Wild Indigo Duskywing

[patina]

Black saffron, frankincense, Florentine iris, blackcurrant, white pepper, black clove, vetiver, and smoky honey.

I wanted to like this one. It is smoky and spicy with some sweetness, but I'm getting a little sourness somewhere. The vetiver and something like orris (the iris?) are the strongest components and they remind me of smouldering cardboard here.

Maybe try it if you like a little smoke and honey doesn't go bad on you.

[EnchantedMoon]

In my opinion this is sexy and sultry in a bottle. I too get the smoky, spicy, and sweetness from this blend. Fortunately, I did not detect any sour notes. The notes in this beautiful oil all work together in complete harmony and create a recipe for sexy! This has great throw and lasting power as well. I am so glad I bought a bottle of this. I bet it will also age into something even more beautiful

[Balame]

This is way more relaxed and light than I was expecting considering so many of the notes are usually very "rawr" (pepper, clove, vetiver, frankincense)...

 

Surprisingly (and thankfully) it's not super spicy at all. Instead I get a sense of wispy incense with the softest hints of honey and earthy vetiver. For those who are scared of vetiver, don't fret - like all the other notes, it's very subtle here.

 

Duskywing is very "sheer" like Black Swallowtail was to me, but this is more my style. It makes me think of a belly dancer or a veil. All translucent, fluttery silks and a comfortable sensuality. A hazy but soft sort of blend.

Edited September 19, 2014 by Balame

[Little Bird]

This is the metamorphosis bottle that I was second most excited about, but it's pretty bad on me . I love the lab's black currant note (smells like dark, sweet, berry jam) and get along well with clove, pepper, incense and most varieties of vetiver. The only iffy notes were the honey and iris. So, of course, this is all about honey and iris on my skin. The honey is a very natural smelling honey, rather bitter and medicinal, and the iris adds a perfumey, sharp floral note underneath the honey. As it dries down, I get a little bit of a dry, dusty spiciness that's rather nondescript and not sweet at all. Nothing about this scent is really sweet on my skin, not even the honey. I don't get any fruitiness in this blend and, surprisingly, I can't pick out any vetiver either. Realistic, almost herbal-bitter honey and a little iris and dusty spice...

[OctoberGwen]

I seem to be having an experience similar to Little Bird's with this one, and it's not working for me at all. I love vetiver, too.

Oddly, the combination of notes smells almost like leather to my nose, and it's definitely got a medicinal quality to it.

 

Weird. And just...no.

[zankoku_zen]

Smoky honey, saffron, and frankincense and pepper. I agree with octobergwen and Little Bird that this almost smells like leather.

 

Or rather than actually being leather, its a flowery/vegan version of leather. Like leather made from flowers and spices.

 

Deep, dark, narcotic flower-leather.

[sqwook]

I really like this on me. Lately, I haven't been looking at notes at all while I test things, and when this had just dried down, I thought I smelled myrrh here -- all these elements are just blending in a really beautiful way, what I thought was myrrh must be the smoky sweetness of the honey note, but not like the normal honey note which usually does not work for me. Nice. The drydown is a close spice. This is really good. Reminds me a bit of my scent-memory of Nemesis & Gomorrah and others along those lines.

[somacat]

This started off really good, kinda like Mommy Fortuna meets Goblin with husky vetiver and black pepper goodness. In the dry down it morphed into an old lady perfume sour fruit tea which I believe was the currant taking over. Dry it's a sharp almost metallic currant overlaying a distressing hand cream scent (which reminds me of my mean step grandmother) with a hint of pepper that's smelling a bit like what my friend calls chicken salt. I really wanted this to work.

[cameroncrazed]

In bottle: Pure vetiver and smoke and is that leather I'm smelling?

 

Wet on skin: Vetiver, smoke, and a touch of honey and a faint trace of leather.

 

Dry on skin: I'm still getting mostly vetiver, smoke, and honey, but there is a faint trace of the iris that helps soften it slightly. Occasionally, I catch a hint of the pepper and clove, just a little hint of spice when I move. The leather smell has disappeared entirely. If there was just less smoke, it would be more me. I'll try it again in a few days, but I think I'm going to have to find a better home for this one, with someone who can appreciate it more.

[Astarial]

In the imp this is very peppery and spicy, with some frankincense and vetiver lurking in there. There's a hint of something lighter, maybe the iris or the black currant, but I expected this to be a dark and spicy scent.

 

Once on my skin, it gets really fruity. There's some spice, some honey, some floral, some smoke, sure, but they're all hanging out in back while the BLACK CURRANT takes center stage. Loudly. Sweetly, and it's lovely, but wow. Was not expecting that. It stays really bright and fruity for a LONG time, too - all through drydown, and overnight, and through the following evening. It definitely melds and gets more muddled as it goes, but even now when I sniff I go "hmm, fruit!"

 

This is really pretty, and very well blended IMO.

[Magycmyste]

Frankincense and black pepper tend to go holy war on my skin, and vetiver tends to turn sour, so I'm a little nervous about this one. But let's give it a shot.

 

In the imp: So... I'm getting patchouli. I just tried Yucca Giant-skipper, which is very patchouli-heavy on me (and yet, I'm loving it more every minute), but...there's no patchouli in this blend, and that's what I'm getting.

 

Wet on skin: Yup. Still getting patchouli, even with my nose less than an inch from the oil. I think I'm getting some blackcurrant in the background. It.....makes me think of plum.

