Alice

[Diana]

Curiouser and curiouser. Milk and honey with rose, carnation and bergamot.

This is one of the first 5mLs I ever bought, yet it's taken me over a year to review. Heh.

This doesn't change at all on me, from wet to drydown. The throw is average; you can notice a scent, but it doesn't waft away in clouds of aroma. It does last a fairly long time as well. I put it on at noon and could still detect it when I went to bed at 2am.

It's sweet; the milk & honey are soft, creamy & comforting, but not cavity-inducing. The carnation & milk are really the stars in this blend. I actual dislike carnations as flowers, but as a perfume ingredient, it's quite lovely and almost savory & spicy.

The rose is barely detectable and adds a nice bump to the floral notes. If you are not a fan of roses, I promise, you may not even know it's there. I amp up roses a lot, and I didn't realize there were roses in there for the first 3 months I owned this!

The bergamot is also a barely-there component, adding a very soft citrus note to the blend. Even if you don't like citruses, you may not realize it is in there, much like the rose. Bergamot isn't quite as sharp as lemon or lime, so it's not very jarring at all.

This is what I call a BPAL classic. Edited January 9, 2006 by Shollin

[cantabile]

Frimp from the lab.

 

in vial: A little girl's cup of "tea", which is to say, warm milk and honey with just a splash of the "grown-up" stuff.

 

just applied: Very soothing; almost makes me a bit drowsy. Maybe I'll fall down a rabbit hole.

 

drying down: The carnation and rose are present, hovering in the background. I love the way the bergamot works in this blend, for some reason I can't quite put my finger on.

 

dry: Curiouser and curiouser. The mental image of a tea party in a garden puts a smile on my face. Definitely very evocative of the story, and the character, it's inspired by.

 

verdict: Getting around to reviewing this has made me want to go put some on. I think Alice will grow on me more and more as time passes.

[BlackWingedRoses]

Alice is one I ordered because so many people rave about it here on the BPAL forum. I've tried almost all of the Mad Tea Party scents now. This one is really CURIOUS. in the bottle it smells citrusy but it morphs into something completely different on my skin. there is a creaminess there but also something spikey that wakes up your nose- it must be the spiceiness of the carnation there. herbal too- bergamot? I'm thinking the rose in here is not red. Cause I have a lot of red rose blends and I can't detect that type here.

I can smell it around me as i walk around from room to room. it's really quite weird, but not in a bad way at all. this is really lovely. Very distictive. a keeper.

[Jocelyn]

In the imp- Sweet and milky.

 

When i first put this on, it went powdery, eventually it dried to a nice spciy creamy rose.

I like this one, it didnt last very long on me, couple of hours and then i couldnt smell it anymore. But while i can smell it, boy has it got throw.

[Alchemy21599]

I received this as a frimp from the Lab.

 

In the vial: sweet, subtle floral with a spicy carnation zing.

 

Wet: Spicy carnation and honey.

 

Dry: Carnation zing and honey. This faded very quickly on me.

 

This is a pleasant sweet, subtle floral. I wish it had lasted longer.

[notagoth]

i can't stand "alice" and it breaks my heart because it sounds so good and my *name* is alice and i wanted so bad to be able to say "me!" when people asked what i was wearing but no. it is sharp and unpleasantly spicy and dries down to strong dish detergent on me. i don't get any of the milk or honey, or even really the rose. just dishsoap, and overwhelmingly strong. so, so, so sad. skin chemistry is a weird, weird thing y'all.

[ktesedale]

Milk, honey, roses are really great on me, and lots of people love Alice, so I had high hopes for this scent. ::sigh::

 

In the bottle, this is a lovely, sweet floral.

 

Wet, I can easily pick out the milk, honey and roses - yay! There's also a sharper note. At the time I wasn't sure what it was, but I know now it's the carnation. All together, the scent is a bit like sweet, milky roses. I really liked it.

 

After it's dry, this goes all wrong. About an hour in a smell like bug spray starts to fill the air. It gets worse and worse, giving me a vicious headache. After I wash the perfume off it gets better, thank goodness.

 

Overall, I wish I could wear this scent, but the carnation does me in. I've since tried two other scents with carnation - The Caterpillar and Maiden - and they both go bug spray on me. It's too bad - I'm glad there are so many other great scents.

[Thaleia]

I have decided to wear Alice today, because I feel like today's going to be stressful (I have to take care of some stuff at the Graduate School, because they messed up my registration AGAIN), and I need something comforting, so why not review before I leave?

