ClareN

I'd recommend Cthulhu for Cold Water, and Wilde and Saint-Germain for Axe. BPAL is pretty different from Axe though, so it still might seem weird to him at first...pick out some imps that sound good to you and encourage him to try them, even if it means branching out a bit from his usual tastes. Some of my other favorite "masculine" scents are Whitechapel, Golden Priapus, Lear and Dee.

I definitely perceive this as MILK chocolate and not dark chocolate or cocoa. In the imp and when freshly applied, it's a very true milk chocolate scent. Nice. However, as it dries it goes a little sour with my skin chemistry, like most BPAL chocolates tend to do (at least the ones that don't have cocoa absolute, which behaves itself a little better on me). With my chemistry, it reminds me of an Easter egg that has melted in the sun - that slightly sour, sugar-overloaded smell of the cheap chocolate you eat when you're a kid. It's not bad, but not as good as I want it to be. Even if it had worked on me, the pure-foody scents aren't really my style - I need some resins, woods or musk to make things interesting. I'm debating whether to keep this imp for layering purposes, but will probably swap it away.

Me too! I feel a compulsion to try everything with tea and have probably worked my way through about half of them by now, but not all of them work for me and I'm still waiting for the Lab to release that perfect black tea scent. I have high hopes for Famine, which I just got a decant of but haven't tried yet. Plunder would probably smell great, but the cinnamon would burn me so I'm steering clear of it. Quick rundown of some of the ones I have tried: Bengal smells like Celestial Seasonings Bengal Spice tea, but the cinnamon burns me. Bakeneko is my favorite scent; it's more amber and citrus than tea on my skin, but I think the tea helps round it out and make it into perfection (can you tell I love this one?). Dorian is probably my favorite GC. I just don't think I can add anything to what's been said about it already! I really like Embalming Fluid too. The tea seems to help make it more complex than your regular "refreshing" summery scent. I think the bottle I have may be somewhat aged, but it smells great. My imp of Severin smells like Earl Grey, but the first imp I had smelled only of lemon, so there may be batch differences there. I don't wear it often because it isn't very strong. I think I remember Kumiho smelling similar to Dorian without the vanilla, but very faint. Bien Loin d'Ici, bizarrely enough, smells like very good jasmine tea for the first half hour or so (rich jasmine tea without the usual "BPAL jasmine" note that I dislike). I love that one. But tea isn't a listed note and I don't see anyone else mentioning it in this thread, so maybe that's just me. I wanted to love White Rabbit, but it turns out I actually hate it (I feel sacrilegious!) - what I think is the linen ruins it for me - and I am aging the imp I have to see if the linen fades out and leaves me with a nice black tea. I need to start watching this thread, and read the rest of it carefully for more suggestions!

Hello, I am pine, and I am going to scream and scream until everything else in the blend is drowned out. Darn it, I really had high hopes for The Snow Storm, but I don't get any mint or cedar or anything except as a subtle background to PINE. Most of the snow scents do this to me; what was I thinking ordering a decant of this one? I might hang on to the decant for times when I feel like a pine scent, but I don't think that will be often.

My mom used to wear Paloma Picasso too. I haven't tried a BPAL that smells like it, but Marquise de Merteuil sounds like it might be similar: Opulent galbanum and amber, glistening peach, and a bouquet of French florals, with a merciless undertone of jonquil and heartless vetiver. Or Moscow: A rich, bold blend of imperial rose, carnation, lush jasmine, lily of the valley, dark musk, amber, bergamot and gilded tangerine. These are wild guesses - I just looked for anything that sounded like a mixed floral with some fruit and heavy perfumey notes (amber, musk...) grounding it.

There's probably nothing that smells exactly like Fantasy or Pink Sugar in the BPAL catalogue, but if you're just looking for things in the category of young, sweet, fruity/sugary scents, there are many options. Bordello would be my #1 recommendation, a delicious candy-fruit and vanilla scent. You'll definitely want to try Eat Me, Jailbait and Dragon's Milk. I second Dana O'Shee as well. Let's see...Madrid smells like grape candy to many people, Queen of Hearts is cherry and lilies, Bon Vivant is champagne and strawberry (haven't tried it, but it does sound young and fresh). As for LEs, Beaver Moon 2007 was a quite recent LE and it shouldn't be too hard to find on the For Sale forum here. Also try Sugar Skull, which is extremely sugary and is still available from the Lab (for a few more days) on the Limited Edition page. Lick It One More Time, which is vanilla mint like a candy cane, is also a currently available LE. Hope that helps!

