ivyandpeony

To me, Ma Bar & HIWTK have some caramel notes w/ their honey goodness. And due to my severe caramel warping-and-amping issues (I bitch about them all over the forum, surely I've cornered you and complained once or twice ) I am the world's worst source of caramel recommendations. I bet if you dabbled with some caramel-y things. though, you might find something that complemented those Lush favorites even if you don't find something that's close to a duplicate. O is especially tricky, it seems to be one of those BPAL scents that is wildly different from person to person and is either beloved beyond measure or the subject of dirty jokes. Maybe it's the honey, that does seem to be a note that can go very, very wrong on people that it doesn't love. It's also on the simpler end of the spectrum, there's nothing to hide.

Another search trick you can try is searching for the term "fur" within the Reviews subforum. When I do a search that way, I will get results by posts, then skim the posts and see which scents the most people are mentioning. A search by titles can be less helpful, since not everyone that uses your search term in a review is using it to describe the scent - with fur, for example, people use imagery like a haughty woman in a fur coat or describe the feeling of being wrapped in a warm fur coat. It's not a perfect method but sometimes if you are seeking something that is a bit obscure, or if you're looking for a certain feel instead of a note, it can be really helpful. This link should show you the results of that search - in addition to Ivanushka, Hunter Moon and Coyote, which seem to get the most mentions, Bastet and The Lion got a lot of comments like "a cat's fur when they're lying in the sun." Hunter Moon has two incarnations - 2004 and 2007 - in addition to being much easier to find, to my nose the 2007 version would be much more like what you're seeking. 2004 was very deep and heavy, whereas 2007 was a light and clear musk (it definitely suited me better than the original).

Ivanushka is by far your best bet - Buck Moon has that feel, too, but it's become incredibly scarce (it was released in June 2005 and was apparently not a huge seller). Ivanushka was an LE so you can't order it from the Lab now, but you can check Swaps and Sales here in the forum and watch eBay for it as well. It was released in October of 2007.

So much great discussion of recently released green scents had gone on in Tamburlaine's thread, I thought it would be really helpful to the Green fans to merge it into the general green discussion. =) Spring is coming (oh please, hurry up spring!) so the action will be picking up in this thread!

That is a good idea =) Dana O'Shee and Blood Moon both have grains listed in their notes, Haloa and Lugnasadh reference grain in their descriptions. Anyone looking for a grain/bread scent will be relieved to hear that Lugnasadh doesn't smell anything like a bakery, it smells like lost eBay auctions, never ending quests and empty bank accounts. (A couple of scents contain "grains of paradise" but that is a pepper-like spice.) I pick up something slightly grainy & yeasty in Dana O'Shee, that note reminds me a little of raw oats when wet but the scent dries to a heady, creamy oats and honey.

Reading over my post this morning, I hope that it didn't come off as unsympathetic to anyone who does deal w/ the kind of allergies that terrenity, ymmat and others have. I've read so many articles about families with kids who have life threatening peanut allergies, for example - hearing the precautions they have to take and how terrifying it is to send their children off to school each day makes me so appreciative that I don't have to worry about being poisoned, basically, by something that's so prevalent in our food supply and that nearly everyone else on the planet considers innocuous at the least, even a diet staple. Allergies are a scary thing even when they seem to be mild. Mine have gotten worse as I've gotten older - I had hay fever as a kid which grew to a full spectrum of respiratory allergies as an adult and in the past year or so my skin has become very reactive, much less to particular substances but extremely so to any kind of trauma - pluck a hair on my face and I get a huge welt, absentmindedly scratch at my arm and it looks like I have been mauled, slightly itchy mystery welts will appear here and there throughout the day. And this is with a daily dose of both Zyrtec and Singulair, and I do see my allergist regularly. Even though I have been stung by bees in the past, for example, there's no guarantee that I won't have a horrendous reaction next time, since it's obvious that my allergies are escalating, so on a smaller scale I do appreciate the worries.

