Violaine

A glittering golden amber chypre whose facets reflect bright flickers of cardamom, galbanum, guaiac, neroli, and sharp cedar. To my nose, on my skin, this is a dead ringer for Obsession and it is GLORIOUS! I get mostly amber with this black pepper like spiciness that I can only assume is the cardamom. It's absolutely gorgeous. This is the scent of being curled up in front of a fireplace on a winter night after a terribly fancy dinner party.... perhaps naked on a fur rug. The throw is heavy enough to envelop you in the scent but not offend anyone near you, and it's one that only gets more beautiful with wear and heat.

This is going to win some lovers and haters, I'd wager, but... Edith, to me, is SERIOUSLY reminiscent of B&BW's Warm Vanilla Sugar. Just without the chemical garbage and a little more grown up. And to me, that is a very, very good thing.

This is pretty much straight up, perfectly balanced orange and amber to me. It's so nice!

I legitimately had to scrub this off. This is nothing but a melange of department store perfume, which is the same thing I got out of OLLA Ava. I'm not saying these two smell the same, but it's the same overall tone to me. I can't smell anything beyond a very strong, very heady perfume. :\

This smells almost EXACTLY like LUSH's Twilight bath bomb to me. TKO has always been similar but where it falls short, A Moment In Time takes up the slack. This is utterly amazing. A sweet, floral, vanilla lavender with a bit of patch to ground it. Absolutely superb. I need a backup.

I don't really know what benzoin smells like, but after spilling a huge drop of Kit into the speakers of my cell phone 3 weeks ago I can thoroughly say that I adore this scent. And yes, my phone still smells like it. It's this syrupy, sweet, wonderfully deep sandalwood that isn't at all dry. I'm not the best at describing scents, but this one is remarkably and wonderfully simple to me. Love!

This is a gorgeous, stable, long lasting, creamy white musk on me. So much so it's almost single note. I absolutely adore it and I bought a backup.

I hate to say it, but this has such a loud Yankee Candle-ness about it that I had to scrub it off before it made me too nauseous. I'm sad that I can't experience the beauty of it, but it's just all heavily perfumed retail candle on me.

5ml: Dolly Kei Glowing Vulva at Ryogoku Bridge Les Bijoux (mostly or completely empty!) Love Lay Upon Her Eyes Sumatran Red Patchouli The Girl Youth's Disengagement Imps/Decants: Alcie Aphrogenes Brisingamen The Butterfly Chimera Comforting Plush Companion Glowing Vulva at Ryogoku Bridge Harigata II Iole Kypris Lady Macbeth Le Serpent Qui Danse Luna Male Nude, Arms Upstretched Molly Grue Odin Pandy The Penitent Magdalen The Ring Skuld Sleeping Nymph and Satyrs Spicebush Swallowtail Tea Urd I generally love honey, vanilla, all musks except red, patchouli, amber, resins, peach, rose, tonka, sandalwood, saffron.... Try me!

This was the runaway hit for me at East Coast Will Call, and totally unexpected. I love amber and I like rose, but rose is extremely volatile and iffy on me. The wrong rose can easily overpower, go sour, or even give me a migraine. But Love Lay Upon Her Eyes is so perfectly blended that the rose never takes over completely. The amber and the rose dance together and they each have their seperate showy moves, but in the end it's a seamless integration, one body moving on he floor. Ahem. Metaphors aside, this scent is sweet, warm, resinous, and sensual. It reminds me greatly of Morocco. It took me a while to pin that similarity down, but that's absolutely it. For me... it's better than Morocco. I bought two bottles at Will Call. We'll see if that's going to be enough.

This may be my shortest review to date. Wet: Spicy bananas. Dry: Gilly Hicks La Perouse. That is all. Provided I can get through the spicy banana phase, I will love and adore this!

I am not entirely sure why I haven't ever tried this before. Maybe it seemed like nothing special by the description and other Shungas won out. ANYWAY. Yeah, in the bottle I smell those grains, and it's an odd smell. But I tend to uncap, sniff the cap... then keep sniffing. It's like as the air hits it, the scent changes and you can smell everything in it. The only thing I can't pick out is the ginger, but I'm sure it's there. I get this gentle lemon fragrance - not at all sharp. The honey is there, and that and the grains keep it wonderfully... warm? Round? The black tea lends this sophistication to it, and I dunno... it's just this glorious, sunshiney, gentle scent that clings to you like you were rolling around in a field of lemon blossoms. I love it.

2010 version Man, there isn't a lot I can say here that hasn't already been said. But maybe this will help some people: I'm not a Snake Oil fan. My MIL wears it and that's a big no-no for me, but I also smelled and tested it long before her and it just wasn't for me. It was too overwhelming and too... can I say unrefined? I don't mean it in a bad way, but it's a strong, strong blend, and it makes no excuses for itself. For me, those three honeys in Womb Furie are Snake Oil's "excuse". It mellows it out for me, rounds it into a nice, honeyed, sweet, incense that snuggles closely against my skin, yet has a great throw. It doesn't insist upon itself like Snake Oil does. I really love Womb Furie, and I'm happy that it give me a Snake Oil to love. 2011 version This version is much sweeter on my skin. The Snake Oil is there, and the honey is there, but the honey dominates the blend. I prefer the 2010 iteration, but I'll wear 2011 too. Give them to me AALLLLL!

Oh, but I had high hopes for this one. In the bottle and wet on my skin it is vomitously powdery, floral soap to me. I'm begging it to taper off into this wonderful vanilla honey muskiness that other people are smelling. Then on the drydown it goes sweeter and even more powdery. At the tail end of my inhale, there's a...savory foodiness that just... wait. Is that pickle? XO Let me um... layer this with Paladin and see what happens. But at this point I really don't think I can get past the... ugh factor. I weep!