The listed notes of Svadhinaopatika are golden amber, oude, red sandalwood, massoia bark, honey, and currant, although there could also be other ingredients that aren't listed. Have you ever had that sort of reaction to another BPAL, or anything else? And have you tried any other BPALs with any of those notes? If you've previously tried another BPAL with, say, honey, and it didn't cause that reaction, that might mean that honey isn't the culprit, which could help you narrow down the possibilities.

A mysterious, enigmatic blend of dry, mellow rosewood, crushed rose leaf and the slightest touch of warm hazel. When first applied, this is a lovely fresh rose scent. I could almost compare the rose to the Possets scent Silver Roses - it's in that same category of youthful and fresh as opposed to powdery rose. There's a certain watery quality to this scent which I think is the impression I get from BPAL's rosewood, since it smells similar to the Stardust scent Tristran to me. It isn't at all like BPAL's aquatic notes, but it still smells somehow "watery" to me. As Séance dries, the wood note emerges and gets stronger, and it starts to smell dry and almost dusty. The rose note is still detectable, though tempered with the dry woods, and the scent as a whole fades rather quickly. Overall, this scent is lighter and prettier than the description suggests, but light and pretty is not really my style. I was hoping for darker woods and more mysterious dustiness. Still, I think the concept is well-executed here, and it's a good GC to try if you're looking for rose or rosewood scents.

I absolutely love the scent of this when it's freshly applied and still wet on my skin - it's a creamy almost-vanilla/tea/musk with pure, high-pitched floral notes and sweet green grass, but all blended together into one smooth scent. However, it morphs in a bad way as it dries. BPAL's fruit notes almost always turn "fake" and generally awful on my skin, so you may want to take this review with several grains of salt. But what I got was a fruit note (artificial peach-strawberry) that soon drowns out almost everything else, with a hint of spicy ginger in the background. (The ginger scent is almost burning my throat!) For the next few hours, it stays this way and smells like a fruity perfume that would be marketed to very young girls. It's odd that no fruit notes are listed, because fruitiness is definitely the dominant "feel" of this blend. I can also understand the comparisons to suntan lotion. The scent is so different from the listed notes - I want more benzoin, sandalwood and tea! But I'm not too devastated that this doesn't work on me - I'm relieved I don't have to try and track down a bottle of such a coveted LE scent.

Do we have any clues about the paintings themselves? I found one, this is Wezwanie. Hołd. by Witold Wojtkiewicz. (edited to fix painting name)

It's quite likely to be the cassia/cinnamon, which often cause that kind of reaction. (They are close relatives and have a similar smell and similar effects.) I react to some things with cinnamon, including Saw Scaled Viper and Bengal, but there are other cassia/cinnamon-containing blends that I don't react to, like Gingerbread Poppet, Priala, and Death of Sardanapal. So it could just be an odd fluke that you haven't reacted to Bengal in the same way - maybe your skin will tolerate that level of cinnamon, but not the amount that's in Saw Scaled Viper. Of course, it could also be the red ginger, but if that's the case you're lucky because it isn't in many blends - just War and a few LEs, as far as I know. Have you tried War (from the Good Omens collection)? It's very heavy on the red ginger.

I'm basically echoing the review above me here. It's a gorgeous, sophisticated lavender scent for a few minutes, but I don't like what it becomes after that scent fades. I recognize the scent of lotus from having eaten a gross sugary lotus-filled steamed bun from an Asian fast food place. It doesn't remind me of bubble gum, as many others say, but it is nothing I want to smell like. Sort of an indistinct powdery fruity scent. I do wonder whether it would work in a scent locket, though.

Another jasmine blend that is definitely not for me. At the start there's a hint of something rich and sweet, very much like bubblegum, along with the jasmine. This note fades after the first twenty minutes or so. As it dries, Eos continues to be mostly jasmine. In the late drydown it becomes a soapy jasmine, as jasmine scents tend to do on my skin. No surprises here. At the risk of sounding like a broken record: avoid this if you don't like BPAL jasmine.

