joiedecombat

True, perfect golden light, refined into an incomparably glorious scent. Aureus, on me, turned out very similar to Cairo - a warm, dry scent which is indeed golden, but which put me more in mind of sunwarmed stone than anything else. I didn't really get cedar from it specifically. It's unusual, and really kind of comfortable and not at all unpleasant, but not something I care to smell of myself.

The cedar of Magus is its most recognizable note for me. That is really just fine; I grew up using cedar chips as horse and dog bedding, so the scent has positive associations for me. However, I wouldn't care to wear it as a perfume... ...which is where the other notes come in. These, I'm not as adept at picking out, but they combine to give the scent a warm smoothness along with the cedar. There's a bit of spiciness too, but it isn't sharp, and it only adds to the clean, dry warmth of the scents. The day after I tested it, I could still smell it lingering on my skin. By that point, the cedar was no longer apparent, but it was still smooth and warm and woody-spicy and very pleasant. It's really more masculine than I like to wear myself, but I love it anyway. If I had a boyfriend, I'd try to get him to wear it; as it is, though I don't really have much expectation of wearing it myself, I can't bear to give it up for swapping. I have vague, faint hopes of finding something similar but just a little sweeter somewhere in BPAL's catalogue. Apparently I went on about it at enough length that a friend of mine, who'd been resisting BPAL, decided she had to have some based solely on my descriptions. Which makes me an official BPAL pusher now, I suppose.

I fell in love with Sudha Segara as soon as I tried it, and it remains one of my top favorites: a warm, smooth, comforting fragrance. Not really knowing what to expect when I read the description, I'd been assuming it would be a sort of vanilla scent, but it's not as sugar-sweet as vanilla would be, really. It's simply very creamy and understated. The ginger doesn't really come out enough to make it at all sharp or crisp, at least not on me, nor does the honey ever become apparent enough to be too sweet. It's a wonderful comfort scent, and it makes me think a little of very expensive soap - not because it smells at all soapy, but because it's the sort of scent I would imagine you could find in a really good soap, the kind you would use when you wanted to feel smooth and soft and womanly. The perfume oil has the exact same effect. My mother fell as much in love with it as I did. I got her a 10ml bottle for her birthday, and she thinks it's wonderful.

When I tested Bon Vivant, I kept waiting for the champagne to come out in the fragrance and do for it what the alcohol notes in Swank do for the pomegranate. Unfortunately, it never did, and on my skin Bon Vivant simply smelled of overly-sweet strawberry. It wasn't unpleasant, but it was a very sticky-sweet and young scent, like a little girl's lip balm or body spray. Too young for me.

On me, Swank smells exactly as it does in the bottle, one of the few oils which doesn't go through any kind of variation as it wears. Which I don't mind in the least, because I adore this fragrance. The fruit scent is bright and sweet and very appealing, and the alcohol note, for once, doesn't go at all boozy; instead, it dries out the fruitiness a little and makes it sparkling clear, giving the fragrance a little added maturity and class without taking away any of its fun. I haven't encountered anything like it in more conventional perfumes and body sprays, and I definitely adore it.

Embalming Fluid turned out to be the first BPAL scent that I absolutely fell in love with. It's bright and fresh and tangy but also sweet, and it puts me in mind of lemon sorbet with a whiff of something faintly exotic that helps smooth it out and keep it from being too sharp. I first got my hands on an imp of this in August, a few days after Hurricane Katrina came through and wreaked havoc in my area with power outages and, in its aftermath, gasoline shortages. Which meant spending, no lie, three hours in line in my car for gas. In Mississippi. In August. I had to rush home and shower and get to work immediately afterwards, and Embalming Fluid was the perfect thing to put on - a great, refreshing summer scent to help perk me up after positively wilting in the heat and humidity.