulling spices and take on a subtly smoky incense sort of feel. I'd love a room spray with this scent but as a perfume it's not knocking my socks off, I've smelled spiced plums many a time before and this proto doesn't bring anything new to the table. Phew! Glad I got to try this, enjoyed sniffing it, and relieved that it's not heavenly enough for me to feel the need to seek out more.

Christmas Eve on the Moor has nothing about it that reminds me in any way, shape, or form of Christmas. However, this is a surprise hit for me. This would be great on my boyfriend too but this is so good I hardly want to share. I do not normally enjoy perfumes with aquatic or ozone elements - they tend to screech and go flat on my skin, and all end up smelling like cheap soap. This is the opposite of my experience with CEotM, probably because the additional notes in here are ones I enjoy, and they conspire to make this a clean and cologney yet atmospheric and evocative fragrance. The coolness of clear water, the refreshing breeze before a lovely thunderstorm, the gorgeous smell of mosses and dew-covered grasses! Underneath all of that, there is a small hint of a sweet, snuggly, comforting woodsmoke note that warms it up and marries it perfectly to my skin. It is not savory or charred, it's just a softly, abstract interpretation of a fire. The lasting power of this is par for the course of most BPAL fragrances on me. I enjoy the clean, subtle outdoorsiness of this fragrance. It makes me think of a bonfire in a meadow, the warm orange glow of the flames contrasting with the emerald of moss, the deep smooth gray of stones worn by the cool wind, and the wistful muted blue of stormclouds.

Bohun Upas seems to come in two distinct variations. My original imp was awesome with a warm orangey colored oil. My bottle and a different imp have a more yellow colored oil. It's significantly fruitier, less barky and sinister. They both fit the description of the oil, but it's like two entirely different perfumes. I still like the fruitier edition, but I'm crushed that I don't have more of the beautiful original, which has like 75% less fruit than the yellow version. I don't think it's a question of aging.

Wow, this is very different from HGM '06. Same name, some familiar elements, but totally different overall impression! It's like the '06 is the day version, and the '11 is the night version. In the bottle, I got super smoky vanilla, an alcoholic whiff of sake, and a dry woodiness. Freshly applied onto the skin, a fair bit of the grapefruit and ginger come out, but they aren't the happy gummi candy versions like in the 2006 version. The sake, subtle grapefruit, and fresh grated ginger root, as well a sigh of wisteria, blend together atop a base of somber smoked vanilla and dry wood. The scent cheers up a tiny bit with the addition of sugared sticky rice after a few minutes, but then I still get the ridiculous impression of forlornly eating sweet rice and ginger cookies, alone, with a bottle of rice wine, plucking the petals off a wilting flower, sitting on the wooden floor of a gloomy old temple late in the evening. Eventually things settle down into a clean musky white sandalwood incense, flavored with a major doses of ginger and a distinct sweet rice note. Good lasting power and sillage. Not what I was expecting, but after I got over my preconcieved notions, I realized that this stuff is an A+ in my book. There's something quite sophisticated and elegant about the balance of notes. It'll be nice at any time of year, but it seems especially suited to summer nights. I'm confident that this will age very well. ETA: This already seems to have softened up a bit since it got out of the mail box, and gotten the teensiest bit more like its predecessor. My boyfriend told me I smell kind of like froot loops. At first I was like, hm, he's not *entirely* wrong. Now I can't shake that association and ALL I SMELL IS FROOT LOOPS. Ginger froot loop cereal, but still froot loops. Hahaha! I mean, I can smell the other notes quite distinctly if I huff it, but the waft floating around me? It's quite silly and cerealy. It's a morpher alright.

I was totally excited to try this. I'm a cherry-almond fiend- it's a comforting smell to me, as a kid when my mom was baking I'd always huff the almond extract. And Kypris indeed has a great soft dose of that almond extract/maraschino cherry type smell. After a few minutes that a slightly tarter, juicier, fruitier cherry sort of smell pops out. Lemon adds a light fresh brightness without being tart- think a little splash of fresh lemonade, NOT dish soap! The rosewater adds just a blush of pink color, but it's very delicate, a suggestion of petals rather than a full on floral bonanza. The honey in the base is translucent, not powdery or funky the way a lot of BPAL honeys can be, and the vanilla base is creamy but not foody. All in all it's a very pretty cherry-vanilla sort of scent, but unfortunately within an hour or two my skin just eats all the good stuff right up and turns it into nothing more than a sugared vanilla skin scent.