I'm quoting myself from some months back just to make a point - I think that if you truly have a life-threatening, potential- anaphlytic-shock-inducing allergy to an ingredient that may be present in one of these perfumes, you need to tread with extreme caution here. Some dermatitis is one thing, a hospital stay or death is another. For starters, I feel pretty confident that the Lab would be unable to guarantee that cross contamination will never occur - they use the same finite amount of equipment to fill bottles (and imps) with everything from their catalog and LE offerings (I don't think anyone could expect a company to have a separate machine for each of 500+ perfumes). It's cleaned to eliminate the scent of the previous oil before they begin filling bottles with another one - but it's impossible to ensure that every molecule from a previous oil is removed. So while a scent formula may contain none of your known allergens, the pristine bottle of that scent that arrives from the Lab could potentially contain allergens nonetheless, just as foods with no nut ingredients can contain nut particles or residue due to shared factory equipment. I would think very long and hard about whether that risk is worth it to me. It's not your fault and it's not the Lab's fault, it's just the situation. And although a list seems like a good idea, if it is a life and death question and not a "will I break out" question, I believe that I would want to hear from the Lab directly and not rely on what someone else tells me the Lab told them or what someone else says they can wear safely. I will try to bring these issues to the attention of someone at the Lab and see if they have any comments - I'm not their lawyer or spokesperson, this isn't even my area of the forum from a mod standpoint - I just get the itchies a lot so I pop in this thread fairly regularly.

If you like any BPAL blends with cocoa or honey, you will flip for this candle. I got one a while back when Beautyhabit was offering a 25% off discount code and although it was still very pricey, I have had a few of the Burn Rare line candles over the past few years and they are incredible - not something that you are going to buy 5 of at a time and burn every day. But light one and my entire downstairs (something like 1700 square feet) is scented within 20 minutes, and you get a total of something like 90 hours of burn time from one. Just having one sit on a side table is the equivalent of having a big bowl of potpourri in my family room, I can smell it from 12 feet away. (The wax in these is very soft due to the high percentage of fragrant oils, so when I have burned one to a point where I'm not comfortable lighting it one more time, I scrape out the remaining wax and put it in a tart burner). The notes listed for the Rare Love fragrance are: bitter Mayan cacao absolute, aromatic Ceylon cinnamon bark, Madagascar vanilla bean, Tunisian amber resin, Reunion Isle ylang-ylang, red rose attar, sacred Asian lotus, jasmine sambac, Mysore sandalwood, Nigerian ginger root, Malabar Coast pink pepper and sensual musk. The closest thing I can compare the scent to is Boomslang layered with single note Honey. But the scent quality is SO BPAL-y. My other favorite from this line is the Amber Resin candle: Golden Amber, Peruvian Balsam, Sumatra Benzoin Crystal, Florentine Orris, Somali Frankincense, Bourbon Isle Vanilla Absolute, Opopanax Resin, and Brazilian Tonka Bean. It reminds me a great deal of Jacob's Ladder, the awesome Yule LE from 2005 & 2006, with a hint of vanilla. ZOMG it is gorgeous. (BURN also makes liquid soaps and lotions that are available at Beautyhabit - I haven't tried them yet but plan to when I have some spare cash one of these days!)

Gosh, I don't, portalkat, but I wouldn't fret about your timing as far as swaps go. You might have missed the Yules coming down from the site, but you're probably right on time for people to begin realizing they don't have to have that 5th bottle of the Snow Storm or The Shivering Boy that they grabbed

I think Victoria would be lovely on an 11 year old girl - my niece just turned 13 and I would have had no qualms about giving it to her or her stepsister (who is 6 months younger) within the past 2 years or so. I think there are lots of Mad Tea Party recs in this thread as well as in the one for "very young children" and I definitely agree - there are tons of good ones in that category for young BPALers. There are some lovely light notes to help train sensitive noses, some sweet notes to appeal to kids (and lots of us never outgrow those), lots of citrus which I think is one of the most universally appealing families - and you have the added advantage of not having to explain what a Sacred Whore is. The Unicorn, Alice, Tweedledum & Tweedledee and Queen of Hearts strike me as scents that would be especially nice on a young lady who doesn't need to explore the worlds of red musk and patchouli just yet.

