[shelldoo]

http://www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com/loveandpain.gif

Love and Pain, Edvard Munch.
Lavender, Balkan tobacco, black musk, dark vanilla, and golden copaifera.

in the bottle: smells like single not lavender.

wet: strong and i do mean STRONG lavender

this doesn't change on me, it is all lavender, those who love lavender herbal scents will most likely want this one.

[Heavenlyrabbit]

This is dark. A dark, brooding herbal.

Herbals don't ususally mean dark to me.

I don't know what to make of this. It's an odd scent. I'm anxious to see what others get.

[vylit]

Wet: I get the vanilla and something that I assume is golden copaifera, since I know it isn't the others. It's a sweet, unusual scent.

Dry: I have vanilla, tobacco, black musk, and golden copaifera, in that order. I don't smell lavender at all, and it isn't particularly herbal on me. This is a sweet, musky, sensual scent. Really gorgeous, and it'd work on men or women.

[clover]

Oh my GAWD - another gorgeous one from the new Salon. :P

When I first put this on the dominant note was lavender. Not a kick-you-in-the-head lavender, but a gentle herbal lavender. Lavender is a note I find really hard to pull off in perfumes - it generally either smells very masculine to me or very medicinal. It's hardly a subtle scent. But in this perfume, it just works beautifully. After a few minutes a few of the other notes start to come into play - notably the tobacco - and this turns into an insanely addictive and sensual scent. It's so soft and yet pungent, dark and juicy. The kind of scent that makes you want to keep burying your nose in your wrist. I also think it's a scent that could work equally well on a man or woman.

[Delphinine]

In the vial: a soft breath of lavender with a touch of sweetness.

On skin: OMG :P This scent just jumped into my Top Ten, probably my Top Five. I think this scent would appeal to people who generally don't care for lavender, because the notes blend seemlessly together. This is a unique and beautiful scent. I must have a bottle!

[veridian]

These new additions to the Salon are wonderful....of the four I bought I really love all of them. This one is stunning and dark and richly beautiful. It makes an impact on my skin with an almost tangible presence.

At first touch on my skin this is very strong, very dark lavender with a heavy undertone of musk and dry, smokey tobacco. It seems like it would be perfect for either a man or a woman, as other have noted. But despite that, it never once made me feel less feminine. In fact, it made me feel more so.

This really hits its pinnacle when the sweeter vanilla note appears. The vanilla doesn't smell foody, syrupy, or overly sweet at all. It's a pure, dark vanilla. The kind that smells like it almost might be fermented and thus has a sort of boozy feeling. At this stage I think it is more of a feminine than a masculine fragrance. Very smooth too.

[supremegoddessofall]

A strange lavender blend. Not really getting the tobacco or the vanilla, but there's an undertone of...something. Only moderately musky.

[sookster]

straight sniff from bottle this is the "most" beautiful lavender beth has created
to date... :D

once applied super, strong lavender takes a few moments to settle down with
my chemistry...the dark and deep musk and vanilla temper this to perfection
and i get the tiniest waft of the tobacco...Lordy be...my favorite salon scent
the lab has to offer, hands down :)

ETA: after 1 hour, this is still going strong and now has a somewhat smoky note...
:P :D

This post has been edited by sookster: 03 June 2007 - 12:40 PM

[cuervosueno]

oh, I love me some copal. And vanilla. And black musk is nice, and sometimes I even like tobacco.

I do not like lavender.

And of course, on me and in the imp, it entirely dominates this blend.

When I first smell it in the imp, and when I put it on, it seems like straight up lavender almost, though there is something making it a bit sweeter.

When it dries, I get a hint of tobacco, and possibly copal. but now it is just a clean soapy lavender with something else to make it sweeter. Imagine someone who had bathed in lavender soap, and then had smoked a pipe of sweet tobacco. that's what I get from this.

Which was, alas, not what I wanted.

