Manic Pixie Dream Ghoul

In the bottle this is gnarly - a sweet, thick, almost medicinal kind of smell. I was afraid to put it on because it smelled so intense. What a morph though. The green plant-y smells in this (vetiver maybe?) mixed with the heady sweetness give the impression of humidity, hothouses, carnivorous plants. It has that bitter smell of tropical growth mixed with the stickiness of a flytrap, but at the same time the musk comes through with this kind of animal sexiness. This is your Poison Ivy cosplay smell for sure. This is going to sound odd, but despite the completely contradictory description I just gave, this one reminds me of Arcana. They both have this full, rounded scent where the sharp herbaceous plant smells blend together to create something more rich and thick and incense-like. The dry down trends more toward incense over time. It's feminine, not in a girly way, but in a thick, musky, dark kind of way. I don't think I suit it, but I'd like to meet the person who does.

I love this. Tried an imp, bought a bottle. It's a perfect citrus, not over-sharp cleaning product citrus or sticky candy citrus, but the real deal. It's like I just peeled an orange or a grapefruit or something delicious, right in the room. But more than that, it's backed by this deeper blend of smells which seems to trick my nose into picking up something different every time. Is it wood? Fancy tea? Leather? I can't tell, the scents all morph around each other and I can't separate them. Manhattan is never overpowering. I want to bathe in it. Other smells I like or dislike depending on mood, but I wouldn't mind smelling like this all the time. My only gripe is that it doesn't last as long as some of the other scents, or throw as far. Maybe that's for the best though. If it were strong I would be in danger of living my life within a powerful force-field of citrus, sterilizing surfaces and exterminating insects as I pass. Would probably still wear it though.

Fancy, fancy, fancy man. This one smells like Really Expensive Aftershave. Quoth my father's girlfriend: "It's like if Lynx Africa was actually good." For those of you in the USA, Lynx is the alternate brand name for Axe in a bunch of countries where they weren't allowed to call it Axe because of trademark issues. In South Africa it's actually called Ego, but that's not the point. I think what she was trying to say is that it definitely falls into the men's grooming product smell association category without being loud and obnoxious. But hey, I'm no code cracker. I have never smelled Dorian, which everyone seems to compare this to, but I have smelled Vicomte de Valmont, and to me Jareth smells like that but without the sharp greenness of the Vicomte. It's a little warmer, sweeter, darker. It's delicious. Not in a food way, just in a delicious way. I like it a lot. Don't take the man smell comparisons to heart too hard though - context is everything. If I remove my associations it just smells clean and complex and... expensive. A masc guy wearing it might smell like a fancy man, but a woman would smell like a mystery. I'm into it either way.

I smell like a wizard

This is my first ever review for BPAL! 🤩 This scent had me really conflicted to start off with - having read the reviews proclaiming it as smelling like a sexy man, a dominatrix, and a holiday candle, I was surprised to open the imp and get a strong whiff of... vape juice? The Milkman Heritage Smooth (a vanilla tobacco flavour which has now been discontinued), to be specific. I don't vape anymore, but even after a few years that smell seems to still be logged in my memory. I found that the association was a bit too strong to really enjoy the scent, so I abandoned it in favour of my other imps for a while. I have since learned that a lot of e-cig liquids use tonka as a cheaper substitute for real vanilla; that plus the tobacco must have been the key notes in common. Obviously the tonka and sweet tobacco are the dominant scents for me. I can also smell rum, kind of reminiscent of Malibu, although the other sweet scents might be contributing to that impression - coconut-adjacent smells rather than actual coconut smells. I can't really detect any chardonnay, and I definitely can't smell any leather. I've spent a lot of time with upholstery, so I thought I'd be able to pick this one, but sadly, no luck. Perversion is, in actuality, a lovely smell. To my nose it is VERY sweet, but unlike some other scents it seems to have enough depth to pull it off. For me it smells the same in the bottle as it does applied and dried, it has good throw, and it lasts the longest out of all the imps I got, sometimes for more than a day, although I find being followed by an intense sweet smell for a long period of time can be a little tiring for my senses, so I prefer to use it sparingly or mixed with other scents. My partner, who originally said he didn't like it for being too sweet and foody, keeps spontaneously saying I smell nice when I wear it. Overall an enjoyable perfume, despite my initial hesitations. Maybe one to avoid if you've run out of patience for sweet tobacco vape flavours though.