Victoria (from the Stardust series) reminds me of The Oval Portrait a great deal - V. is a little rosier, TOP has that heady honeysuckle but their underlying feel is similar to me. Morocco might be my favorite GC carnation scent - although Alice and Maiden are both very carnation-y on me and they're beloved as well. I love BPAL's carnation note(s).

I love Chinatown - to me it's mostly patchouli and florals with a little bit of fruitiness. I haven't consciously noticed a BPAL that resembles it, but I haven't been looking, so I will definitely put on my thinking cap for this challenge. I will have to try Midnight on the Midway again, soon. It's been ages! I remember trying it this summer as I was going through bottles to keep or swap and deciding it was a keeper. (This is a sign of having too many bottles, incidentally, but that's nothing new...)

I'm laughing at myself, I'm wearing Old Moon today and thought, "OMG, this is so good, I have to post about it in that Perfect Winter Scents thread!" Then realized that I had done that exactly a week ago... duh

Since Anna mentioned being unsure about whether it's appropriate to recommend non-BPAL perfumes in this section, I thought I'd clarify that for everyone - this is in no way an admonishment or an Anna-spanking, she's one of my favorites round these parts and she's always so helpful in her responses whether they're here in Recs, in Chatter, in FAQs, etc. *hugs Anna D.* In general we discourage it, since this is a part of the BPAL-specific area of the forum (I posted about it here about a year ago) - the rationale being that if someone's looking for general scent recs that smell like X,Y, or Z we have Retail Therapy for that so we can reserve this section for BPAL discussion. If every thread was a free-for-all discussion of any and all perfumes that fit the original poster's likes/dislikes/requests, I don't think this subforum would be nearly as useful to BPAL fans who are using it for its intended purpose. The size that the forum has grown to also influenced that decision - now that we have nearly 10,000 members we naturally have many more threads being started, many more posts on a daily basis, and keeping things as organized as possible from the start is much easier than trying to sort things out by splitting threads, merging threads and such. You can read a little more about it in my post in the link above. In this particular case, we all seemed to be reaching conclusion that Persephanise probably isn't going to find a bread or buttercream BPAL blend - so it made sense for Anna to suggest some favorites she's found elsewhere, and that's cool. If I was seeing posts in "The Best BPAL Vanilla" listing off all of someone's favorite etailer vanillas, that would be another thing; I also don't think it's necessary to steer folks to etailer dupes when they're asking about BPALs that are similar to a favorite perfume. In any case it isn't something that I am going to smite someone for - it really falls under the "good manners" banner to me. And I'm always available by PM if you want to talk about this or anything else going on in Recs. Alright, enough forum stuff, let's get back to talking about perfume.

I picked up a bottle of Judith and Holofernes about two months ago at the Whole Foods in my area that is carrying the Salon exclusives. When I tried it at the store, I was a little overwhelmed by the patchouli, which seemed dominant and a little raw-edged. But I love the way that patchouli ages and the other notes in the blend are favorites of mine - so I thought I'd invest in a bottle and see how things progressed after it sat in the dark for a little while. OH! I am so glad that I did! This is sublime. Sweet honey, heady magnolia, spiced up by the patchouli and carnation and held together by the sandalwood. The elements are very nicely balanced and this has the effect of an elegant perfume without seeming overly "perfumy," I think due in part to the way that the Lab's honey and carnation notes are so natural (they smell like honey and carnations, respectively, not honey-scented oil and carnation perfume) and to the patchouli-sandalwood base. This is one of my favorites of all the Salons I have tried.