[black_and_bloom]

At first this is pure lavender - wonderful if a bit dominant. The initial rush quickly subsides and the scent gains in complexity. Love and Pain dries down to a gorgeous, clean-smelling blend that is highlighted by the vanilla and golden copaifera. It's simply beautiful!

[dawndie]

Wet: barely-there herbs

On skin: blast of herbal lavender, burrowing into my sinuses. Phoo!

Half-hour later: still lots of lavender, but with a creamy base

In conclusion: while lavender isn't one of my favorite notes, the creamier base makes it tolerable. This is the nicest lavender blend I've tried.

[gwynethr]

I was sort of afraid of this one because me and lavender are unmixy, very very much. But I love the other notes, so it was worth a try, and I'm glad I did. It's not a favorite so far, but the lavender is incredibly subtle on me, for once, and so are all the other notes. I can't even really pick any one note out, though there is something I can't identify that's most prominent, and I assume it might be the copawhatsit, since I don't know that I've ever smelled that before.

There's a slightly spicy, slightly herby, slightly warm, slightly herbal quality to it -- as though every single note is perfectly balanced against the other so that nothing leaps forward. Very interesting.

[sarada]

I was eager to try this scent because I love smoky lavender blends (and I love the painting, what with the red hair and the gloom!). I like just about everything listed in this blend...and when I first sniff it, it is a very strong, piercing lavender, with a hint of something like men's cologne.

Once on, it remains very strong -- lavender through an amplifier, wearing black leather and spikes. It's masculine in the only way that I tend not to like masculine scents, i.e. a bit like a strong cologne. That's odd, since these notes rarely do things like that on me. The black musk is working overtime, drowning out everything else but the lavender.

I love tobacco in perfume, but I don't get much in here, not a lot of that smoky lavender that I love in things like Agony of Loss or Gaueko. It's sharp lavender darkened and deepened and drenched in cologne. All that said, I still like it, mainly when it has dried down a bit and loses that metallic edge. And the vanilla? Not present at all to my nose.

[euterpe414]

I have to agree with sarada's review above- this is some STRONG cologne-y lavender, definitely not for the faint of heart! This blend it pretty much all LAVENDER until it has been dry on my skin for quite a while (re: 1/2 hour) and then it turns into a nice smoky lavender and tobacco. I really love this stage of the blend- it's very shadowy and dusky, like the painting. This lovely stage doesn't last long, though, it's right on the edge of disappearing. :P I really wanted to love this one, but sadly I can't since lavender refuses to play nice. I suppose I could try to tough it out and wait for hte dry-dry down, but I have so many loves that I like from the get-go that I don't find this worth it.

[Lunaratu]

Very herbal lavender. I have to admit I was a bit frightened of this perfume since lavender usually hates me with a fiery passion (it amps and is hard to scrub off). This isn’t really amping as much as lavender usually does on me yet but it is very much the plant lavender since it has this definite just picked flower smell.

It quiets down a bit in the few minutes while it’s been drying, melding with the amber is my guess, but it is still very much an herbal lavender which is much better than the lavender funk I usually get. This at least is a straight clear lavender plant on my skin with a tiny bit of underlying sweetness underneath from the amber, and perhaps the black musk, that also quiets it down to non-ampage on my skin.

Rating: 2.5/5

This post has been edited by Lunaratu: 09 October 2007 - 04:56 AM

[Little Bird]

To be fair, I generally dislike BPAL's tobacco and black musk, so I wasn't hopeful for this to begin with, lol. On me at first this is black musk and lavender. It's very herbal and very cheap, musky men's cologne. Dark, herbal, musky. In the drydown (after about an hour) the tobacco comes out smelling thick and smoky. It's very masculine to my nose and very not-me. I was excited about the dark vanilla, but this is just musky and herbal on my skin.

