Bite Me

[Ishtar]

Croquembouche with almond silk and a drizzle of caramel.

In the vial, I mostly get almonds - but real almonds, not the "oh I so wish I were cherry" schizophrenic almond type.

Wet on my skin, Bite Me is simply wonderful. Sweet and foody, yes, but taken to much more special and sophisticated levels by the presence of a beautiful rose note. My, this is gorgeous.

Oh. The caramel starts amping. Now caramel can do pretty strange things on my skin (most notably make everything smell burnt), but it looks like here it's willing to play nice. It does overpower the other notes, though - this stage is not nearly as well-balanced as the initial wet phase.

Thankfully, complete drydown brings back the rose and the almond, and Bite Me settles into a lovely, sweet and smooth gourmand/floral that I can't stop coming back to over and over again. It is indeed silky, very alluring and much more interesting than a simple "fun" foody scent.

[windbourne]

I'm a total foody lover, so trying this out was a no-brainer for me. Still, I started with a decant and moved on to a bottle only after I'd ascertained that I COMPLETELY LOVED IT.

I open the bottle and smell sweet marzipan and pastry and a very sweet caramel almost entirely unlike any other caramel that I've tried so far. Many of them smell very charred on me, quite unpleasant and sour, but this one is a smooth liquid caramel, like a truffle filling.

On my skin it stays that way. I can understand where people are finding the rose and/or cherry notes, and it does have a vague fruitiness that pops up every so often, but by and large, I'm wearing dessert. It doesn't last too long, maybe an hour or two, and has almost no throw, so I can wear it out and confuse people by snuffling my wrist every so often.

 

ETA: 9/28/16 -- Well. This has had some time to age. *droll grin* I'm wearing this right now for the first time in ages and ages, and I still love it. I -do- get a strong rosy quality to this now, but the caramel is still distinct and still smooth. Almost all the pastry has vanished, except for a faint hint right after I applied it, but the almond is as strong as ever. It's fascinating and sniffs more like some sort of syrup that you'd put on something like a croquembouche, and less like the thing itself.

 

Overall, a little less foody and a little more floral, but still delicious. I wish more caramel notes were like the one in this. I'd wear a lot more caramel.

Edited September 29, 2016 by windbourne

[damonkitty]

I am glad I saw someone say CHERRY because that is all I got when I put this blend on. I actually thought there was a mix up or maybe my seller added something to the mix. I was expecting a caramel smell, but all I got was pure cherry (strong cherry). I may buy another bottle to see if something is off with my bottle of this scent. This almost smells like Suck It, but sweeter to me in the fruity department. It is good, but super strong on me.

[cfrancesca]

Mmm..a lot of different reviews on this one.

I smell caramel ROSES with a bit of almond pastry. I have a perfume that's called rose pastries and it smells almost exactly like this.

I like roses, but this is not what I was expecting...

[childoftime]

In bottle: Like sniffing a bottle of almond-infused honey.

 

Wet, on skin: Sharper than I expected, but still warm. The honey is a sort of floral honey now, it's less foody than I thought it would be.

 

Drydown: I'm still not getting the caramel, somehow. Now the croquembouche is coming out to play, and it's effect is surprisingly to lessen how sweet this scent starts out. This may be a foody BPAL for people who don't really like to smell like food.

[Argentwolf]

Like many, I also detected Roses WTF from this. Upon deeply huffing my wrist, however, I can figure out that it's just the way that the almond is interacting with the other components...it's almost like there's almond and orange extract, or orange rind, in with a caramely pastry of some sort. From a distance, that distinction blurs and becomes a rose-like scent. I actually love the way that this scent works, and therefore bought a bottle of it.

[vegasblueblood]

When I first opened this, I thought I had gotten the wrong bottle in the order. It was pure cherry. Now, I love BPAL cherry note. It's deep, dark and red. But when I ordered Bite Me, I expected the scent that it's in the item description. I thought I'd gotten Suck It! I gave this a try though and still got none of the listed notes. I started to faintly detect the almond but it's such an unusual almond and after maybe 30 minutes after the drydown, I finally detected the pastry scent. It's definitely an interesting blend but it's not what I was expecting at all. It's really strong but it's not for me. It is like a floral as opposed to a foody until well after the dry down when it becomes sweet. It's a morpher!