Yep, it's really fruity in the bottle. A tart, sheer take on strawberries tinted with plums. On my skin, wet, it's mostly "fruit blossom". Definitely fruity, with the strawberry-plum-apricot coming through in that order, but instead of being juicy or candy-like, the fruits are rendered much more delicately, balanaced out with a soft spring blossom scent. It stays more fruity than floral for a long time, but after about an hour it goes 50/50, with watery, dainty flowers balancing out the lightly sweet fruits. Peony is definitely making a statement here, but all the other floral notes seem to swirl together for me. There's a clean, thin woody glowy base that's barely detectable at all until about two hours after application, but it just barely grounds the fruity-florals and probably makes this last a lot longer than expected. This is pretty and not at all artificial smelling, but it might be too well-mannered for me! It's quite strong and long lasting for such a diaphanous feeling scent, but it's just so inoffensively pretty. Everything is so sheer and well-blended that nothing in particular sticks out. I was hoping that the apricot blossom would be really textural and that the floral bouquet would be louder, or that the "branches" would manifest as a sharp wood note, but, nope. I'd enjoy some Weeping Branches Moon room spray or hand soap, though.

I got this for the sentimental value I have attached to the name, but I'm afraid buying this on a whim was not a good move for me. When this was fresh out of the mailbox it was horrifying. Watermelon jolly ranchers and cough medicine, drying down to a lollipop with such a patently artifical flavor that the child eating it decided to give up half-way through and threw into a corner with some dust bunnies. I waited for it to settle down and warm up for a while, and there's some improvement. The apricot peel pops out more from the bottle, which is a major improvement. I got really excited for a moment, because I love apricot, but, sadly, on the skin, the plum still comes off as vaguely watermelon candy-ish and really synthetic-feeling to me. As it dries down it goes spitty hard candy, which uncomfortably rubs up against the slightly spicy, very powdery cloying amber vanilla. Eventually it goes back to that dust and lint covered lollipop. With a hint of grape Robitussin. Maybe it's still suffering some travel shock, but this smells so fundamentally wrong I can't imagine it will ever be right, at least not on me. I WANT to love it, but it's like Bordello's (also a jolly rancher festival on me) crazy sister.

It's clean, though I'd hesitate to go so far as to call it "soapy". It goes on as a mélange of airy wildflowers, just barely grounded by the cedar sage. No one flower comes through loudest, and the magnolia is really subdued on my skin, there's nothing heady about this scent. The image I get is of a wide open field dotted with hardy little thistles, tiny red poppies, and sunflowers under a cloudless blue sky... it takes a while to notice the distant, wispy pillar of smoke rising up on the horizon. After it dries down, the tiny hint of smoky wood peeks out, but its very dry, crisp, and delicate, and the clean dry grass and weedy wildflower scent stays dominant. The thing is, though, this scent is so very light. Even if I slather, it vanishes before an hour is up.

I found the the LE Enchanted Wood Florist to be quite reminiscent of Fairy Market, and I know I'm not the only one who got that association. However, it does not have the creamy vanilla "candy" part, and, this might not be helpful at all, but it smells pale green or even pale yellow to me, as opposed to the pale blue feeling I got from Fairy Market. Anyway... does anyone have some recs for scents that feel similar to March Hare? I know that Depraved and Katharina have similar apricot notes, but they have a very different feeling. I find the former quite dirty and dry, and the latter quite fresh, delicate, and clean. Manners Among Men and Women is also very apricot, but its much more... austere and refined than March Hare. So, I'm asking for recs of scents that really just "feel" similar to March Hare... spice aspect welcome but optional, and it doesn't have to be apricot-based, it just needs to be sort of jam-like in its fruitiness.