[Edens Sixth Day]

Love and Pain - This doesn't smell so good on me. I'm not a fan of lavender or black musk and when blended with certain notes, tobacco can go horribly awry on my skin, as well. This is one of those blends that simply does not work for me. It opens with a sharp blast of lavender, but the lavender settles down more quickly than usual, but it's definitely still there. At this point, I can smell the tobacco and the dark musk, and it just smells terrible on my skin. I don't have a clue what golden copaifera is, and I definitely don't smell any vanilla. Oh! But then, after it's been on my skin for 30 minutes or so, I suddenly notice the lavender is gone. The musk is gone. The tobacco is present, but very subtle. What's left over is a scent that distinctly reminds me of LUSH American Cream. Is that the vanilla? The golden copacabana (haha). Wow. It actually turns into something really, truly stunning...yet so faint that I can barely smell it. But still...a BPAL that ends up smelling like American Cream? ROCK ON!

[Forspecial Plate]

It was very interesting for me to try this and then read the reviews. I'm totally with those that got a big 'masculine' vibe from this. It starts out with a big flourish of lavender, which is a note I've always got along well with. But that does back off pretty quickly, and the other notes come forward. It's all blended together so I really couldn't pick apart the notes....and I didn't have the description with me, so I didn't know what notes were there anyway, except I remembered there was tobacco in it. Kind of a suffused golden and smokey scent, elegant, almost. Makes me think of couples slow dancing in a smokey lounge, to sultry jazz music.

The extended drying stage of this totally reminded me of a classic, almost old fashioned men's after-shave. After reading the reviews I can't wait to try it again, and see if my opinion changes at all, and if I get any 'feminine' feeling from it. It's something I would enjoy wearing when in certain moods, but not all the time, and probably don't need a whole bottle of. But it is quite interesting and as usual, I love experiencing Beth's interperetations of the art.

Edit: You know....something about this scent reminds me of a used ashtray. I think it's the golden resin, because copal sometimes goes out of control when I wear it, and tobacco doesn't usually have this effect on me. I don't think I can wear this any more. : (

This post has been edited by Forspecial Plate: 03 September 2010 - 05:08 AM

[yeahbutnobut]

Love and Pain

In the imp: heavy, perfumey lavender cologne.
Wet on skin: dry, perfumey tobacco and lavender.
Dry on skin: this smells like a traditional gentlemanly perfume, it feels like the masculine counterpart to DPP Sitting Up With a Sick Friend. It has that same perfumey quality to the tobacco, with a touch of golden cologne, and heavy lavender replacing the rose note. After a minute I smell some copal here and the scent becomes more unusual, almost like heady incense, smoky and soporific. It smells like Gaueko, but more potent.
After a while: the lavender fades but the tobacco still retains it's cologne like scent, a manly scent which smells very sophisticated. I smell none of the vanilla but I smell the golden copal which adds it's distinctive crumbly dry resin fragrance (and gives the scent a hint of King Cobra), and the musk may be adding more of a perfumey aspect. But it's not the vanilla-lavender-musk scent I was expecting. This is a lot more like something upscale and expensive. The tobacco is really strong in here, taking over with it's smoky dry leaf scent, different to the softer tobacco notes of Bachelor's Dog and Pinched. There's something almost leathery to it. I normally like tobacco but this one is a little too much like posh perfume to me.
At one point there's a hint of burnt rubber to the scent which I really don't like. I have no idea where this comes from but it confirms that this scent just isn't me. The rubber scent doesn't last but the end drydown smells like something my mum wears, a faded and old fashioned perfume.
Verdict: I was expecting this to be the ultimate BPAL lavender-vanilla-musk, a wonderful sleepy scent, kind of like a BPAL equivalent to Possets Ultramarine Blue, with added tobacco. But this was nothing like that-it was pretty much all tobacco, and tobacco cologne at that. There are not many BPALs which are too masculine or mature for me to wear but I do feel I am the wrong gender-and the wrong age-for this scent. the lavender is even more of a knockout than TKO, and hot on it's heels is a very dominant and perfumed tobacco. It's not the gentle, crumbly, comforting tobacco from some of my favourite DPP scents, but something stuffier and much more 'gentleman's club', it smells like a very expensive department store aftershave. It's very sophisticated smelling, I must say, like something high-end, and there's an interesting copal angle to it, but it smells too much like a 'posh bloke' scent for me, which I can't really pull off. I was hoping for more of the vanilla and musk to show up at the end but it didn't. Not my thing, I'm afraid.
Emoticon rating: :P
Is it a keeper? Not really.
If you like this, try: Gaueko, Kalahantrika, Arcana, Hellfire, Isaac, Sitting Up With a Sick Friend, Clio, Somnus

