urbantravels

This was a frimp - it wouldn't have occurred to me to try it on my own. If I had read the description I would have pictured something way too sweet - I have issues with sweet florals, and I would have seen "muguet" (lily of the valley) and "osmanthus" and "water lily" and so forth, and flipped right past with a "not me." And I'd also be afraid of a fakey coconut smell, which is all too easy to do - even *real* coconut can smell fakey at times! But I did not expect to become totally fascinated with it. To me, the coconut is dominant, but it's a very fresh, edible coconut smell - not like dried coconut. Even though the coconut is always there for me, the other notes really do seem to burble around and take turns appearing and disappearing. Does what it says on the tin! It's not totally coconut, and it's not totally flowery, and the lime is there sort of in the background - you can't pin it down, but it's all good. On me, this is one of those "I can't stop smelling myself" varieties. I have no idea what "glassy musk" is but I think I like it.

Sadly, this is the first BPAL scent that I experience as "artificial", whatever that really means. And I don't know what's wrong with me, but I don't smell ANY mint that smells like an actual mint plant. I'm a newbie so my experience is a bit limited, but I think I have one or two other imps that are supposed to have mint notes and I can't smell mint in those either. Oh yeah...Yggrdrasil. Half the reviews swore they smelled mint, lots of mint, and I didn't at all. Maybe this is what people mean when they complain that a scent goes "soapy" on them, but I pondered and pondered that "artificial" smell...like some kind of commercial product that I'd smelled before...like, maybe, shampoo...and then it hit me: this is almost EXACTLY what I remember Clairol Herbal Essence shampoo smelling like when I was a kid in the 70s. (I have no idea what the current version smells like, but I'm talking the old-school dark green stuff.) Of course, once I got that memory in my head, that was all I could smell...Herbal Essence shampoo. Which is an interesting whiff of nostalgia, but not something I want to smell like today.

I have sentimental reasons for wanting to capture some desert scent in a bottle - after many years in Los Angeles, I'll be relocating back East in the near future. This seems like the topic for it, even though Coastal California is really its own thing, Mediterranean and semi-desert, not desert, but the basic dry/aromatic character is there, and of course some plants like sagebrush and purple sage range into the "real" deserts of the Southwest... I'm intrigued by the description here of Visting the Temple of Auspicious Fortune etc as being "like Los Angeles rain." Unfortunately as a Limited Edition it might be hard to find, but if it really smells like that, it would be worth having. What I'm really obsessed with are coastal sage scrub (sometimes it's just coastal scrub because the sages are absent), chaparral, and the massive poppy fields of the Antelope Valley. For sage scrub, someone somewhere recommended Lear which is heavy on sage, but I assume that would be culinary sage and not wild California sages! Nevertheless, the difference might not be too important. For chaparral, I'm at a loss. There is a perfume maker (IlluminatedPerfume on Etsy who makes a "chaparral" scent, and I got a sample, but my jury's out on that one. It seems to have some of the right woodsiness/earthiness of chaparral, but she put a smoke note in there to suggest wildfires, and to me it just dominates everything else, so it doesn't feel like a chaparral landscape - more like a vacation cabin that's saturated with old woodsmoke. Which isn't horrible or anything, but not what I'm after. The Southern California poppy fields are pretty much one of the Wonders of the World. Besides the incredible intensity and expanse of color, there's a fairly impossible-to-describe scent. The poppies themselves don't smell like much, but a lot of other flowers are in the mix, and probably the most fragrant is goldfields, with is the paler yellow, ground-hugging stuff you see in the pictures. That would probably be hard to get right in a fragrance, since even in their totally natural state they smell a little too much - "like air freshener" is one description you hear a lot. Anyway...has BPAL ever done a California wildflower themed scent?

I'm a total fiend for wood, so I had high hopes for Yggdrasil, but on me it's a bit puny. I'm not getting the mint notes that others are describing - maybe some of the wintergreen (wintergreen is not a mint!) - it's mostly wood in my nose. But it seems like old, dried-out wood that has little sap or fragrance left in it. Sawdusty, even. I'm getting some sandalwood, and some hints of pine or evergreen, but mostly feels like some not-very-resinous hardwood, possibly oak or birch? I don't have a clear mental picture of what ash should smell like - we don't have a lot of them in Los Angeles - but since this is the World Ash, I'd assume there's ash in here. I think there may be one or two ash street trees in my neighborhood, so I'll have to hunt them up and see what I can smell. Overall, sweet and pleasant, but doesn't seem to have much personality on me. Fades relatively quickly after it's on.