Wet: Soft. A bit of the fresh brightness of honeysuckle pops through. It does smell a bit "sunny", but right off the bat the gentle milk and honey dominates the scent. There's a bit of distinctive olive blossom peering in, but mostly I get a soft dab of powdery-sweet heliotrope and demure rose in a pool of soft milk and honey. Dry: The milk isn't sour, and the honey isn't feral or syrupy- this is like the milk and honey from Alice or Dana O'Shee. However, Dawn: Maiden is stronger and more potent than either of those two. It lasts way longer, and the throw is more aggressive... a very light application goes a long way. The honeysuckle, tea rose, and heliotrope balance each other out, but after it dries down, the olive blossom pretty much disappears on me. The tea rose is really innocent smelling and dainty, much like the rose in Alice. The florals get more and more understated with time. After a while this is all milk and honey with just a dusting of heliotrope and sigh of rose. Overall: I was envisioning a more floral, wearable, personality-infused relative to Alice, but instead I got Alice's equally bland older sister. It doesn't have enough pizazz from me. I wouldn't mind having some soap or something in this scent, but as a perfume, it's just not doing it for me. It's like a dessert that has neither brightness nor depth, just sweet fluffy blandness.

I totally love Enchanted Wood Florist, but as summer grew old and fall started to creep in, the springy flowers felt less and less appropriate. I desperately needed my light floral BPAL fix, and then Flor de Muerto came to the rescue! In the Bottle: No stinky bug-repellent marigold here to my nose. It smells like delicate flowers and the color ORANGE! It smells a little bit like orange blossom, but without any trace of the bitterness or metallic aspect it can sometimes have. Flor de Muerto smells almost fruity in the vial, and quite bright, but with a slight backing hint of something slightly herbal. Wet: It reminds me more of honeysuckles now, but it's not as heady as that note can be. A happy floral with something about it that reminds me of hard candy. It has that translucent sweet sugar-fruitiness to it, but it's not overly sweet because there's a slightly watery-herbal tint lurking around. I can almost feel the soft, delicate texture of flower petals. But it's shot through with a current of warmth... a delightful tickle of spiciness! Dry: I'm hard pressed to accurately review this because it just smells so golden and orange to me that I keep thinking of all things golden and orange: it reminds me of honeysuckle, orange blossom, even a touch of something almost apricot-orangey harmonizing with freshly watered, deliriously cheerful flowers and their intoxicating nectar. I couldn't help but apply it the day it came in the mail, but already its lasting power and throw is very satisfactory for a scent in this family. I think it's the dash of spicy fresh earthiness that's anchoring this flowery, nectary smell to the skin so well. It never poofs into a bland powdery smell. After hours have passed and it settles close to the skin, Flor de Muerto is just a duskier shade of orange with a balance of warmth and earthy faint floral. Overall: The simple soliflore billing just didn't prepare me for how delightfully mutli-dimensional Flor de Muerto would be. Fabulous. An unobtrusive but quietly enticing and uplifting fragrance. Fresh and floral, with a warming sunset glow. A perfect way to bring a bit of floweriness into the fall, but this will be wearable all year long.

Wet: A dry patchouli, with blackened cedar overtones! A sweet, translucent glaze of orange-colored apricot is painted over it. It feels like it really is just glazed over top of it. I get the impression of contrast, not of a "melded" scent, if that makes any sense. Dry: Doesn't change too much. It's just dark patchouli getting down and dirty with some syrupy, tart-sweet apricot, with a curl of cedar incense in the air. But as it warms up on the skin it seems to coalesce and become a more unified scent. Less "apricots and patchouli", more of one cohesive earthy, dirty scent with a slight fruitiness on the exhale. Lasting power, as you'd expect, is phenomenal. Hours and hours. The longer it stays on, though, the sweeter it gets. With the passage of time, the sweet apricot preserves smell that dominates March Hare is what comes to dominate here, though the patchouli remains an important balancing, grounding presence. Overall: Simple but inspired. I must be a weirdo, because I was excited by the reviews that complained about "cedar chips"... and Depraved did not disappoint. This wasn't overwhelmingly cedary, but it definitely did have a strong dark woods component. And I love this patchouli. It's so dark and husky and dirty, and a slick of bright apricot is just what it needed to become more three-dimensional and wearable.