[The_Merf]

In the imp: SHARP lavender with black musk and a whiff of the tobacco

Wet: Really sharp lavender with a strength to match the Somnium blends like Baku.

Drydown and wear: I'm quite fortunate in that this doesn't go to straight lavender on me. However, it takes an interesting detour through the realm of "citronella candle" in the early stages. I'm not entirely sure what combination of notes results in that smell, but it does smell like I've got some OFF Bug Spray on when this dries down. This is not something that black musk or vanilla has ever done on my skin before. As I read on copaifera, I see that it can be used in bug bites, so I guess that's what is creating the effect. My skin really amps that note up!

[karen]

Okay, first off, the art that inspired this scent is GORGEOUS. The only Munch I really "know" is Scream, so this was a revelation. Love and Pain is more commonly known as Vampire, by the way. In case you ever try to, say, find it on google images. Just a hypothetical.

Love and Pain -- the scent -- definitely works with the picture. It's innocent at first but gradually darkens into a very dark, heavy, masculine scent.

The first few minutes after I put it on, I smell a green herbal blend, not light but not too dark either. Definitely lavender, but not the huge medicinal whiff I was expecting. As it dries, any lightness the blend had evaporates, leaving behind a dark, dark, musky vanilla laced with a bit of tobacco, I think. I'm not great at picking out tobacco, so I could be off, but I think that's what I'm smelling.

It has throw, too, which is rare with my chemistry. I would never be able to pull a scent this heavy off, but it is interesting, that's for sure.

[alicia_stardust]

This starts out as a soft, herbal lavender but it doesn't take long for that to change. After a while I get the back musk and the golden copaifera and those are tempered and sweetened by the vanilla and lavender. What a nice duality that those notes create; they seem to mirror Love and Pain quite well.

[Ajila]

In the bottle – Straight up lavender

Wet on me – Sweet soap and something that tickles my nose

Dry on me – Sweet creamy lavender, with just a hint of tobacco

Overall – I really expected to like this, but on me it was just bland

[theseagrows]

oh WOW this is so much more beautiful than i ever expected. it has a sort of "classic" scent to me, yet is very original at the same time. sniffing the imp i smell mostly lavender with something else lurking beneath. i know at some point i have smelled another perfume similar to this. at first the lavender is strongest, but once the sharpness of it fades away, the tobacco and musk come out. there is also something sort of floral in here that i cant put my finger on. perhaps it's the golden copaifera. a crisp musk scent, this one has shot to the top of my favorites instantly :P

[Miss Lynx]

At first sniff this smells like some kind of relaxation aromatherapy blend, though that tends to be my response to most things that have lavender as a top note. The lavender has a rich earthiness beneath it, though, which keeps it from being overly sharp or sweet.

As it settles in a bit, it begins to take on that unmistakable "Hi! I'm a MEN'S scent!" aroma, although not the point where I feel completely freakish wearing it. It's a rich and interesting enough scent that it smells like a woman could get away with wearing it, even though it's pretty butch. The overall feel is a bit like a non-chocolatey Wulfric at this stage.

Unfortunately, the later stages, after it's been on for a few hours, seem a bit "off" on me, in a way I can't really identify. Something about whichever notes it is that last the longest in this makes them not really quite work on me. There's almost a bit of that mildewy graveyard dirt note that's in Zombi, though I have no idea what it would be coming from here. But whatever it is, it was unpleasant enough for me to eventually wash it off.

Grade: C