This is really beautiful. Sniffing it in the bottle, I thought, "Oh, this is Korea!" And by that I mean that it smells like a throng of generic, sweet, teenage girl-aimed Korean body sprays. But don't take that in the wrong way!! I love those scents! I spent a lot of my time in Korea shopping at places like Etude House and Holika Holika for those sweet, almost effervescent sprays! But while it reminds me of those scents, Loosening of the Obi is more grown up. The rice wine stays very high in the blend, always there, but it's like the sandalwood, vanilla bean, and musk are wrapping their arms around it and pulling it back down to earth. It's sweet, enveloping, and while I'd consider it "perfumey", it's also very unique and mysterious in a lightly feminine way. I absolutely love and adore this. If you're one of those people who feel like the Shungas are "made for you", then you gotta try this.

I just cannot EVEN with this oil. I'm Anne Burrell huffing garlic off the heels of her hands with this oil. Holy lord, it is sex. Sex sex sex. Like, literally. Okay, NOT literally, but if the smell of sex were a color, this oil is the same shade. It's magnificent and creamy and skin-musk and heaving and panting and flushed skin and... pardon me, but I have to go put some more on. Seriously though. If you're a Glowing Vulva fan and woefully lacking in any of that awesome goodness, try and find a bottle of this. It's right there in the same family, and it's GORGEOUS.

Absolutely gorgeous. It's that creamy, sexy BPAL honey - three kinds of it! - and a sprinkle of soft mint. The apple blossom, to my nose, lends just a soft powdery-ness to the blend... in a very GOOD way, mind you. This scent is warm and creamy, but in a very cold, wintery way. It's impossible to describe and absolutely worth a second (or third) bottle! I'm in love!

Sugar Plum Fairy, to me, is very sweet and shampoo-like. Cloying and teenage, something you'd expect a high school girl's bedroom to smell like. Purple and SWEET. Sadly, I couldn't handle it.

I have to mirror Edens Sixth Day as well! I'm surprised, but SO happy that this scent is sweeter than I thought it would be. The licorice and coconut are blended together perfectly and seamlessly, and the scent is dark and dangerous. Venomous. It's terribly sexy. I do detect some spice in there, but it's so light that it's hard to tell whether it's clove or cinnamon. Either way, it's gorgeous. Oh, and much like angelicruin, it doesn't have much of a throw for me, but right up against my skin it's nice and strong. Perfect scent for an evening you anticipate you'll be close to someone. Rawr!

Smelled exactly like the old Sand & Sable perfume to me. Deposited me right back into middle school... which is not where I want to be. I can tell this is a GORGEOUS blend, but it's just not right for me.

This is one of those scents that I almost didn't try on because of the scent in the imp. It was waaaaay too overly sweet and I almost smelled caramel? Something teeth-rotting, that's for sure. But I looked up the notes and thought to myself "Uh, there's no way this can be bad", and I was right. I'm not entirely sure I could pick out the scent of chamomile on it's on, and definitely not hyssop, but the honey in this blend is unmistakable and positively wonderful. There's an herbalness underneath, but nothing strong, nothing frightening. It reminds me of the sunny days at my farmshare when I'd walk into the wildflower meadows to cut flowers. There's something warm and serene and happy about this blend, a comfort that you could wear every day, but could also mean so much if you dabbed it on only once in a blue moon. Beautiful.

Black Heart is all sweet pea and plum on me, deep purpley red. This is juicy, fruity, and ever so slightly fizzy in my nose. It's sweeter than I thought it would be, and leagues fruitier than I thought it would be. I'm disappointed that the vanilla, sandalwood, and honey aren't more profound, but I think I'm going to hang onto my bottle despite that and see how it ages.

Morocco has immediately shot into my top ten favorite blends, and into quite a high position, too. I can't believe I waited so long to try this, but it just never seemed like something I'd like from the description alone. I'm know I'm echoing a lot of other people in saying that, but it's true. I totally see the comparison to Antique Lace. They're very similar on my skin, but I have to say that I much prefer Morocco. Antique Lace is sharper to me, more cologney, while Morocco is warmer and spicier, but still with that gorgeous vanilla backdrop. This is a cozy fragrance, like you're being wrapped up in a warm blanket that smells of sandalwood and vanilla. Just one drop on my chest keeps me smelling it with every breath, and THAT is a lovely thing, my dears. I never get carnation or cassia, but I feel like all the notes in Morocco just blend together so seamlessly to make a perfect, close scent that it's hard to pick out any one thing in general. Basically? Gorgeous. An automatic 10/10 on my BPAL scale, and so few get that rating from me. If you like Antique Lace, you should totally try Morocco!

This is the third time I've tried to write a review for Were Puppy, but I'm not feeling particularly eloquent this morning, so please pardon my lack of creativity. While a bit different than what I was expecting, the scent is absolutely PERFECT. Dead on what it should be, a beautiful, creamy, gentle blend of milk, musk, honey, and fur. The florals stay in the background where they belong (on me, at least), and the end product is a sweet, maternal, close scent that I personally feel would smell wonderful on anyone. It's the smell of warmth and skin and happiness. A second bottle might be in order. :B

I scrub with kosher salt, juuuust a bit of warm water, dish soap, and a fingernail brush. And I mean scrub. HARD. Just short of bleeding. Heh. Of course I don't recommend that anyone else scrub that hard, but... yeah. That's what I do. It seems to take 80-100% of the scent off, at least on my skin. But some oils are STRONG and will linger even after that.