I'd definitely second tartchef's suggestion - the experts on the foodies have been in and out of that thread since its incarnation so you're likely to find some detailed discussion of many scents in there. If you want to search the thread for a term like cake or bread, go down to the bottom left of any given page and enter your term in the box below the last post, then click the Search Topic button beside it. Of everything I have tried in the BPAL universe, I personally have never been struck by a dominant bready note nor a dominant buttercream note. This doesn't necessarily mean that the blends that you want don't exist, it just means you will have to try a lot of the cake, cookie, and sweet-creamy blends to find out if any of them are going to become what you want them to once they're on your skin. A lot of the foodier scents do have a bit of caramel in them and my chemistry amps caramel so much that I can't smell any of the other notes in the blend, so I don't consider myself the best guide to the foody blends. This caramel thing happened to me with Channikuyah - so there may be some good bakery notes in there that come out on your skin. They are so hard to find that I almost hate to mention them, but the best and truest cake notes I've found in any BPAL blends are in Monster Bait: Closet and Monster Bait: Underbed. Midway has a bit of a cake-y element to it, but may be sweeter than the brioche that you're seeking. Searching Reviews for mentions of the word "bread" in reviews, you will find these results, which can give you some ideas to add to your wishlist. (To replicate or to search for another term, put the term in the box on the search engine page, highlight the Reviews forum in the drop down menu, choose search title AND text, and display results as posts or topics, either can be helpful. These results are displayed as posts.) Have fun searching and trying new scents - be sure to report back and let us know what you find. (and on a moderator note, I may merge this thread into the big "foody" thread after you get some responses, just for the sake of forum tidiness.)

I second that rec - it's not exact, but it's the closest thing I have tried. To me Kyoto is fruitier than Sakura, but Spirit is floral and has lots of that cherry blossom-mimosa scent that I get from Sakura.

I took a chance on champaca, which can be the flower of doom for me when it shows up in what otherwise looks like a fabulous blend. There were so many notes that I drool for in Prospero, I had to roll the dice... I adore amber in any shape or form, plum is absolute heaven, and Beth's white musk makes me weep with happiness. So 3 outta 4, pretty good odds! The plum in this one is absolutely gorgeous, rich and grape-y and winelike - if you even think you like plum, this one's a must try. And the amber is gorgeous and spicy. But dammit, the champaca did it to me again. It must have enjoyed ruining Khajuraho for me so much that it was determined to screw up Prospero too. Ah well, it was fun trying.

I absolutely adore BPAL's white rose note (I could be the only BPAL fan who has at least four bottles of Parlement of Foules, for an example). And that ivy note! It's not used enough in my opinion, and it's so gorgeous and authentic (my house is surrounded by ivy so I know and love that wet green smell). But when I wear Madeline, my skin grabs the soil note and amps it to the exclusion of anything and everything else in this blend, which smells so marvelous in the bottle. This has happened to me many times before, with Zombi, the venerable King and Queen of Clubs, Penny Dreadful, The Premature Burial, Destroying Angel, Burial, The Death of the Grave Digger... such a long list. So I wasn't really surprised that this was the result I got - just a little sad! I'm going to give her another try before I send her away forever - hope springs eternal when you love white rose. And I am sure that Madeline is absolutely lovely on that faction of people who smell great with a teeny sprinkle of dirt on their roses.