I love reducer caps and I try to put them on everything. They usually deposit just the perfect amount in one drop, and if it's too much/not enough I can just press the top against my skin to apply just a bit of oil instead of a full drop. The regular polyseal caps aren't useful for oil application, and wand caps are the prettiest but are way too fiddly... those are the most prone to leaking in transit, and I don't have time to clean the wand after each application, so just rubbing it on and then putting it back in the oil strikes me as so... unsanitary. With reducers, I know I can't accidentally spill oil, it's super easy to decant from a bottle with a reducer cap, and they keep the rest of the oil "uncontaminated"... not that I really worry about contaminating my personal bottles, but I'm not exactly thrilled when I see cat hair or other little bits floating in bottles I buy secondhand.

In the imp: Lotus! Wet: Menthol, menthol, menthol. Really sweet mint, with the lotus adding a bubblegum veneer. Juniper awkwardly elbows its way in. This doesn't remind me of water so much as it reminds me of medicine. Dry: Dries down to a sweet powdery menthol scent. Greenish. Kind of like a cross between artificially flavored chewing gum and this gross "cooling" tylenol syrup. Overall: This just fell flat on me, to put it mildly. Not much to say about it. I had to wash it off before long.

Just a mini review, as I tested this lightly at an MnS. The opoponax leaped up at me right from the bottle! What a fabulous note... a rich, thick resinous scent, sweet and just faintly reminiscent of conifers. It settles onto the skin as a musky unisex perfume. I was worried that Siberian musk would be close to black musk, a nemesis of mine, but if it is, its held in check by everything else. Neroli adds elegance and a bit of bright contrast, tonka stays mild-mannered and well-behaved, subtly smoothing the edges with a sweet creaminess. Woody clove with nose-tickling pepper add a husky kick of spice. It all adds up to one warm but shadowy, growly but enticing fragrance. I'd have to try it again to be sure, but its potentially bottle worthy.

Just a mini review since I tested this at a meet and sniff! Grave-Pig starts off like fresh turned black soil with little white mushroom caps poking up through the dirt. Adorable! The fruitiness of fig doesn't peek out on my skin until after it dries down a bit. After a time it smells like clean mushroom dirt balanced with a soft fig note. It's not too sweet, but it's not harsh or too dry either. The oakmoss did not leap out to me, and the patchouli is pleasantly earthy. Not much throw, but it lasted and lasted and I was still able to smell the soft earthy scent of Grave-Pig hours later.

Wet: Oh my. Oak wood! Lots of it. This is a seriously distinctive note, and if you've never tried a BPAL with oak in it, you owe it to yourself to check it out just for the experience. It's accented perfectly by a sigh of muguet and a clean sliver of pale sandalwood. There's a creaminess lying beneath all of it. I can smell the influence of fruity golden apricot, but it's not standing out on its own. This is very clean and light smelling, but very refined, and looking at the painting it was inspired by, it smells like a perfect translation. Dry: If I didn't have the notes listed, I would feel confident that there was teak here! It reminds me of The Antikythera Mechanism, but without the nasty tobacco of death. Haloes dries down to be mostly strong, smooth, very perfumey oak warmed with a creamy, delicate vanilla. While the vanilla's presence is strong, it's held in check, and doesn't smell the least bit foody. I really like ginger, but I never sensed any in here. The white sandalwood gives it a very clean feel, but it doesn't go to soap or aftershave. I usually think of white sandalwood scents as light in general, but Haloes has a whole lot of presence. I just keep sniffing it, not sure what to make of it! It smells expensive, but like something you'd find from a niche perfume boutique, not an average department store. The amber and tonka creep up on me with time, but I'm sorry to report that they don't behave well with my chemistry. Overall: If I was a chemical magician, I would pluck out the tonka and amber notes. Haloes was almost beautiful and grandiose, a golden creamy otherworldly wood scent, but the longer it sits on my skin, the more the discordant powder and butteriness of the amber and tonka bother me. Even if I could ignore that, though, I'm not sure that I would wear this around! Its extremely intense and honestly, a bit weird smelling on me... I'd imagine it would elicit a "love it or hate it" sort of response.