[Amoraexcena]

Like many, I also detected Roses WTF from this. Upon deeply huffing my wrist, however, I can figure out that it's just the way that the almond is interacting with the other components...it's almost like there's almond and orange extract, or orange rind, in with a caramely pastry of some sort. From a distance, that distinction blurs and becomes a rose-like scent. I actually love the way that this scent works, and therefore bought a bottle of it.

^ this! I definitely agree with the almond+orange rind= somehow, rose. A very sweet, caramelized rose. and cherries...

 

Bottle: Caramel almond fudge and marachino cherries, oh dear- too sweet.

Wet on skin: Ok, slightly more sugary-pastry. That same "powdered sugar" note is coming out a bit along with the caramel.

 

Drydown: dead-on description on my skin. Like Argentwolf says, something in the croquembouche and the almonds play together to make a scent almost like powdery, spicy, sugary rose (if you're looking for a juicy sugared rose scent, I would go to Hope instead though). Does croquembouche have orange rinds and cloves in it? Bite Me reminds me a bit of these as well:

Edited December 12, 2009 by Amoraexcena

[Ajila]

In the bottle - Soft, sweet, slightly boozy, almonds

 

Wet on me - A sweet, doughnut scent, with something a tad watery and backed by the soft almonds

 

Dry on me - Suprisingly faint, given the start; sweet, slightly spiced, bakery scents

 

Overall - A tad faint, but overall very nice; a pretty not overly cloying foody scent

[Gwydion]

In bottle: Pastry with a hint of apple and a lot of almond. Wet: Almond dominant with the caramel rising. The pastry is softer now, overwhelmed by the almond. Dry: Less impressive as it’s gone a bit powdery. The caramel’s gone a little plastic. It’s still quite sweet, but vaguely generic.

[ianastar]

Wet - straight out of the bottle this is pure caramel goodness.

 

On the drydown the almond starts to mingle with the caramel

 

This reminded me of a beignet from Cafe Du Monde, sprinkled in powedered sugar. I had to look up a Croquembouche again to remember exactly what it is. It's basically mini beignets that are stuck together to form a cone, drizzled with caramel to hold them together, and dusted with fine powdered sugar.

 

This fragrance hits that EXACTLY!! I love it, and want to bite myself I smell so yummy!!!

[Rshields]

Unfortunately this did not work for me at all. It had a scent that reminded me of a strong red wine, a fermented red grape with bitter almond in the background. I did not get the caramel or the sweetness at all.

Sadly I passed it on after I received my full bottle from the lab.

[PeshaRocha]

Wet: strong caramel, smoky and sweet -- lovely!

 

Drydown: caramel and smokiness fade away *sigh*

 

This becomes powdery, slightly floral honey on me pretty quickly. Where oh where did the caramel go? I never got a pastry scent at all, and I never really noticed almond either.

 

The drydown on this is nothing at all like what I expected. It becomes somewhat sweet, a tiny bit spicy and quite a bit powdery and floral. And the kicker is that I don't like powdery or floral. However, I might (just might) keep this anyway, as I almost like it a lot anyway. Very odd that I may have a powdery floral I can actually wear. If that weren't so incongruous, I wouldn't hesitate to toss it into the swaps pile, but it intrigues me. I'll have to try this one again later.

[brwnpaperhag]

I never would have thought I'd like this one, because it seemed too rich for my liking.

 

However, the almond silk is exactly that: light as silk. Barely a kiss, and it mixes with the caramel amazingly. On my skin, this is mostly almond and caramel, and if there's a pastry that's supposed to be in here, it's just a hint. There's a tang of sweetness I can't put my finger on, and I don't want to attribute it to the caramel because it doesn't seem to be anything that belongs to it, but who knows.

 

It's delicious, just barely foody-rich and just shy of being sickly, cloyingly sweet. It works, and I love this.

[fieryredhead]

Well, my first review; bear with me! This was the scent description I saw on a random blog that finally made me give in to the BPAL madness after holing out for so many years. I ordered my first imps & they arrived yesterday & after struggling a bit with getting them open without spraying oil (I did not succeed. ) I decided to try this one that night.

 

In the bottle it smelled nummy! I really like foodie scents so was excited to try this. When I put it on though I immediately got the rose / floral scent that quite a few people commented on here. I actually had to come on here and look in the reviews because I had NO idea where the heck rose was coming from. I am not a floral person but I do like rose but it was just totally not what I was expecting.

 

As I put this on a little before I went to bed, it was still plainly there when I woke up the next morning until I washed it off. I was expecting to hunt down a bottle of this after I tried it but I think I will hold off a bit until maybe my nose matures a bit to the BPAL scents and see what happens then.