When my bottle of The Oval Portrait originally arrived from Dark Delicacies, I wasn't sure if I was going to like it (and that disappointed me a little bit - I had with delight when I saw the description for this one). So today I was going through my bottles, culling a few, and tried it again to decide if it was going to stay or go. And within 30 seconds a resounding "YES!" was heard throughout the land. There are many bottles that arrive from their travels, still fresh and new from the Lab, that really need to sit in a dark place for a few weeks or more and just calm down. The Oval Portrait was definitely one of them for me. Not a hint of the sharpness that I got when I first tried it - this is a sweet, rich vanilla with layers of flowers on top, most noticeably honeysuckle (which is a fantastic companion for vanilla! I love this combination.) The Oval Portrait reminds me a bit of Victoria - on me, it's Victoria Leaves Wall and Visits New Orleans. She leaves her tea roses behind and wraps herself in honeysuckle and the result is just delightful. I love it.

theal8r, I was just popping in here to post a comment about an old favorite I rediscovered, and I realized it actually might be a good candidate for what you are looking for. I have a bottle of Nemesis I bought almost 3 years ago and I hadn't pulled it out and worn it in what seems like months - it has really gotten gorgeous with a little age on it! I always liked it, and like so many BPAL blends it's richer and yummier now. Nemesis has tons of fig but it's tempered with woody and spicy notes (the description says "cypress, ginger, fig, dried rose, red patchouli, tonka bean and cyclamen"). It's not as green or bright a fig as Strangler Fig, but it's lovely nonetheless.

It may not be that great a solution to my Dublin problem but Old Moon is such a gorgeous winter perfume... at least now that I have Old Moon to love, I can alternate it with Dublin and my Dublin will last longer. (And the longer it lasts, the better chance that the Lab will find a source for the stuff that they can't get right now that went into Dublin, or the artisan who supplied them and had to close shop will be opening again by the time I am using the last drop of my Dublin, right? Right? Please tell me it will happen! Hold me...)

Of those three, Marie is my favorite because the violet really stands out. I really can't smell it in Nocturne, I think the other florals in that one overwhelm the violet on me - Morgause is lovely but very complex and incense-y, so the violet is a team player but not dominant on me. Veil has lots of violet on my skin (notes: white sandalwood, lilac, gardenia, violet, orris, lavender and ylang ylang) as does Le Serpent Qui Danse (violet with vanilla and gardenia, but on me the violet is in first place and gardenia's in third, which it doesn't often do). Faith is a fantastic violet blend - sugared violets, smells just like it sounds and I love it. It's only available in a bottle set, Hope and Faith, The Siamese Twins (part of Carnaval Diabolique) and since you're on the fence about liking violet, I have a feeling you won't want to make an investment like that (unless you happen to adore rose - Hope is sugared rose). You may be able to find a decant from someone in swaps though. Violet lovers should all try that one, IMO! If you tried Pink Moon 07, which was sugared carnation, it's very similar but of course with violet instead of carnation.

AEris, can you wear rose? If you can I think you might like Psyche (Bulgar rose, Chinese white musk, lavender, orchid and frankincense). Pontarlier may also fit your tastes, it's green and herbal yet pretty and girly at the same time (ferns, lilac, blackcurrant, rose, lavender, sugar and absinthe). Unfortunately, they are all about to sail away to Discon Island, but many of the Muses have a real floral-herbal feel, which is what I got from Sleepy Moon overall. (Although, as you know, Sleepy Moon and I didn't get along splendidly, and I sent my bottle away to live with... oh, it was you! ) If you want to get some general herbal recs, there is a thread here for your perusal - feel free to bump it with questions or comments, too.

Just a periodic bump to get some attention in case there are some folks out there who haven't read this thread... Since we've had a lot of new members join over the holidays and therefore more "Help me, I'm new" threads (in addition to lots of "help me with a gift idea" threads) I'm trying to stay on top of archiving those when no one's posted for 30 days to keep the place as uncluttered as possible. If you find your thread's been archived and you want follow-up recs, you have 2 choices: you can PM me and I can resurrect it, you post a reply at the end to update and continue discussion. Or you can start a new thread for yourself. Just don't start a new thread for yourself if your first thread is still alive and well in Recommendations! *This applies to the topics that are oriented very specifically to one person, you or your mom or your sister types of threads. The first post in this topic explains how Recs works, when you should be bumping old topics for discussion and when it's OK to go ahead and start new topics.