The review below the black text is for the first formulation of Jack. Recently I got ahold of an imp of the reformulated Jack, and I have to say it is lovely. Still doesn't capture the scent of pumpkins that I was imagining (you know -- like when you're carving into them?), but it smells like deliciously spiced, creamy, baking pumpkins. Layered with Three Witches, it smells just divine. Not my favorite scent from BPAL, but still a good one.
I adore pumpkins. Halloween is my favorite time of year, and the amount of time that I spend around pumpkins during the holidays is almost distressing to everyone around me. Seriously, I spend hours carving pumpkins and pulling out their innards, until my nails are stained orange; even more time is spent in the kitchen making pumpkin pie, bread, custard, baked pumpkin seeds, soup, and anything else pumpkin based that I can get a recipe for. So basically, I had no doubt that I'd love this.
In the Bottle
I have to admit that this is one of the more foul smells that I've encountered. At very first sniff (I'm talking about the first half second of smelling it), it smells really good, like baking pumpkins, maybe right after you've added the dry ingredients (like baking powder and the spices) to a bowl with pumpkin puree. But then it turns into the scent of burnt butter and pumpkin, and the peach underneath it all seems to only contribute an overripe/sweet smell to it. The "aftersmell" is like charred pumpkin bread stuck to the walls of an oven.
Wearing It
This does change on my skin, but not enough. Wet, it retains the strong scent of burnt pumpkin; once it dries, the smell of charred butter and bread is more prominent. The peach also turns the smell sickly sweet (there's something about peach and my skin chemistry that just *won't* play nice), and is just noticeable enough to bother me. I'm honestly really upset that this doesn't work on my skin. I want to cry.
And just to prove that it isn't my skin chemistry playing nasty tricks on me, I made my boyfriend try it on. I was hoping that maybe he could smell absolutely delicious. But it still smells like burnt pumpkin on him, though much less like bread and butter. The sub note of peach doesn't turn the scent too sweet either. But still...burnt pumpkin isn't what I want him to smell like. (And, go figure, he doesn't want to smell like that either!)
I had read the reviews and noted the few negative ones, and figured that I was just too "hardcore" a pumpkin fanatic for *any* pumpkin smell to bother me. That'll teach me to not pay attention to the reviews here in the future. I'd wanted so badly for this to work, but...C'est la vie, I suppose. I wish I could smell a single note of pumpkin, and see if it was the pumpkin itself that was reacting badly on my skin and in the bottle, or if it could be blamed on the peach and the other ingredients. The pumpkin scents in Samhain weren't anything but delicious (although a definite subnote to the apple cider/fall leaf scent). But...unless a single scent of pumpkin suddenly shows up on the single note list, I guess I'll just have to wonder.
This post has been edited by hypothermya: 13 October 2004 - 06:21 AM
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