 

Dried down: Still fruity-patchouli-ing out. I am getting some vetiver in the background, too.

 

Throw: Not getting much throw off of this at all.

 

Verdict: *** I'm really not getting much out of this at all. It's nothing special on me, unfortunately. I think it will be heading to the swap pile.

[theseagrows]

damn, this one starts out pretty sour on me, i think due to the combination of frankincense, pepper and vetiver, which my skin seems to be amping. why oh why am i not amping the lovely saffron, iris, honey and clove?! i'd probably like it much better that way. yeah i am getting pencil shavings (thanks frankincense, and maybe vetiver) with a little bit of black currant and pepper. it ends up being mostly black currant and frankincense and it still has that pencil shaving-scent that i often get with the BPAL frankincense note, unfortunately.

[milo]

Weirdly fruity at first with something else that I can't quite place. Morphs into a resinous blend, but overall fades pretty fast, and I don't like the fruity phase.

[lady_pandora]

In the imp, this is really acrid to my nose, not very pleasant.

 

Wet on skin, I get something that's obviously the same note but calmed down a lot. Very woody. I think this is the vetiver. It smells kind of like pencils. Sinister pencils.

 

Next, it starts to throw really strongly and becomes smoky. It smells kind of burnt, not like a burning wood fire but more like an extinguished one. It seems to switch back and forth between regular woody smell and burnt woody smell and sometimes cigarettes, probably depending on what my brain is zeroing in on at that moment. I also start to get a spicy note during this phase.

 

Next stage after that is smoky wood and PEPPER! This is "opening the big tub of pepper while cooking at my old job." It isn't awful, but with this list of notes, I really wish more of the sweet notes would come out to play and balance out the harshness of this. This is probably at about the 15-minute mark--I wasn't really timing it yet though.

 

So I decide that if a watched pot never boils, maybe a watched BPAL never morphs, so at this point I decide to ignore it for about half an hour. At about 10 minutes, I start getting a sweetish waft, maybe honey; at 20 minutes I'm pretty sure it's the frankincense. It keeps on being smoky. At my self-imposed deadline, I sniff my arm again and the frankincense is rounding it out some on my skin. Throw is still mostly smoky.

 

And then after all this, it starts to all seem to come together--I think I can smell currant now, and it and the frankincense are balancing all the smoke nicely. I'm not sure it's "me," but I think it's finally doing what it's meant to do.

 

I'm not sure what to make of Wild Indigo Duskywing. I like what it finally settles down to, but I'm not sure I want to go through ~45 minutes of heavy smoke pepper for it. But kudos to the Lab for getting me to play with vetiver scents again. (They frimped me Sloth when I was convinced it was a death note, and I liked it.)

Edited November 12, 2014 by lady_pandora

[Katlyntje]

This is smokey and sweet with emphasis on the smoke when wet. As it dries I can begin to detect a light floral note and the smoke starts settling back revealing a lovely spiciness. Dry, this has morphed into a wood/spice/sweet scent with lurking wisps of smoke and a tantalizing hint of floral. I really really like how this smells. On me anyway, I tried a bit on my husband because I dabbed too much on myself and it went all sour wood on him.

Edited December 2, 2014 by Katlyntje

[DevilsCandyCane]

This was a surprise sniffie I got sent, and I'm amazed by it! Most of the notes are unfamiliar to me, and those that *are* familiar I generally don't like, and I certainly wasn't expecting a butterfly collection to smell so masculine, but I love this so much I've just bought a bottle!

 

Freshly applied, it's very much earthy patchouli, though I don't understand that as it's not a listed note. That quickly fades though, and what's left fits the name so perfectly, 'indigo duskywing' - it *smells* like the colour indigo, sort of dark and denimy and soft and reassuring, gently masculine and a little powdery/smoky. It smells like being hugged by a very sexy boy

 

The blending is amazing, I'm *completely* baffled by the note list and how much I love it - usually clove goes soapy on me, iris I wouldn't touch with a bargepole! The smoky honey is...possibly lending it a little hint of creamy, smoky beeswax, perhaps frankincense making it a touch more...almost incensey but not quite, but I have *no* idea what that lovely dark snuggly indigo-denim note is!

 

Can't wait for my bottle to arrive

[nameoftherose]

In the decant, I can mainly smell pepper and perhaps some of the iris - a very grainy, dry scent. Wet on skin, the woods and spices still dominate, but there is a beautifully multi-layered quality to it. As it dries, the slightly sour sweetness of the blackcurrant comes through and I can particularly detect it in the throw. Gradually, the honey seems to warm it up to become much more incense-y than in the beginning. Vetiver seems to be rather subdued in this - I love vetiver, but cannot really distinguish it individually here.

 

It is a deep, solid scent; for me the dryness of the woods and spices gives it an almost parchment-like undertone - one that is much more inky and less sweet than the one in Dee for instance. People have mentioned pencil shavings and I have to say I can certainly see that: the wood of the pencil combined with the smell of the glossy exterior coating; strangely, I do quite like the combination. Overall, I find this sophisticated, dark and somewhat androgynous, rich and complex.

[theredkilt]

2014 decant: it's a dark spicy blend with hints of smoke, but i can't tell apart the individual notes. It doesn't feel heavy, but the grounding notes (frank, vetiver, clove) give it a dark texture.  There's a hint of black currant, but no sweetness in sight.