Hesper

I'm getting piney bourbon vanilla out of this. I want the plum and salt and benzoin you're all getting.

Imped from Ajevie, FS'd as I love having variety. A little dewy and ozonic, as though it's rainwater collected from the tips of mountain juniper and kept in a shining glass flask to wash in a holy place. Elderflower offers just a hint of something behind that aerial cleanliness, and prevents it from feeling too Irish Springs soapy: sweet intuition darting through the pure logic and intellect of the scientist, flickering in and out as the scent warms up. It takes on a little syrupy quality reminding me of my bottle of elderflower liqueur, til the place it takes me to is a forested mountain clearing blooming with flowers and welling with the uprush of a spring. I love having an ozone I can wear! One more for my None Gender half of the collection.

A Reddit user swapped me an imp of this for the Ars Draconis imps I had that just go cherry rest stop soap on my skin, and I loved it so much I immediately full-sized. The leather and spicy carnation are my influences here, with white musk and that gorgeous vanilla that balance it out. The sage and cedar never quite come out for me; but the leather + musk + vanilla + carnation and a shadow of lavender underneath is literally perfect. Nobility in a bottle, a knight in white leathers, a falcon in the gloved fist. This is probably going to become my "signature" with Fallen resting In Memoriam, lol: it's so prettily androgynous and complex. 10 Antichrists out of 10!

The gothic vampire wine scent of my dreams. Dark, lush, red red red, fruity-smoke and intoxicating. 5 vampire larpers out of 5. I need to go more places worthy of wearing this.

It definitely opens up as green stems and flowers snapped and bleeding sap from the force of May rainsqualls: a white floral with the freshness of rained-out air, as well as that greenness to balance out the cleanliness of the scent. It's very pure. It dries down to an interestingly...hollow-feeling, slightly soapy white flower-and-musk combination on me. Like there's a hole in the middle of the scent, somehow. Like the glamorous lady in the woods turning around to reveal her hollowed back...Is that the treachery? I like the opening, the end is baffling. I'm probably gonna destash this one, as I prefer darker notes in tandem with my whites, and I would have liked more electric intrigue to this, but I'm glad to have tried it!

Oh, I LOVE this. Moonflower is palely sweet and refined, and the orris adds a smoky quality to it--like the thin trails of incense smoke, not bonfires or cigarettes. I'm obsessed. I NEED a bottle of this. Oh, NO, how am I ever gonna find a bottle of this?!

Are there any blends with the same white rose as Asses Plus Long from the 2021 Lupers? I LOVE how dewy it is, and how it smells like how velvety soft a lush rose petal would feel...

Clean, slightly cologney soap. A hint of the same salty air I get out of Calico Jack, but I think I may have to give up on oceanic scents ;-; they just do not want to give me what I want from them. Orange blossom usually sings on me, and it isn't even coming through here.

Spellbound on me comes off as a sweet cherry cola. Given some time, the amber emerges to mellow down that sweetness, but I wanted roses...!

Warm, white flowers. My last experience with these was Long Night Moon 2020, which I dug for its gorgeous shiver of frost bespelling the lunar garden. Grief is much different. These are warm, damp white flowers in a summer rain; broken green leaves, elemi’s citrusy zest, and woody spices from the calamus help ground the otherwise-overbearing floral sweetness of it all. Somewhere, an aquatic element (hydrangea?) plays into it, and pours rain over the flowers, and they thrive in it. The name is fairly inappropriate; this is a cheerful, playful scent to me. Being caught out by that unexpected rainburst while playing in a garden...Springtime in a bottle. It turns into something very soapy on me, likely the lily-of-the-valley’s effect; it’s a pretty soap, but not necessarily what I want my skin to smell like. I’d turn to Long Night Moon first, for that frosty moonlit bouquet, if I was craving pale flowers. This is too welcoming, too gentle, and too docile for me. I’m glad the Lab sent me one to try, though!

In the bottle, it's...mostly coconut. A strangely sharp, unpleasant coconut: I can detect orris powderiness in it, and something…weirdly herbal under it? Where are my roses? As it warms on my wrists, the coconut mellows out to something a little less piercingly artificial. The musk comes out now, and I do start getting pale white impressions from it—rounded, soft pearls, for sure, but no roses and no diamonds so far... A little too pale and dull for me, and that unpleasantly bittersalt green lingers underneath it. Rotting rose stems and muddy pearls floating in coconut soup… Actual rose emerges later, a powder-drifted floral sweetness. An ethereally uplifting, pink and delicate rose—but after the rest of the scent, it’s neither pretty enough nor unique enough for me to like this perfume very much. A pity; I love the original fairy tale, and it’s such an evocative series of notes, but I far prefer the velvety petals and richness of Asses Plus Long (picked as a comparison for being another "gem" rose).