 

Let me preface my review by saying that I ordered this on recommendation from a dear friend of mine who enabled me. She describes this scent as 'crack'. Lots of other people seem to like Alice, too, so I'm doubly excited.

 

My first reaction was, "I don't smell 'crack' - just milk and carnation." I was momentarily unimpressed. It's sweet and innocent and makes me feel really young. If I were as young as Alice makes me feel, I wouldn't be worrying about graduate school, now would I?!

 

Oh God. OhGodohGodohGod. I just put this on and it smells exactly like Snowcake soap from Lush, or Smitten hand cream, with an added rose undertone. It's lovely! The bergamot comes out after a while, and now I smell like Earl Grey tea just the way I like it - with milk and honey. I smell like afternoon tea, complete with the vase of roses and carnations on the table. I'm wearing a blue dress with a white pinafore and black Mary Janes, and I'm sitting at a table with fine china and a pot of Earl Grey and a plate of pastries.

 

This is crack. Spreading the Alice love. Down the rabbit hole I go! 4.5.

[StormtrooperPrincess]

While she's a dear girl, Alice and I don't get along. She starts out in the vial a lovely sweet, milky tea with a hint of soft pink roses, and morphs into sickly carnation soap on my skin. Sigh.

 

Thanks to jj_j for the imp, though.

[loves_requiem]

Imp: Sweet milky creaminess, tiny bit spicy floral

 

On Skin: Candy like sweetness mellowed out by the spicy creaminess again...kinda reminds me a bit of those creamy swirled hard candies that are so addicting...

 

Dry: F*CKING FABULOUS!! I had a guy at a club come up to me and smell my hair and exclaim "Christ you smell GOOD!"

 

So...I think thats a very positive thing....

 

DEFINTIELY one of my Favorites...can't wait to get more...my Imp is almost gone

Edited January 29, 2006 by Love's Requiem

[shirasade]

In the imp: Very, very sweet, like cherry bubblegum.

 

Wet: Still very sugary cherry, but with a sharp undertone. Reminds me of children's toothpaste. Very girly and pink.

 

Dry: The sugary cherry sweetness recedes, it becomes more spicy, less frothy pink. Finally I can smell the milk and honey, combined with nice spicy floral. Nice staying power, too.

 

Overall impression: My first impression was not very positive, much too little girl pink. But then the scent becomes much more interesting, almost subversive. I can imagine wearing both with girly clothes and business wear, as a playful accessoire. Perfect for cool, understated winter days.

[ocicat]

Urg. This goes directly to hell on me In the imp it smelt sharp and *dark*. A very brown scent. I smelt no tea or sugar or anything nice. On my skin, it just deepend and sharpened. I had to wash it off

[strawberry_star]

I loathe reviewing scents that most people seem to love. Makes me feel guilty that it didn't work on me. When I tried it on, it smelled very similar to the effect Dana O'Shee and Snow White had on me. All are very popular fragrances and yet take on a medicine-like smell when it comes to my chemistry. This was actually not as bad on me as the other 2 though, and oddly enough it was the carnation that helped and I usually don't like carnations in a perfume. Overall it still didn't work on me at all. I gave it to a friend and she seems to like it. (as does almost everyone else! hehehe)

[ladynoah74]

I'm one of the few who didn't like this scent. It started out beautifully in the bottle - golden honey and sweet cream which were luscious.

 

Once on, though, those two faded into the background and soft florals came out in droves. Too much floral, since it wasn't tempered by anything else.

 

By drydown, it had become all carnation. Not a bad scent, but not a floral for me. Too bad.

[marzstar]

this is my first review

 

from the description i thought i would like this

and i love the iconography of alice so i wanted to like this one, too

i love milk and honey and am an earl grey tea drinker (bergamot) and though i wasn't sure about the carnation or not, i thought i'd give it a try

from the bottle, this smelled way more milky than i expected

really sweet and warm yet light not heavy

so i put it on

second i did every bit of warmth i liked about it disappeared

oh no, i thought

but i thought i should let it settle

so i did

but as it settled and dried it shifted more and more away from what i liked about how it smelled in the bottle and continued on this way until i had to go scrub it off

there's other smells i've put on that i was not super fond of but i could tolerate wearing... this one i couldn't even let stay on my skin for a mere 15 minutes

i just couldn't handle it. feared a headache. . .

is this what carnation does on me? guess as i try more oils i will learn what notes work and don't work on me.

strange that i really liked it in the bottle

but yeah

i HATE the way it smells on me

synthetic cheap powdery medicinal and really strong

a reviewer above me said bug spray. good analogy :\

smelled as if it was wearing me rather than me wearing it

so much that it was still present even after i washed it off as much as i could

gross.

