Teasing

[Seajewel]

In which the fate of one’s entire garment rests on a stray flick of a feather: mallow flower, peppermint cream, blue lilac, bourbon vanilla, benzoin, English roses, teakwood, and nutmeg.

[groovyrooby]

So weird, this one! Right out of the decant, it's got a sourness that reminds me of A Sorceress - I'm thinking it's something to do with the fabric here and silk there? I got a similar (softer) sourness to start here. Kind of like feet? Mixed with the mint. Warmed up to a lovely sweet waft, assuming it's the mallow flower & bourbon vanilla. But up close, I couldn't seem to shake that minty sour smell. Almost worth it for the sweetness! Stuck around a good couple hours. 

[katharina]

What an odd scent this is. It feels like Beth was attempting recreate both the scent of the room the woman & cat are in, as well as, play with what the colors of the painting smelled like.

 

Initially it's a blast of acetone, which is quite startling. From there I can start to tease out some of the individual players: indolic flowers, some peppermint,  a hint of nutmeg. They don't feel cohesive to my nose. It's a cacophony of loud smells, and reminds me of a roomful of toddlers playing with toy instruments. It's not music they're making, so much as it is noise. That's my synesthesia experience of this scent. 

 

I wonder if these notes will ever learn to play together, or it will remain them all just doing their own thing?

[samanare]

Peppermint cream with pale flowers. The lilac and peppermint come out the most on me. The mallow flower is also there, adding to the floral nature of the scent. And I can just pick out the benzoin.

[MonBon]

This is Beth flaunting her prowess for turning visual art into smell-art.💙 I usually find lilacs challenging and own less than 3 scents with lilacs. Teasing opens with a creamy mint that serves to keep the lilac from turning too indolic, it isn't a long-lasting mint. The strongest note is the lilac followed by the English roses, the whole scent smells very turn-of-the-century. Fancy dress, playing with a peacock feather and wearing a massive rose on her bright blue dress, lilac powder and pomade in her curls-- big Victorian vibes. It has a hint of humidity to the florals, it's also rather floaty as opposed to heavy and not super sweet.

After resting this decant longer, the mint adds a squeak I'm not particularly fond of when blended with lilac. I prefer my florals sweeter and less indolic, Victorian ennui. It does smell nicer about 3 hours after: silky vanilla and benzoin with the faintest memory of florals. Throw: low/med, longevity ~5hrs

[roseus]

This one was strange to me in the imp, I think something about the way the peppermint cream and lilac were combining. Not bad just threw my nose. On my skin this sorts out with the peppermint cream being more dominant, it's not *super* minty and there's a lot of that airy, marshmallow-y thing going on with the mallow flower as well. I get a bit of lilac as well, and as it dries the rose and teak start to poke out. They give just a touch more body to the scent. 

[doomsday_disco]

This starts off as mostly blue lilac on me, kissed with peppermint and mallow flower, and backed by the rose and the woods/resins. The peppermint becomes lighter once the scent is dry, and the lilac remains the dominant note throughout wear. The bourbon vanilla in this is sheer and not sweet, and the mallow flower is more the flower than actual mallow (I got more floofy mallow from White Cat). The rose in this is pretty tame for rose, and the woods/resins gain strength over time, but never manage to overtake the lilac.

 

Testing this, along with some other scents from the May Lunacy update, has made me realize that I'm currently not interested in lilac. (I don't dislike it, but I rarely reach for the scents I have that feature it, and the scents featuring it from the May release feature the note pretty prominently.) But if you are interested in lilac, this is a complex lilac scent that's very lilac but you still get to smell some other notes, so this may be worth a try if that sounds up your alley.

Edited August 2, 2023 by doomsday_disco

[Estamets]

This goes on with a lovely burst of mint and promise! 

Sadly, on my skin, this blend turns into mush. There’s a barely-there whiff of mallow but it goes in the direction of most florals on me: a gooey pile of week-old flowers. 
 

I don’t get any wood or nutmeg. 
 

I blame my skin chemistry for this epic fail. YMMV. 
 

 

[splendidissima]

This one's fascinating! It's such an odd but good (?) combination of notes!

 

I get a lot of peppermint cream - and it is more creamy than, say, a Lick It - alongside pale blue-violet flowers, cool and...well, floral! I can't really disentangle specific floral notes, but it calls to mind exactly the dress from the artwork, with those blue stripes and the billowing skirt. I don't really get teakwood or nutmeg; it stays soft mint + cream + cool blue-hued florals, with good throw.

 

I'm not usually drawn to florals, but I love peppermint and cream and vanillas, and also cats, so I wanted to try this one, and I'm glad I did. I don't know if I love it, but I find that I keep reaching for it and testing it and sniffing it, because it's so interesting - so I've actually been wearing it a lot!

[LavenderCoffee]

This is a fun bit of chaos freshly applied: feels a bit like scent notes clashing with each other, or maybe it's something my skin chemistry adds to the composition. Maybe it smells like what is going on inside a cat's head when they play with one of these toys and the feathery bits are zipping back and forth. As it dries down it settles into a minty floofy situation with florals peeking out, and that is more agreeable.

[Little Bird]

Mint often smells very discordant to me in perfume, unless it's super gourmand like it is in Spooky, one note-ish like it is in the original Lick It blend where it's just a mint candy cane, or used to intensify snow and pine notes for an atmospheric, wintry illusion.  In anything else, it just doesn't blend well to my nose.  I tried to like here, telling myself that perhaps it was like a blast of cold air over lilacs on a spring day, but it just doesn't work for me.  It smells like someone dumped a bottle of peppermint extract on to some poor lilacs.  I wish that I could take the peppermint out of the blend entirely because the marshmallow-y vanilla, honeyed spring sweetness of the lilacs, and the dewy rose underneath the mint smell lovely.  An hour in, the mint finally starts to fade to nearly nothing, but the airy, floofy quality of the scent has disappeared as well, leaving me with mostly red roses, resinous benzoin, dark and slightly bitter, masculine leaning teakwood, and a smooth, slightly buttery, not overly sweet vanilla to round it out and soften it all.  It's sort of a gentler, smoother Pulcinella & Teresina.  I like everything about it except for the mint, but I'm not sure how much I will wear this because I don't want to wait for the mint to burn off every time that I put this on.

[PumpkinGuts]

The peppermint cream is present throughout the entire wear-length, and it's lovely. That's the good news. The bad news is, when that rose note emerges, it stomps all over my mint-lilac-mallow party and turns the whole blend sour. After a couple hours of asking that rude guest to leave, they finally do, but the party's been ruined.