Phantasmagoria

[anastasia]

This oil invites dark muses. It is an oil of somber reveries and unearthed horrors, and is inspirational in all creative undertakings with a macabre bent. This oil is for horror writers, artists, and musicians, and for those who wish to better understand their shadow selves.

This oil contains tobacco absolute, pomegranate extract, orris CO2 extract, steam-distilled fractionated white camphor, wildcrafted myrrh oil, jasmine sambac, steam-distilled galbanum essential oil, elecampane essential oil, motia attar, champaca attar, mugwort essential oil, organic clary sage essential oil, styrax, labdanum absolute, Somalian opoponax, carrot seed oil, wildcrafted cypress essential oil, rose otto, asafetida essential oil, and crushed poppy petal infusion created from flowers grown in the TAL garden.

Ahhh i do hope this oil gets more love. i bought it some time ago with intent to use with a creative friend. in the back of my mind i had the concept of mary shelley and lord byron and pollidori all getting wild and creative together. i was hoping to do some gentle imbibing of some kind and some serious work with writing or visual art or music or all of the above. i still think it would be good for these things and hope to use it in this way later on...

no TMI but the person i wanted to use this with has kind of broken my heart and i am in a really repressive and uncomfortable living situation where i feel i cannot be creative in any of the ways i normally would be. i had been casting about for comfort and picked up the book American Gods again which is so much more than a novel in so many ways. i have ended up using this oil with a candle at night to connect conceptually and creatively in my mind with Zorya Polunochnya in the house of Czernobog and to be more comfortable with the dark feelings i am currently having.

it is working.

as a scent i would say that dark communion is an apt term. there is a something that reminds me of a really black bread but perhaps one with psychotropic herbs baked into it. and the throw is a remeniscent of absinthe. yet of course it is much more as a fragrance than these two things.

it is not scary. the way i was feeling was scary and now i feel able to deal with it...

[patina]

I've used this twice. The first time motivated me to write a poem and then may have stimulated some vivid, but non nightmarish dreams. The second time I fell into a dreamless sleep almost immediately after applying it.

 

The scent feels cold to me because of the camphor. Immediately after applying it, I get chills and feel very alert. It's like being terrified without the fear.

 

Initially, the scents a bit too far on the medicinal side for me but the drydown (when I've woken up in the morning) is complex and amazing. I can tell there's mugwort and myrrh involved.

[MsDebCastellano]

If you take medication, use only a little of this scent and use it very cautiously. Also I would advise against drinking much alcohol while using this scent. I got to learn these lessons the hard way on my 35th birthday which I very glamorously spent with my head in the toilet. But that was totally my fault, I over did the scent application and the booze as I tend to get overly excited.

 

On a "wooji"/ magical level, I found that since this scent was formulated in complete darkness, my bottle wanted to keep it that way. It didn't want to be put on my bathroom sink. It wanted to be carefully wrapped in black fabric and put in the bathroom medicine cabinet where it lives. I only take it out in my bathroom which has no windows.

 

The scent is deliciously dark and used lightly, makes me feel sort of swoony like a gothic horror heroine. I hadn't thought to use it right before bed and I look forward to trying it out! I bet it would be awesome on a waning crescent moon!