This is for the 2008 version. Wet: Custard city. Creamy vanilla pudding with a bit of orange. Very sweet but has a decidedly NOT edible, offputtingly plastic musk vibe underpinning it, like a lot of foody BPALs exhibit once they hit my skin. Dry: Gets creamier and creamier. Anise pops out and acts all licoricey and devious for a ten minute phase before it abruptly fades off. I usually hate anise and it's definitely disagreeing with me here. I guess it harmonizes well with the orange, which reads as an orange marmalade sort of glaze here, but its just making me wrinkle my nose in disgust when paired with all that custardy vanilla creaminess. It's not buttery, thank goodness, but it's so milky and... moist. Like a really moist, artificial yellow cake, the sort of thing you'd get out of a boxed cake mix. The custard cake stuff amps up and takes over before long, and any other notes are smashed underneath and all but obliterated. Yuck. Sweet and cloying! Where's the celebratory funereal floral bouquet? I never catch any of it, and I kept it on for an hour before I ran to scrub it off. Overall: The notes were pretty intriguing, actually! I thought this had the potential to be an interesting gourmand floral, and I tested it before I read a single review. But, alas, the results were tragic. All foodiness, NO flowers! Not even a bit! I guess if you like smelling like vanilla-y custard cake desserts this is fine, but I was really hoping for some floral dimension...

Wet: I was intrigued by the strong orchid note in the imp, but that's not what I get when it's freshly applied. Actually, for the first couple of seconds, it has an unpleasant sourness to it. That quickly morphs into a tart but sweet berry-like fruitiness, fused with a soft floral. The skin musk and creamy notes round it out. So far, it smells rather commercial, but not in a bad way. Dry: As it warms up on the skin, the champaca and the skin musk come join the delicately fruity creaminess. The champaca-skin musk combo is really lovely, sultry but in a dainty sort of way... I think they're two notes that go really well together. With the passage of time, the vanilla and tonka get stronger too, and their creaminess really comes to dominate the scent. There isn't much throw, so it turns to a skin-close fruity-floral vanilla musk. It's soft and not overly sweet. It's really the champa and skin musk that add interest here... BPAL's skin musk is a really hard to pin down but very pleasing scent, it's feminine and a bit sultry but with a clean lightness to it, and the champaca flower is great and has the faintest of incensey undertones. Overall: It's actually really pretty. The sort of floral I'd recommend to people that are normally afraid of florals, but also to somebody who likes a lot of commercial fragrances but is new to BPAL. It's the sort of scent that seems like it would work on anybody of any age in any situation. But for that flexibility and inoffensive charm, it loses something... there's nothing wrong with it, but it's lacking some oomph and... je ne sais quoi. I wouldn't mind getting more of it (all I got to try was a testable sniffy) but I won't go out of my way for more of it, either. ETA: Why did I say this was kind of blah? I was seized by the sudden urge to acquire more of Vasakasajja just recently, and oh boy, am I glad I leaped for it. Its exotic creamy floral scent is nothing less than addictive. It's something I can wear in any season for any occasion. Don't we all need an all-purpose scent like that in our lives? Yum.

#517 Advertised as: The original owner said she got spiced vanilla, tea and some kind of floral, maybe some lotus too... reminiscent of magnolia and Southern florals at first, after 10 minutes of wear, more tropical florals reminiscent of the floral blend in Hi'iaka, without the ginger. In August: A greenish sweet tea drink, bundled up with candy and a dash of spice. Glossy green leaves, a peculiar spiced herbal tea, with what smells like lotus and hard candy flavored with tropical/hothouse blooms. (My boyfriend said it just smelled like gummi bears to him.) Dries down and morphs: first to spicy tea and purple orchids. A creamy fuchsia scent with spikes of green spice. The tea aspect smells like Michelia alba leaf EO, not true black tea... sweet, but definitely greenish. The vanilla gets stronger with time. After everything dissipates after several hours, its virtually pure rich dark vanilla. In December: This is aging pretty dramatically. The vanilla is getting stronger and richer and overpowering the top notes more now. The best way I can describe it is, it smells like Snake Oil on a tropical witch doctor vacation. There's a toxic jungle candy overtone but the dark, subtly spiced vanilla is really starting to steal the show. I will see how this ages over the next couple of months, but it might just be toooo vanilla for me. D: