ivyandpeony

Toasted sesame oil - the dark brown one - has a much stronger smell (and flavor) than raw sesame oil. You've completely stumped me on this one, Couscous... if I have tried a BPAL with a hint of sesame, it was subtle enough to escape my nose! Then again, the nutty notes in BPAL don't come through as extremely nutty to me. The almond note falls a little more towards cherry to me and the hazelnut note has a little more of an oatmeal smell, if that makes any sense. Toasted sesame is a really nutty smell to me. (Just in case you don't cook much: Sesame oil is extremely delicate, whether it's toasted or raw, so if you decide to pick some up to try in layering combos, store it in your refrigerator. It can go rancid very quickly otherwise.)

I really loved the Cauldren scent (despite Charity's deliberate misspelling ). Sin is the BPAL blend that reminds me of it most - amber, patchouli and cinnamon. A little mod note - I added the Yodelingfish reference to the title with the hopes that it would help attract a little more attention to your topic.

Thagirion (one of the Qliphoth) is my favorite scent with grape - it is really unusual because it's crisp and light, like white grape juice with a hint of vanilla. Titania seems to use the same type of light, white grape note combined with a lot of fruit. On me, Bess seems to have a true purple grape note without any trace of booze, even though the description describes it as "grape spirit." And the fruit in Bordello also seems very grape-like on me, even though it should be a combo of plum and burgundy wine.

I had almost forgotten how much I love Tarot: Temperance until Ah Xia just mentioned it. I might have to rush upstairs and smell it when I finish this post. I get that dandelion note I pick up in Roadhouse, but without the beer. I mean hops. And tons of greenery, wildflowers and fresh air. It gives an extremely natural clean feeling. I don't know why I have this burst of spring fever - this is just the second cold day we've had in Atlanta in a week or more.

I think that The Darkling Thrush has taken over as my favorite violet scent. All the violet lovers out there should take a chance on this one before it disappears! It's different from any other BPAL violet blend I have tried and I love the spicy amber/sweet violet combination. The Bearded Lady is still close to my heart, as is Le Serpent Qui Danse... I think I may like my violet blends a little more over the top and feminine than some of my buds.

First, a wee bit of mod talk: I found an older thread with a similar theme, just different adjectives... I merged it with this one, kept Flowermouth's title & threw in a few of the adjectives from the old thread so we wouldn't lose that earlier discussion. As for the subject at hand, one of the most dark and unsettling BPAL blends I know of unfortunately was discontinued in the great purge of 2004 - you wouldn't think from the notes that Spectre (lilac, tuberose, Lily of the Valley, palmarosa, and white sandalwood) could be so creepy. I have just an imp left and although I love it, I love it in the way that I love a good scare or a good cry. Something about it fills me with a sense of sadness, nostalgia and a little bit of fear. It's the only BPAL blend I've had a strange emotional reaction to.

Garden Path With Chickens will win the hearts of anyone who loves a green floral with a hint of wetness - like the dew on the grass before the sun burns it off. It's the freshest, greenest, springiest BPAL blend ever - it knocked Floral Moon and the Beltanes off their perch for me!

Dabbing on the delicious lavender-vanilla of TKO is a great prescription for better sleep. Soaking in a hot tub of water, inhaling the lavender-vanilla beauty of TKO while your body completely relaxes, is a great prescription for an 8 hour temporary coma. I need enough of these to build a little snowball fort in my guest room, then I can disassemble it one by one for months of restful, delicious sleep. I have to say, the Panacea bombs really have made me appreciate their simplicity. I think I'm tired of cocktailing bright pink bath bombs with bubble bars and chunks of massage bars and half of an extra bath bomb and coming out smelling like a huge pink marshmallow. (Notice I say tired of, not giving up forever ) These are so effective and fragrant, they make my baths enjoyable without having to turn them into a street fair.

I love Moxie the oil, but it can kind of take over my world when I do the ole rub-on-the-palms-and-inhale trick. I will smell ginger for days, which may not be the ideal for me once I'm done with the situation where I needed to get my mox on. But a Moxie bath? What genius! It's like your own intensive, heat-activated temporary Moxie cloud. Breathe deep and feel the energy, motivation and courage building! This bomb bounced around and fizzed in a happy, Moxie kind of way. The batch mine came from had a bit of turmeric in it for color, but I believe the fizzy-boom imps have dropped that over worries that it could cause tub stains. I have to say I did enjoy the sunny golden color of the water, but I'll enjoy an undyed Moxie bath every bit as much since the bottom line for me is scent - I was surrounded by it! My skin felt nice, not dry but not slick, I didn't have any tub-scrubbing to do, I had a gentle waft of Moxie-Lite on my skin, and my post-holiday sluggies were lifted.

Aw, Baudelaire - I admire your tenacity! *prepares soothing, cool cloth for eyestrain and headache* Here is a small trick you can try when faced with finding a bit of information in a daunting thread like this one: Look at the bottom of the page you are on, on the left side, under the bottom post. You should see a box that says "Enter Keywords" with a button to its right that says "Search Topic." Type your term(s) in that box, and only the thread you are reading will be searched! I find that Lush-BPAL similarities are very subjective - but I did check to see what scents contain blackberry. Glasgow (The rich scent of wild blackberry breezing over gentle rosy heather) and Bewitched (Deep, luscious green and berry scents that evoke images of woodland witchcraft and the raw power of nature: blackberry, sage, green tea, wild berries and dark musk) are the only GC blends that contain it - but there are a number of blends that are dark and fruity. Try searches at the lab's web site for berry(ies), currant and plum for those. Hopefully you'll get some response to your question, but if not, try Glasgow and Bewitched to start.

I'm a lucky girl, in that I was around before the single notes were discontinued and I bought a bottle of Stargazer Lily because it's one of my very favorite florals in the entire world. I like to use it to amp up the lily sometimes in the blends I love. My favorite blends of the ones containing Stargazer Lily are Bearded Lady and Berenice. I just tried Melancholia for the first time so I don't know that I have enough of an impression to "review" it on its stargazeliciousness - I got a lot of lilac from it, but I can say I loved it and it's gorgeous. To my nose, Cobra Lily seems to contain Stargazer Lily... have you tried it yet?

I am in the process of doing this too - although I did get rid of all the fuschia socks from the Limited circa 1986 a while back. (I had scrunchy socks to match every sweater I bought there, but they bled dye in the laundry like wounded whales every time I washed them! They were the scourge of my entire floor in my dorm - once we all got together and made up one big laundry load of nothing but those evil socks. But I digress.) I have hit a bit of a wall - cleaned out most everything but my own clothes and shoes, and I am having the worst time getting rid of things. Let me know if you come up with any tricks that work for you, and congrats on the home detox

Jacob's Ladder is a great suggestion - last year's formula has aged into an incredible, complex, spicy amber. It's so fabulous I haven't actually tried on this year's formula, just sniffed it from the bottle. The Darkling Thrush reminds me of a classic '30s or '40s scent. It's violet and iris anchored by amber. The effect is ultra-feminine while being quite different from the va-va-voom, "Whatever Lola Wants" feel I get from Hell's Belle, Black Dahlia, Euphrosyne and other heady florals that contain gardenia, magnolia, tuberose, or jasmine.

Hey there seadragon! Happy New Year! On me, Storyville and Devil's Night have something in common, sugary musk notes, it seems. Smut also reminds me a wee bit of Storyville, although not as much as DN. Storyville seems to have some vanilla that those other two are lacking - if you end up giving them a try and don't feel it at first, maybe try layering with one of your favorite vanilla blends? Good luck - I love Storyville and although I don't hoard it so much that I never wear it, every time I put it on I'm reminded that there's a very small, finite amount of it in that bottle... and that's it. *sigh*

My skin has amped the caramel note like crazy in the few blends that Beth has used it in, to the detriment of the other gorgeous notes that I knew were lurking. Not that caramel isn't a yummy smell, it's just that I'm not fond of heavy, sweet, "simple" perfumes and that's what my chemistry turned Red Lantern into. (And you should smell what I can do to Miskatonic U - you would think I'd spilled a pint of Bailey's Irish Cream on myself). My first try of The Arrival... sadly (for me) has been the same experience, just a huge, wafting caramel cloud. Like I said, not entirely negative, just not my ideal experience when I look at the incredible components that have gone into this perfume! Since I bought the set of Exhibit II imps, I definitely will keep this one and see if a little age makes a difference.

I have a thing for fresh, sunshiny, springy scents. Not the artifical dryer-sheet type of freshness, but the thing that Beth's mastered with Beltane (2005 & 2006), Flower Moon, Pontarlier - the perfumes that make me feel like I am surrounded with flowers, grass, and the kind of fresh air that doesn't have a smell of its own, but that somehow makes everything around you smell so incredible. Green florals, but with a little something more to make them special. So, this is it. The Holy Grail. I'm outside in the late spring in the country (and I am far, far from the parts of the farm where smelly animals live - any chickens around me have been nesting in the herb garden, not a chicken coop!). I have to have a bottle of this when springtime comes! FS, now you've issued a challenge to Beth... wait til we get the Enraged Chicken Musk. Or Buttercream Frosted Chicken Cake. You've thrown down the gauntlet and she will make you love teh chickens smellies!

