RedAoife

Favorite pastime: slamming doors. What a drama queen! Booming carnation, iced mint, white fir, and itchy patchouli loudly disrupting a dreamy bed of lavender. Yikes, first? Okay. Let's see. I made myself wait until Christmas before opening my blind-order bottles! In the bottle, I get spicy, spicy carnation. Whee. It definitely "booms," but it's got some freshness behind it to keep it from getting too dense—the fir, maybe, or some green carnation stems. Wet, I detect a spike of mint. It's almost like that lovely snow note that shows up in so many other yules—that'd be the fir and mint, I suppose—but it's quickly overpowered by the carnation. It’s quite unusual, and I’m excited. Drying, it rapidly becomes...ecclesiastical incense? Some blend of the carnation with the patchouli creates a heavy, dead-ringer for the kind of incense used in my Catholic church. I’m picturing fewer slamming doors, now, and more images of low, golden light and flickering candles and the gentle, reverent murmur of heads bowed in prayer. Dang, this was just last night, at Christmas vigil. I can't smell any mint or fir now. It does have fantastic throw—I'd daubed a bit on my arm to test it, and I still keep catching whiffs of it. I even pulled down my sleeves in attempts to muffle it a bit, but nope, still booming away, even through the fabric. My sister just asked me why I “smell like church.” Awww . I wanted to smell like a fierce little Icelandic holiday gnome! Verdict: It’s a beautiful blend, don't get me wrong, but I don't think this one's for me. I'll give it another shot, though, before I relegate my bottle to the sales pile. Church incense is lovely, but I just couldn’t wear it as a perfume. Now, soggy fireplace cinders, on the other hand…

I love red musk. Unfortunately, red musk loves me too, the result being that any blend featuring red musk becomes straight, all-caps RED MUSK on my skin. This one is beautiful (hey, I love red musk!) so I'm sure it's worth every scent if you don't happen to amp red musk into the stratosphere. For me, though, it's not different enough from my original beloved red musk scents. I do get little wisps of syrupy honey and spices (cinnamon?), and it does seem to have a powerful throw.

I've never had the blessing to sample Snow, Glass, Apples...but one of my all-time BPAL favorites (and the only scent for which I've ever purchased two bottles at once) is the Yule scent Skadi. And Morana is a dead ringer for her. If I had to distinguish, I'd say that this is perhaps a bit sweeter--the apple and the rosewood seem to take more prominence, but only subtly. It also reminds me a lot of the Ship of Hel (which for me was Skadi + strong woodsy scent). It's gorgeous, but just not different enough to warrant a bottle purchase from me. Anyone who missed out on Skadi, Ship of Hell, or SGA; though, snag this straight away! It'll be your go-to winter scent for certain, and the bottle you pull out in those sweaty months when you're looking for a wisp of frost.

This! This is the cardamom scent I've been searching for! Not too spicy, not too sweet, and none of that red-musk that overpowers whatever else is on my skin; it's perfect. I'm reminded of a stronger version of Possets' old "Feral" (terribly hard to find now!), and this is actually better, I think. Vanilla and cardamom and cedar blend so perfectly that it's almost not even helpful to describe this scent in terms of its notes; it's one of those rare scents that becomes more what it evokes than what constitutes it. And this (from in-the-bottle-wet to skin drying) evokes dark, cosy, warm, furriness. It's the perfect curled-up animal scent I've been searching for--and I'm not even a cat person. That said, it can certainly work on a day-to-day basis as just a warm autumnal skin-perfume. A bonus that I've also been on the hunt for the perfect cardamom scent! Beth did a wonder with this one. Rarely do I spring for a full bottle upon the first test. This is one. Oh, man, do I love this.

I love the Zoryas, as a concept. Gaiman's American Gods is so magical for how it delved into the stories of different communities of immigrants. I am not Slavic myself, but I studied Russian in college and I hope to move to Moscow next year, so it's always exciting to run into these sorts of semi-relevant things. It's neither quite my place nor my heritage, but I felt drawn to these sisters for this reason. Also I have no moneys. So this was the scent I chose, as it seemed most promising to me, and Zorya P was at least my favorite "time" represented of the three. Zorya Polunochnaya is the embodiment of Midnight (полуночь = midnight; with полу (Polu) = "middle [of]" and ночь (Noch) = "night"). It's a beautiful composition. The vanilla blends smoothly with the amber (which NEVER EVER works on me at any stage, and yet here, it does, somehow) as well as what I can only assume is the ambergris. I don't know what tobacco flowers smell like. If I concentrate, I do get a whiff of elegant and woodsy florals, but that might just be my imagination. It is a gorgeous scent. It reminds me a lot of one of my all-time favorites, Black Swallowtail--I feel like there must be a licorice note somewhere in here, but maybe that's just my weird skin chemistry. It's lovely. Someone said before, I think, that "midnight" might be better balanced with a darker note, and I agree. But that's just my opinion. This is a lovely, floating, ethereal scent of the best and coolest time of night, when you are (ideally) walking alone with your thoughts and the moon is a creamy silver disk above you. In the end, I don't believe it's for me, because the amber (or something) eventually turns into something like play-dough on my skin. But that's just me. Had it never changed, I'd have loved this. Gossamer is a good word. Try this oil, and think of midnight. It might work better for you. All the proper ingredients are there.

I was excited for this one. The whole "for the joy of it" fightin' words thing really spoke to me, as I'm the child of Irish immigrants who were the worst/best embodiment of all those stereotypes, and I was raised as a small, scrappy, little ginger girl. Playground fights were my gig. Hell, I started a little recess "fight club" in third grade, which was a blast until it got shut down (pretty fast). Fighting for joy and exhilaration was a part of my childhood, and of course I love Gaiman's work, so I was eager to see how this particular one lined up. This is sweet and heavy, straight from the get-go. I get the whiskey and mead for certain; the whiskey is nice because it operates civilly as a "scent" (as in, it doesn't make me smell like an alcoholic) and the mead is true and syrupy. Like mead, though, I'm feeling that this scent is best enjoyed in small doses. Not so sure how I'd feel about wearing this on my person. However, the "blood" perfume note never worked on my skin at all, and so far I'm not catching any traces of that cough-syrup catastrophe, so things could be worse. As it begins to dry, the incense takes more of a center stage. It's a tad strange, but not unpleasant; it's no headshop incense (a good thing; I like hippies, but don't necessarily want to smell like one), but rather reminds me almost of the holidays...this might be a great winter scent! I detect frankincense and cloves among a mess of other things, but all blended together in a highly sophisticated way such that "incense" may be listed as a single note. Having dried, I've decided I really like this one. The incense has opened up into something soft and more complex, and the whiskey and mead notes are still detectable as a sort of smoky-honey backdrop. It's sweet and deep and quite nice; I get the sensation of burying my nose in dark, warm wool. Not quite sure if this will be a big bottle for me, but I'll definitely be revisiting my decant in the colder seasons! It's a chilly weather scent for certain, and....those are my favorite kind. Hell, I might end up buying it for the name and memory-associations alone.

Definitely a whiff of true leather. It's unmistakable. I'm with Little Bird here in that Snake Oil has never quite worked for me, but its subsequent incarnations have been nice (I actually look forward to winter precisely because it gives me reason to wear Gingerbread Snake, which is an all-time favorite). This, though, is a Snake Oil I can do. It's harsher at the start (a positive for me) but still relaxes into that sexy, familiar coil we all know and love. It's markedly different, though. I agree that it is very much like a sheath of leather over your regular Snake Oil. And I think I like it. Bottom line, if you love Snake Oil, you should give this a run. BUT! if you've found Snake Oil to be a bit too disappointingly sweet (as I have), this might be your happy medium. I have yet to invest in a big bottle of SO, but I might spring for one of this.

This is my first foray into the Lupers (Weenies have always been more of my thing, seasonally). And...golly. I'm usually not one for florals or sweet notes, but this one kills me right out of the gate. It is perhaps the most perfect gardenia scent. Gardenias have always been my mother's favorite flower, and she has been terribly sick for the past year, so I've been all the more conscious of things that remind me of how she used to be. I love this. Gardenia is a difficult floral because it leans towards the heady, and it can be very cloying. But this is perhaps the first time I've encountered it so perfectly-balanced in a perfume. For me, gardenia is by far the most perceptible note--this is definitely a gardenia scent, on my skin, at least. However, the peach and the frankincense blend almost seamlessly with the gardenia. I love the scent of flowers, of course, but floral notes have been difficult for me in the past, because it's hard to replicate the exact scent of a real flower--you can capture the oils and the essence, but without that near-inimitable sense of freshness of living tissue, the scent will often come off as sickly, heavy, and cloying. Not this one. The blend here is perfect in its offset and balance. After years of disappointment in gardenia scents, I've finally found my grail. Gonna spring for the full bottle on this one. Lupers have officially roped me in, hard.

