tikiera

Okay, I have to say that in the bottle, I thought this one was awful - very sharp, very harsh, I did not like it. But I really, really wanted to like either Oak King or the Holly King, so I tried them both, and am very glad I did. Oak King too about 30 seconds to settle down, but it smoothed out drastically. It's very woody, but a dry woody. I don't get patchouli - but I do get a bit of musk, very much wood, and a very dry scent. It smells very much to me like leaning against a hardwood tree.

[This is the scent of crisp, green apples, chilled until they are ice cold. It's the scent of feeding those perfectly riped, frosted apples to someone, in bed. It's very apple, but crisp and clean, there's a hint of ozone, a hint of musk. It smells cold, wintry, but it warms up strangely - the musk and ozone flourish with skin contact but do not overwhelm the apple. It does not smell exactly the same to me as the prototype. But it's as good, maybe better.

I have a two step process. First - witch hazel. The kind they sell in the drug store for less than a dollar that is witch hazel and alcohol. Then, normal alcohol to get rid of the witch hazel scent. Neither will work alone for the strongest resiny BPAL. But for some reason the witch hazel gets rid of stuff the alcohol alone won't.

Did I miss the announcement for this month's? It would be the 18th, right? <frets>

This started off a sweet custard creme brulee kind of scent. And then it turned into hideous cheap sugared violet candies. I think I am the only one that got violet off it, but gah, that's all I smell.

The Emathides. I got my imp, tried it, and went !Purple! It smelled like a color, not like anything else. Literally, the only word I can use to describe it is purple - and when I ran in to have my boyfriend sniff my wrist, even he agreed.

In the imp this smells like water-drenched sweet pea. On me, I seem to pick up the pear - and it morphs into the essence of cool water - cucumber and mallow and sweet pea just drenched in a cool crisp water scent.

In the imp I smell cucumber, ozone and water. Wet, it smells like amber tinged with OZONE - like wearing an nice amber perfume in the middle of a storm. The ozone backs off as it drys down - becomes more balanced with the amber, but it did have a slight baby powderish to it.

Darkness and purple. I didn't know purple had a smell until I got an imp of this. But it does. It's lush and dark and I don't smell the amber and amber tends to amp on me. But truly, it smells purple.

In the imp I smell a floral I don't know - maybe the aster? and the smell of water. I don't really know how to describe this one - it seems to become a part of me - I smell like spring water, and rushes and pond blooming plants - but ME. It's a very cool, very aquatic smell, but spring water not river or ocean.

This was my first bottle. In the imp it smelled like a light floral mint. Wet, it smelled like a vanilla mint - only without any sweetness. If you took a vanilla extract and added peppermint leaves to it - that's what this semlled like. It lost some of the vanilla on the drydown, and it ended up being very not sweet mint with a hint of floral and a hint of vanilla. Essentially, it smelled like working in the herb garden while flowers bloomed - the smell of fresh growing mint with a hint of other scents on the air.

When I was taking tribal bellydancing, I would wear Bengal. It just smells right to me - just enough musk, just enough spice, and it faded wonderfully into my skin so that I didn't smell like I was wearing it, it smelled like me. Only much, much better.

I got a tester of this with my last BPAL purchase, and all I can do is sigh that it's so hard to find. It smells like thin mint cookies to me in the imp, but when I put it on, it morphs into this rich, creamy, chocolate mint with the coconut smoothing it all down. I honestly can't pick out any one note - it's like the coconut fills in all the crevasses between scents to make it one nice warm GOOD smell. I hate coconut, so thought trying this would make me go "I can see why people like it but meh". Instead, I was sniffing my wrist all evening long. Seriously. Like very 5 minutes. On my best friend this is exactly thin mint cookies. In a good way. In a just opened the fresh box sort of way. She also spent the evening sniffing her wrist and has sent off in search of more. I can't laud this scent enough. Of all the BPAL I have tried, this is the best.

This smells like bubblegum snowcone on me. The fruity bubblegum snowcone that you can only get at traveling fairs.

I ended up putting ice in a plastic bowl, the bowl in a large baggie and then put a notepad in my large, padded BPAL box, put the ice on it, and closed the bowl. It too a long time for the ice to melt (several hours) so the box must not have been very warm to start, and the the padding acted as insulation. So the add ice theory worked very, very well. Just to repeat with more ice after about 8 hours. Just a few cubes and we were going through ice anyway. The BPAL was even cool when I put in on this morning - noticable cool on my skin for a little while. Made me want to slather.