Splendid Molerat

My favourite bartender (back when I used to have a favourite bartender -- hi Trevor, where ever you are), made a drink called a Five Dollar Milkshake. The ingredients involved Bushmill's, Irish Cream, Butterscotch Schnapps, and Creme de Cacao (I think). Candy Butcher has a very similar aroma, with a wisp of vanilla perfume in the background.

Not much to add -- Jersey Devil is a very natural-smelling, earthy pine, cool, but not piercing. If Golden Priapus was too sweet on you, and Mistletoe gave you a brain freeze, this blend occupies a nice, tart middle ground.

Drink Me vs. Eat Me -- I figured one of these would have the dry ginger-or-nutmeg note from Gluttony, and this appears to be the one. I admire this greatly in the bottle, where it has a toasty, buttery, smoky, amaretto-cherry sweetness. On my skin, it quickly turns into a dusty poof! from the spice drawer. I make it seem dirty, and not in a good way. Oil warmer, here we come!

In the sniff comparison between Eat Me and Drink Me, Eat Me is definitely the winner with my chemistry. Soft on the butter note, and the currants are tart enough to bring down the sweetness of the cake. This will be the scent I reach for when I want to have a cloud of baked goods around me.

I've been ordering since 2004 -- always delighted with the customer service! Fast, efficient, and just all-around NICE! And as for the Devil's Panties? I nominate "Nam Pla" as the secret ingredient. Not only is this Thai sauce distinctive, but it can survive for years without refrigeration. It's already gone as bad as it's ever gonna get.

Bess is stately and pretty. On me it has a soft, cool green background (the rosemary, mint and lemon), topped with very liquid rose notes. Part of the liquidity is the grape spirit, which isn't registering as "grape" so much as grappa -- very high and volatile. The grape is under-represented when I put it on, so I've tried layering Bess with Puck (grape & civet), and also with Urd (muscadine & patchouli). With Puck I got a young and mischievous Queen, and with Urd I got an Iron Queen. Try it out, the two moods are very different and interesting.

Let's see... If O was sex in a hayloft, then Pink Phoenix is sex in a mound of cotton candy. Same albumin-honey notes when wet, becoming progressively sweeter and fruitier. I like the way it dries down to a near-incense floral/honey on me.

Red Phoenix is delicious. Smoky, spiced plums and warm resins. In the drydown it reminds me of the perfumes I wore some years back (Diva, Fendi). Less brightness, more of a simmering heat.

Snow White opens with a coconut marzipan scent. The snow I'm getting is powdered vanilla sugar,... and Snow White seems to share some notes with Obsession, my skin latches on to the similarity and plays it up for several hours before drying out. It's evoking a bittersweet emotion. Will have to try it again in a few days and see if my reaction changes.

I'm enjoying Talvikuu. Very sniff-able. It's got the spicy aquatics of Cthulhu & Whippoorwill, in an expanse of frosty-birch-spruce. "Cthulhu-Pops!", my ad-deranged brain volunteers. Now there's a frozen treat I wouldn't go lick.

Versailles starts as a very creamy rose fragrance, with a transparent red-orange layer, jasmine and citrus. It clings, heady and warm, for several hours. As it dries out, I get something close to dusty velvet or a faded pomander, and the grand ball winds down.

Tanqueray with a twist of lime. Three or four of those. Sudden realization that was rather a lot of gin, now surreptitiously nibbling on cardamom seeds to achieve some scent of sobriety. And the perfume was bang-on, too.

I get a couple of competing scent-memories from Lurid. First the silly one: Anyone remember Thrills gum? That bright-mauve, clove-y Chicklets competitor? Man, I loved those. Better memory: Long soak in the tub, all kinds of fragrant bubbles and scrubs, and the next half-hour out of the tub you've got a cloud of perfumed steam wafting off your skin? It's a lot like that. It's giving me a craving for those Angel bath flakes, in a roundabout way.

Penny Dreadful is like watching Hitchcock for the first time -- well done! I can apply it to the backs of my fingers, up to the knuckle, and no further -- it really does give me the horrors. This is a corn-fed, golden-haired girl who met the wrong man, and was left for dead in a shallow grave off in the brush somewhere. She clawed her way out, recovered, changed her name, and has lived alone ever since. Anyone who got close enough would notice a smell of wet earth that never quite faded.

I like Black Opal. It has the compelling flinty-stoney note I seem to recall from Pluto, backed by a dark and musky vanilla that clings to the skin. Black Opal does promote frequent sniffing -- don't test drive this by wearing it anyplace where you'd get odd looks for nose-wrist contact.