I’m new/ish to BPAL, but I love this sort of thing, and I’m happy to see that people are still posting in here. 'Scuse the incredibly self-indulgent novel, but I've been wanted to do this for awhile: I am a short, very pale-white female with red hair and blue eyes. I play the saxophone in my university band. I like horror movies and old-fashioned ghost stories, and I get along really well with animals--I have an African Grey parrot who is basically my second soulsister (for good and bad--she can be a real bitch sometimes), and I’ve tamed the local squirrels into climbing up on my shoulders and eating peanuts from my hand. When I was in third grade, I started my own Fight Club on the playground (I hadn’t seen the movie or anything; just thought it’d be fun for us all to try to beat each other up)--you better believe that got shut down fast. I got many, many “cards” (disciplinary things) for laughing during class. When I was about 12, I walked in on my little brother and my grandpa having a discussion about how, as an older sister, I am “sometimes nice and sometimes not nice,” and they quickly explained that, no, they hadn’t been talking about me the whole time; but actually had started out with a conversation about “woman pirates.” I’d certainly like to think that I haven’t so much changed, but instead I’ve grown into a more “refined” version of my scrappy child-self. I’m an anthropology and Russian major, and it seems that this will take me in the archaeology direction, as I’ve been getting more and more involved with megalithic excavations in the far-flung parts of Ireland. I never expected that I would be in this field, really, but it’s comfy anyway because I’m very much Irish by heritage (and I look Irish); also, I’m one of the 12th-ish (I don’t know what the actual figure is) great-granddaughters of the Irish pirate queen Granuaille/Grace O’Malley, so that’s fun. Probably the most immediately distinctive thing about me is my super-curly red hair. I cut it short last year (it’s bouncier this way!), but previously it had been about identical to Merida’s hair (that chick from Brave), and I got a lot of good-natured ribbing about that. I recently discovered that the main reason I’ve never had a real boyfriend (I'm 21...) before is because I am apparently “scary.” My best friend told me that I seem “very fierce and idgaf,” which was sort of a surprise to me, because I’m like the most ridiculous person I know. I am trying to seem more approachable without compromising myself, but I still have one helluva Resting Bitch Face. It also didn't help that up until maybe five years ago I had a deeply-ingrained, instinctive, visceral revulsion in regards to romance (probably because I feared the idea of giving a person so much sway over my emotions), but I've been working on that. It was one of the multiple manifestations of my OCD, which wasn’t diagnosed until I was 18. So basically, I spent all the years up to that point being quietly convinced that I was honest-to-God insane and doing my best to hide it (so I wouldn’t be put away). I'm medicated now, though, and I'm a lot less afraid of things! I have a very dark sense of humor, not so much because I’m a purposefully dark person, but more just because I laugh at everything. I grew up in the southern USA, and I’m good at lots of things like survival skills, fire-building, botanical remedies, etc. I have a hobby of skinning and tanning the hides of (fresh) roadkill (I never kill anything), which comes off as a bit macabre to people who aren’t used to it. I enjoy that, though, and sometimes I play it up; scaring people is funny. The End

Let me echo the sentiments of those above me when I say that this scent is gorgeous. Peat and ice and something like honeysuckle, with red musk for sure; this red musk isn't showing its teeth, though, but rather is blending it all together quite beautifully. I love the violent red musk, but this is something else entirely, and I love it, too. There's a very soft, sweet floral note in the background--I guess that's the heather--and I usually have trouble with florals, but this is working quite nicely. It smells like a mist-covered field after a thunderstorm, either just before dark or very early in the morning. The grass is still flattened and silvery-looking from the rain, and I'm definitely getting a sense of cool purple of grey-blue "mist." I thought I'd go more for the creepy-crawly Lovecraft yules, but this one just swept me away. As a whole, incredibly evocative and lovely.

Yeek, never posted a review before, but my decants just arrived and this one really struck me. I actually don't get fire at all, unless you count fire that's so white-hot it comes full circle and turns cold again, which is an image I can see with this oil. On my skin, it's herbal and sharp. In the bottle, though, at first sniff, it immediately hit me as being a dead ringer for something that I couldn't quite pin. It drove me crazy for a few minutes, until I realized that the smell it perfectly mimicked (to me, at least) was the smell of tomato leaves and stems. It's a very distinctive scent, and gardeners will know what I'm talking about--sharp and not unlike watermint, but herbal and sharp like a blast of wind, and not at all sweet. I like it. It makes me think of summer, digging around in the herb garden and rubbing tomato leaves between my fingers.