Aw, Hepcat... hugs to you for your homesickness! I hope you discover more and more things about your new town to love so those pangs won't feel as sharp. There's also a general thread about rain scents that might give you some more leads on blends to try. For me, so many of the "rain" scents end up with an aquatic note that doesn't agree with me - but I definitely second the suggestion of Szepassony.

I don't know if there's anyone who has had every BPAL rose work on them... if so I wish they would post! I have rose blends that I adore, and there have been rose blends that have just been stale and icky on me. For the most part, I think it has to do with the particular rose that's used in the blend, except in those cases where there's a rogue note that goes weird on me. I would love to ask Beth just how many different varieties of rose she uses in all of the different blends - I know there are tons. Sometimes Beth tells us specifically what varietal she's using. White rose hasn't made it into many blends but it's beautiful. Some blends mention Bulgar rose, Bulgarian rose, tea rose, wine rose, musk rose, Sumatran rose, imperial rose, damask rose, Damascan rose, Moroccan rose, wild rose, shrub roses, Turkish rose, Somalian rose, and black rose (this was in the gorgeous and much-mourned discontinued Noir as well as the much-coveted Formula 54, but can currently be found in Sophia. Gotta try her again!). Some of these may just be descriptive terms but for the most part I think they're true rose types. There are three roses in Harlot, Bess contains five different roses, and who knows how many are in Two, Five & Seven (I once heard a rumor that it was seventy-something ) If you are the type who likes to keep notes and spreadsheets, you can cross reference blends that contain the same type of rose and predict which ones may work on you and which won't, you can track which smell similar to your nose (handy when the description just says "rose") and guess what varietal mught be in those blends where they aren't named. I adore rose when it works on me, and I did those things I just mentioned for a while. But since I've been around long enough to hoard some Rose Red and Parlement of Foules and since Two, Five and Seven is readily available, I don't fret too much. Other favorite rose-heavy blends of mine are Harlot, Marie, Ode on Melancholy and Rakshasa. I was really sad that Delight, Moon Rose, Blood Rose, Black Rose, London and Lucy's Kiss all made me smell like a stale old rose sachet. But that's the breaks.

I went ahead and merged the old thread looking for blends similar to Poison with the recent one started by Jenesis, now that we have a lively discussion going. I know lots and lots of people would dance for joy if Venom could be resurrected! Sadly, Beth had to discontinue it for a component issue Those are always the least likely blends to come back. But hey - against all odds Antique Lace came back! So never say never.

It's a shame that the Lab had to discontinue Venom - a lot of people found it to be the closest BPAL blend to Poison. Someone even posted a similar request a few years ago, but I didn't merge the threads because all the scents recommended to her are now discontinued and practically impossible to find. I would try some of the plum and berry scents, and look for those that also have floral or spicy elements instead of just a sweet component (Midwinter's Eve is like that on me, too). I love Purple Phoenix - but if you want to order that one, today is the last day! Blood Countess (black plum, smoky opium, roses, Hungarian lilac, white gardenia and wild berry) might work well. Bordello is very plummy but could be too sweet - but I would also give it a try along with Bathsheba (plum and carnation). Florence is amber, berries, iris and spices, and Masabakes is currants with cloves and myrrh - another two that might work with your chemistry to get that heady, rich, and spicy feel of Poison.

How could I not bump this one when I stumbled on it? Lycaon was definitely made to order.

I've heard that Lyonesse is close. Which is why I'm coveting Lyonesse at the moment. I had not thought about comparing the two - I would say that Underpants is thicker and more syrupy to me, whereas Lyonesse is lighter, a little more perfumy than foody in nature. But Lyonesse is absolutely gorgeous regardless of whether you like or dislike Underpants! I think everyone should try it, and vanilla fans will especially love it.

I would recommend Azathoth - it was super-duper-strength vetiver to me. I also find Sloth and Saturnalia to be very strong vetiver. I will note, though, that my skin amps vetiver like crazy. Still, with other vetiver blends (like Marquise de Merteuil, for example) I can smell many of the other components - these are the ones where the vetiver was really dominant.

Listen to these wise women, they know of what they speak.

This is definitely the most purple scent I have ever experienced. It's lush and gorgeous and heady. The only note I was concerned about was the wisteria, which doesn't often agree with my chemistry - and luckily for me I can just barely smell it when this is in the bottle and wet on my skin. As Purple Phoenix blooms, it becomes gorgeous candied violets, plums and resins. I am entirely smitten with this scent and I think it is only going to get more beautiful as it ages.