Now here’s a sexy aquatic. Alright, I live on a boat with my father who's a rabid Calico Jack fanboy, so this would have been a hilariously worthwhile frimp for the Lab to pick for me even if the scent were subpar. (Did someone divine about this? It's almost TOO funnily perfect...) But it’s not. It’s dashing as hell. It starts citrusy bright, green & crisp from the bottle. As it dries, you’re casting off from an island of citrus trees, carrying off a crateload of fruit against the scurvy—now salt-crusted leather starts to dominate the note, musky and worn with the sweat of working the deck. The sea air is bracing, a refreshing breeze blowing over the sails and filling the flag, during the heyday of the Calico bunch—before that fateful day when Bonny and Read were the only ones prepared to defend a drunken revel of a crew. Incredibly masculine, even though I’m not particularly attached to gendering scents (why shouldn’t men smell like sweet white moonflower?). This absolutely is the scent of Calico Jack, a bright citrus cologne overthrown by actual sweaty musky work, debonair and dashing rogue and total dandy fool. It’s fantastic. I don’t know how wearable it is for me—feeling sweaty and grimy is a Problem for me—but I adore the frimp, nonetheless.

In the bottle, I'm getting...Pinesol. And then it goes to diner burger grease on my skin, mustard and hot beef and all. This is NOT what the imp I had of Faustus did all those years ago when I first discovered BPAL did. Could this be a poorly blended frimp...?

Oh, this was one of my out-there choices for myself, an experiment—the fruits and heavy woods scared me, and I wasn’t familiar with labdanum enough to imagine how this would smell. Now that I've tried it, I am obsessed. Medea starts wet as dark, rich pine resin, sharp and deep, touched by a carefully light hand of sweetness that just illuminates the dark. Labdanum’s honeylike, leatherlike aspects, earthed by myrrh, blend incredibly well into the pines: like a candle borne through the dark forest, making one’s way to the rite. Myrrh earths it all. Dark, but never bleak. Cool, with flashes of purple fruits on the offering plate that never turn jammy or cloying; the body and complexity of this scent is gorgeously intoxicating. As it dries, the florals emerge like gathered herbs, never becoming overly sweet, never fighting back against that masterful hand that bore them here. The resins thin out to a wispier scent, incense clouds trailing up to heaven as the darkness gathers round you, sweet with power, dark with rage. This is a scent to throw Selene from the sky with, so that she can’t witness your wicked works. I LOVE Medea, as I really should have expected given my love for the sorceress herself. What a gorgeous, witchy scent.

Yes, I do keep calling it Asses Plus in my head, because I’m twelve. One of three Luper releases I’m lusting after (the other two as yet unpurchased: Nocturnal Palace and Cascading Silks), Asses Plus caught my attention as a relatively simple scent: yes, I love the complexity of things like Medea, becoming a whole fragrant experience on skin, but while learning what I enjoy in a perfume, it’s nice being able to pick some things out and say “yes. that. that is the good shit.” Or eye warily. Jasmine, I am looking suspiciously at you. Asses Plus Long opens in the bottle as an indeterminate vague sweetness, pale and enticing. It’s a little frightening to dab on: what if it’s too sweet? What if I actually hate rose as a main note? There’s no need to fear any of that. The opal nature of this rose retains the sensuality and clarity of the flower, without becoming overpowering; the most vivid impression I get is of the soft, luxurious texture of white rose petals, silky under stroking fingertips. It remains pale and light as the scent deepens, soft and lush. I agree with romantic as stated above. Vanilla and benzoin come into play as two ends of a spectrum of light: from moment to moment the undertone on which the white rose petals drift shifts from high clear vanilla to darker, warmer (almost boozy: I love the intoxicating whisper here) caramel benzoin. I am reminded of the play of fire in an actual opal, the way a white bead will suddenly dazzle in the sun, shot through with reds and blues that were hidden up til now. How in the world did Beth capture such a thing in scent? Absolutely magical. A dynamic scent, but it doesn’t seem inclined to morph into anything else: it just shimmers and shines. Applied on moisturized skin, the scent holds up better than much of what I’ve tried so far. Gorgeous, crystalline without being cold, bright without being glaring, sensual without being cloying. Asses Plus Long sparkles. I’m very glad to have blind-bottled it: an opal for my little jewelry-chest.