I am not a big fan of most floral scents, and I never would have tried this if I hadn't received it as a frimp from the lab (via a decant circle). To my surprise, it's lovely! In the imp: A very true lily scent with a nutty, woodsy thing going on. Wet on skin: It immediately turns to a high-pitched floral scent, but in a good way. I've tried several scents that start out with a similar pure floral opening (The Lady of Shalott, Euphrosyne, Water of Notre Dame, Hymn), but they inevitably turn bad in some way - aquatic or jasminey or powdery - and I'm apprehensive that Kostnice is going to do the same thing. This stage is pretty, though, it reminds me of magnolia and rose. Drying: I'm waiting for it to turn into The Bad Kind of White Floral, but there's no jasmine in sight. I look up the notes and see that jasmine isn't on the program, and breathe a sigh of relief. I see that what I thought was rose is actually rose geranium and rosewood, two of my favorite notes. Drydown: The frankincense is there in the background, but it's behaving itself (frankincense is not normally a favorite note of mine). I don't usually like lily either, but the lily is actually really nice here and not as air-freshener-y as it usually is on me. The rosewood and frankincense become stronger as time passes but the lily is still there. I wish the rose geranium were stronger, but this still a gorgeous scent. I probably won't need a bottle because it's just not the sort of thing I wear often, but I'll either hang on to the imp or give it to my mom; I have a feeling it's right up her alley. Reading about the creepy church in the Czech Republic that is the inspiration for this scent makes me even more intrigued by the perfume! There is a chandelier there made out of at least one of every bone in the human body.

Port-au-Prince has some almond, although it might be overwhelmed by the other notes. Almond tends to fade quickly, I find. Snow White is supposed to be almondy, right? Maybe it will return this Yule. Hellcat would be another one to try.

I love Tombstone. I knew I wanted it because I'm obsessed with Deadwood, and I must have all Wild West scents. It's not quite as rugged and manly as I expected it to be; it's actually really sweet on my skin, especially in the drydown. The initial stage is sweet vanilla, cedar, and something almost like peanut butter - but not in a gross way. When it dries down, the wood notes fade and the vanilla gets stronger; it reminds me of slightly woodsy marshmallows. I prefer "gourmand" scents, where foody notes are combined with non-foody, rather than pure foody scents, and this is definitely in that first category. The soft warm marshmallowy scent sticks around for hours; definitely one of the better and more unusual vanilla scents in my collection. There may be batch differences at work, because the sassafras is pretty light in the imp I have (although I would actually like it if it smelled like root beer, like in all these other reviews). I look forward to getting a bottle because I'm pretty sure I'll love it even if it's not the same as my imp. This is in my GC top ten at the moment!

Oh my god, I get that too. I doubt it's an anaphylactic reaction since I'm *pretty* sure you have to ingest the substance for that kind of reaction, but it makes sense that it would be some kind of sensitivity. I don't know why I thought the scratchy throat thing was normal - I just thought I didn't like frankincense. Guess I'll start avoiding it more carefully. Sad, because I love incense, and it's in a lot of incense blends. Is there much frankincense in Midnight Mass? Edit: to make more sense

I wanted to like this and I think I almost could've liked it, but unfortunately I got one of those infamous decapitated imps. The lid cracked slightly and it started leaking after the first time I opened it to sniff, so I put it in a small Ziploc bag, but it then leaked all over the inside of the Ziploc bag, which was sitting near my keyboard, and for a few days I could smell it quite strongly even through the plastic bag whenever I was at my computer. That may be the only reason I don't care for this scent, because it's the kind of thing I usually like. I'd describe it as a tart, warm, spicy scent; the gardenia is not too prominent, and there's a cherry tobacco note like in my bottle of Samhain. This might not be accurate because the smell may have been too overwhelming for me to discern notes. Finally I decided to put some on, and I wiped some of the oil from the plastic bag and the label onto my wrists. Bad idea: I think the oil had started to interact with the plastic bag or the label or something, because I got an odd burnt smell and something unpleasantly bitter and green like dandelion milk. I managed to wash most of it off, and the lingering smell afterwards was not so bad - warm and spicy like an old-fashioned perfume. I really think I might have liked Tavern of Hell if we had met under different circumstances. I will definitely try it again if another imp comes my way. So this is not really a review so much as a warning: Buy decanting supplies so you can rescue decapitated imps if you ever receive one in a swap (fresh from the lab imps don't seem to have this problem any more).