[captainecchi]

So I've discovered, as others before me have, that a croquembouche is a fancy French dessert made out of profiteroles. I should know that, as I've lived in France, but I didn't.

 

In the decant: Almond, something fruity, and something almost dusty.

 

Wet, on my skin: The almond disappears, and the fruity note takes center stage. It is an intense, grape-y, boozy note, like the wine in Madrid. Why is this in here? Did someone slip me a decant of Suck It by mistake? Is this the caramel, and I'm just totally failing at identifying notes?

 

Dry, on skin: Same thing - intensely boozily, woozily fruity. Of course, since it's lasted more than a nanosecond on my skin, maybe it's not a fruit note at all.

 

 

Yeah, I have no idea what's going on with this scent. I don't love it, or even like it very much, though. I'll see how it smells on my husband, but I'm leaning towards swapping this one away.

 

ETA: Very, very dry on skin - like, 6 hours later - this is starting to smell like something I like. Namely, Hellcat. Maybe I should let this one age before I pass judgment on it.

Edited February 2, 2010 by CaptainEcchi

[HelenHighwater]

This is a deeply odd scent. Not bad, not at all. Just totally NOT what I thought it was going to be. I tried it today after I'd forgotten what the notes were, and I thought... yum, vanilla and blackberries, a bit floral in a restrained fashion. Not foody vanilla particularly. I got a few compliments on it today, too. It does smell appealing on me.

 

I just reapplied it after rereading the description. Now I can see that yes, there's something that ought to be almondy in there- it smells slightly almondy in the bottle. On me, it goes sugary berries with a bit of rose. It's lovely! But, er, not anything like the descrip. In the bottle, yes. On me? Not so much.

 

The scent is pretty intense- it throws far and lasts long. It also smells even more floral/berry at a distance.

 

It also smells a bit boozy on me, but again, not in a bad way. Boozy is almost always atrocious on my skin, so that's kind of astonishing. I like it, but it isn't like True BPAL Love.

[voodoocatwoman]

Oh, ICK. This starts out as yuck and dries down to GROSS GET IT OFF!!!

 

 

[yamiko]

In the bottle, I get caramel and almonds, with a little fruit.

 

On me, it smells very much like marzipan. There's also a kinda boozy note in the background... like a fruit liquor of some sort. It's very thick and sweet. When it dries, it just becomes more fruity.

[Gin]

Bite Me goes to almonds and roses on me and never fails to make me queasy and give me a headache. I don't know why, it just does.

[filigree_shadow]

This is weird. I put it on and got a big blast of something that smelled alcoholic. Boozy. Then that faded off, and I smelled a rather medicinal cherry note, plus a soft almond and ... roses? Definitely floral. Kinda loud floral.

 

This smells nothing like almond pastry goodness on me. I have no idea what happened here.

[yakiguri]

On first application of Bite Me I get a blast of cherry, disturbing as the Lab's almond note is a favorite and almost never goes cherry on me. After a few minutes a dusty, dry caramel note slips out to yank the cherry back into submission, and ends up dominating the blend throughout the cloying dry down. All in all Bite Me ends up smelling like I've been slapped with an old cherry pop tart.

 

*sigh* Yet another Weenie that doesn't work on me.

[DahliaHayashi]

I wanted this one to work.I wanted it so much to work it is not even funny but no way

I heard something of sweet cherry and almonds and tart. well mine smells almonds all right. burned almonds with a sticky caramel crust. sickenly sweet to me.

I was brave and putted it on never the less....yep stays the same on my skin and morphes into a fat headache for me. tried to wash it off but i could stell smell it afterwards.

even tried it 2 times. same again

Really not for me. i am scared of this perfume oil since it gives me piercing headaches

[ephemere]

Very intense almonds and roses! Considering how much of a disaster roses usually are on me (with the exception of Peacock Queen) this is surprisingly beautiful, especially a few hours in when the caramel starts to come out. One of few floral scents I can wear, maybe because it has a strong gourmand element too. I like it so much I ended up buying a bottle.

[bpalscentsual]

Mmm, this was beautiful on me all day today. It was like some kind of currant/blackberry jam inside an almond shortbread cookie. I'm not getting any of the caramel, but it still feels somewhat like a pastry under all that dark, sweet fruit and sharp almond. It has more of a liqueur feeling, though. Amaretto, probably, since almond.

 

Simply amazing. Very rich without being spicy in the slightest.