Edited February 23, 2006 by marzstar

[jamjar]

Very sweet. The milk and honey smell sticks, and it is quite powdery. It's not to my taste, though I could wear it as it's not sickly sweet. It feels very much old-fashioned little-girlish.

[The Perfumed Ferret]

In the imp: Sweet tarts

 

On: Sweet tarts for about ten minutes, and then this one goes powdery on me.

 

I smell like baby powder.

Edited February 25, 2006 by The Perfumed Ferret

[sestina]

Beautiful in the bottle and beautiful wet - but maddeningly faint as the drydown begins. Alice was pretty much gone after two or three hours, the only BPAL I've tried so far that just doesn't seem to stick to me.

 

I do love the scent while it lasts though, and a gorgeous carnation note to spice up the sweetness of the milk and honey.

 

A perfect blend for a scent locket, I think. I will almost certainly swap for more imps or a bottle.

[Ryvre]

I don't normally like rose or carnation, but I love Alice.

 

In the imp: It's sweet. I mostly smell honey with a bit of rose.

 

Wet: It's smooth and creamy and very understated. The honey and milk smell great on me.

 

Dry: Unfortunately it fades into baby powder as it dries.

[Lizzie]

Alice to me, smells quite a bit like Lush's Potion, and that's not a bad thing at all!! I do wish I could smell the milk more, as I really like Milk in other blends. But really all I get from Alice is Carnation Carnation Carnation!!! But I love Carnation, so it works! It's maybe a slightly sweeter Carnation (likely due to the honey) than Potion.

 

Unfortunately, it disappears REALLY quickly. Or else I'd be buying a bottle. I'd give it an 8 out of 10.

[mermaidrage]

At first Alice was all carnation and I was sure I was going to have to wash it off immediately.

 

Then the honey snuck in to sweeten the deal. And the carnation and honey combination ate the rose petals and they started growing. This scent makes me feel incredibly intoxicated.

 

At the very end of the development, the milk comes out and ties everything together and it's just lovely.

[LittleGreyKitten]

I do believe Alice is a love or hate deal. I fell in LOVE! In the imp, I thought, eh, nothing special, kinda sweet and meh. Then on my skin, it blossomed. I am a true BPAL honey freak, and this one is major honey on me- almost as much as O. This could be O's little sister. The honey is backed by the roses mostly, with a tinge of spicy carnation thrown in and a teensy swirl of milk. Mostly BPAL's milk scent doesn't come through on my skin, though the cream aroma does very strongly. Alice is a beautiful very honeyed light floral on me. Amazing! Definitely need a full size. 5 out of 5.

[jidabug]

I've seen Alice compared a lot to Dana O'shee, and rather coincidentally I happened to try them one after the other. However, to me, they were nothing alike. Whereas Dana O'shee was all sweetness and warmth, the Alice contained the dreaded rose and that's all I could smell. Rose and I don't get along at all. Pretty much as soon as I put it on the rose turned to obnoxious powder with the barest hint of anything else underneath it. Pity.

[purplegirl]

I ordered an imp of Alice with my first ever BPAL order back in the fall, and I got my order in mid-to-late November. Since I'd picked her out when the weather was warmer a couple months previously, I wore her twice, and liked her a lot, but the impending winter stole some of her thunder, I think!! But I dug out this imp a couple weeks ago and fell in serious, earthshattering, all-consuming love with her.

 

Alice reminds me of a really lovely bakery, in the springtime. When there are lots of cakes on display in cases, which are alternately creamy, decadent, zesty, luxuriant, sugary-sweet, in all sorts of colours - a parade of pinks, blues, greens, yellows and lilacs. This scent had a creaminess to it; that led to a zesty, zingy! phase; which became a gorgeous rose (and I have had ZERO luck with BPAL roses, my chemistry can be bitchy and demanding) I even got a vanilla-fudge-y phase which made me really, really hungry (a hunger that my white cheddar rice cakes didn't satisfy, funny enough!!!) I can't even say that I didn't like a certain phase, from wet to drydown, because they were each beautiful in their own way.

 

I got a bottle of both Alice and Sudha Segara from Gale (I *heart* Gale for further developing the Alice-love!) and Alice has zoomed almost to the top of my favourites list.

[filigree_shadow]

Alice and I were not meant to be pals. I suspected the rose would be too much, and I dreaded the honey-induced play-doh scent, and I thought the carnations would be too bitter on me just like they always are. And Alice did exactly what I thought she was going to do.