I hate to say this, but Calico Jack is one of the worst smelling perfumes I've ever encountered. I don't like aquatics to begin with, but something about the combination of the detergenty, salty aquatic note with the leather, musk and spices makes this smell like vomit and bile to me - and it's not just my skin chemistry because it smelled the same in the imp. Dry, it's not as bad, but it's still far from something I'd enjoy. I wish there were a pirate scent I could wear. Fortunately, I'm swapping it away to someone who likes aquatics. There's a good chance she'll have better luck with it, since a lot of these other reviews do seem pretty positive.

I've got to agree that this contains a generous helping of jasmine. However, I quite like the white musk underneath the jasmine, which reminds me of a body spray from someplace like Bath and Body Works. It's a pretty scent and I'm surprised it doesn't have more fans. For me, though, it's too airy, too soapy, and not my thing.

Hmm - I didn't mind the initial stage of this scent which is a heady, creamy floral, lots of ylang ylang. I like ylang ylang, but I can't stand jasmine or lily and unfortunately jasmine and lily is all I can smell after a while. In the drydown, something about this scent reminds me of living in Venezuela. I think it may be a soap we used to use there. Scent memories are weird - I almost want to hang onto this imp just for that, even though I don't like the scent. There's no way I'll ever wear it, though.

Doc Constantine and Whitechapel for me.

Most of BPAL's evergreen scents haven't ended up working for me, but this one is a winner. At least, one of my imps is. I have two different imps received in separate swaps, and testing them simultaneously I find that they are slightly different; whether that's a batch difference or an aging difference I don't know. In the wet stage, I get mostly evergreen with a bit of amber and vanilla. Imp 1 is more juniper, Imp 2 is more pine, with that bad cleaning fluid association that most pine scents have for me. Drying down, the vanilla seems to take the cleaning fluid edge off the pine and juniper, making this a soft, rounded and creamy scent. It's lovely. Imp 1 is still the better version; Imp 2 is still a bit too piney. I can pick up more of the rosewood and amber at this stage, but I think of this scent as mostly vanilla and juniper. Later in the drydown, it's gotten fainter, and now reminds me slightly of Dorian, with only the slightest hint of anything evergreen-y. At this stage the two imps smell similar although I still prefer Imp 1, which is not as sharp. Although I like both scents, Imp 1 is bottle-worthy, while Imp 2 is not quite. This is a bit of a dilemma, since I don't want to gamble on a bottle if I don't know which version it will turn out to be. Perhaps I'll just use up my imps while keeping an eye out for a cheap bottle on sales posts. I want to comment on one other thing: I don't much like the idea of dividing scents into "for men" or "for women", especially with BPAL; I have a lot of thoughts on this subject but I'll try to be brief. With commercial men's fragrance, you often get the feeling that someone said "now let's throw in a lot of stereotypical man-scents so men will buy this and not smell too different from all the other men"; you don't get that vibe with BPAL. But because it's been mentioned in a few of these reviews, I wanted to add that I don't think Golden Priapus smells at all like mainstream men's fragrance. Meaning it could be worn by anyone who likes it of any gender, but it doesn't smell like something you'd find at the mall. So don't let those descriptions put you off; this is very good.

I've heard that men are attracted to vanilla and lavender scents. You could try TKO (vanilla-lavender), if you're willing to risk putting the boys to sleep... ETA: This is so true - my own boyfriend seems to like it when I wear light, springtime floral scents, for example.

I have an older spreadsheet than the one being discussed on this page (doesn't have the Stardust/Good Omens update, etc.), and the thing I like about it is that the name of each oil is a link to its review thread. Does anyone have an updated version of that? Sorry for being so demanding, I know it must be hard enough to keep the thing updated at all without adding all the review threads.