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- Past hour
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The lemon peel and neroli fight for top place on my skin initially, but quickly settle into a really pretty harmony. Sparkling slightly bitter neroli and lemon on a warm musky base. As it dries I get some slight greenness from the ti leaf and a bit of zing from the ginger. I want to say I detect the lime blossom but I can't be certain. A gorgeous bright and breezy scent.
- Today
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This is so gentle and lovely. Reminds me of a softer, slightly more complex Shanghai. Bright citrus-scented tea wet, with the soft slightly powdery orris and smudgy frankincense-ambergris combo coming in as it dries. Wispy and romantic.
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This is like the olfactory version of a movie scene where fire burns through a piece of paper only to reveal the next scene. It starts out as a conflagration of burning leaves that gradually crumble in the fire and fall to ashes around a single ripe pomegranate, red and juicy and slightly bitter, waiting for Persephone to return to the underworld and taste its forbidden seeds again. Leaves still smolder around the fruit. It is the myth come to life.
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This is mostly fruit on me, with a whisper of patchouli in the background. For some reason my skin amps the sweetness of the fruit so much that I can barely detect the patchouli after it dries down. It turns to pure cloying sugar until the patchouli finally emerges much later. Eel King, you have betrayed me.
- Yesterday
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I've tried a couple things with white honey and I'm not sure I've ever been able to pick it out before, but here I think I can finally put my finger on it. A sort of crystallized honey with an almost menthol hint, drizzled over fresh pansy petals floating in cream. Fully agree with the Poinsettia Gown comparison. This feels like a slightly more Golden Afternoon version of that scent palette. Up close, it does read powdery to me, but the throw is very creamy. Not quite as gourmand as a floral buttercream but not so cosmetic as cold cream. This feels really nice and wearable in any setting but it's absolutely perfect for Mother's Day afternoon tea, which is what I'm wearing it to today haha
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it's PERFECT. the sweet almond/marzipan perfectly brightens the Snake Oil, it's so sexy but also adorable, I even kind of see where the Snow White is fitting in. this is ridiculous. I keep thinking she's winking over her shoulder, beckoning.... What! ❤️
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i received a frimp of this awhile back and am finally trying it. it just smells like straight up orange blossom to me, with maybe a hint of orange rind and a woody petitgrain. i love orange blossom so i find this gorgeous and perfect for warmer weather.
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This does feel very much like a Victorian Christmas card in scent form. Fir dusted with honey powder, draped with dried floral garlands and velvet and chiffon ribbons. One of those Victorian-inspired 90's holiday magazine spreads where everything is white and cream, gold accents against evergreen branches. It smells fancy but whimsical, and it's a really unique holiday/fir scent in my collection. Absolutely fits the painting perfectly.
- Last week
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Dead leaves! Very familiar from dead leaves blends, I agree that this one is more soft, sweet, clean, musky. Some of the dead leaves blends have been too sharp for me as well, this one is very pretty. I do get the hint of anise as well.
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I don’t know what happened to this on my skin. At first it was all baked goods, which then went tootsie roll, and then it had an edge of something animalic? The initial scent is delicious though, will have to retest or use this in a locket.
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Sniffing this from the imp, the most forward note is a gorgeous juicy realistic pear. It’s so well-supported by the other notes, which lend a creamy background. Sadly, on my skin, the orris note just torpedoes everything else so that’s all I get; and this scent is a little too understated to do much in my scent locket.
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I waffled on this one in my first Yules order (hahaaaaa🫠 it's a dangerous time of year for me), but the reviews convinced me to trust the process and ignore the pumpkin, which never agrees with me. Thank you forumites and your reviews! This is perfect!!! This is the holiday parties of my childhood in 4k. The spiced fruitiness, the cozy warmth. You know that scene in the Wilder Willy Wonka movie where they go through the kaliedoscopic tunnel? It's that but with every lovely holiday scent imaginable. A melange of nostalgia. It settles into a cozy spiced fruitiness, gilt with resins and wax. Really lovely. Perfectly executed.
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Oh man, this is so pretty. I adore the lab's Bulgarian rose note so whenever it pops up, I'm on it. I'm not normally keen on coffee scents (despite drinking a ridiculous amount of coffee) but the allure of a B. Rose duet was irresistible. I am so glad I went for it! The rose is gorgeous, not the snapped green stem freshness of Rose Red and less deep velvet of Peacock Queen. It smells like the platonic ideal of a Valentine's bouquet. The coffee smells like walking in to a space where coffee is being brewed more than huffing the beans directly. It's a very romantic type scent: coffee and roses in the morning. It's not terribly strong but I absolutely don't care because it's just so enjoyable. Occasionally, I threaten my wallet with the concept of a back-up bottle, but so far I've always managed to talk myself out of it. But I'm a sucker for rose lattes and this is like wearing one without all the embarassment of spilling it all over yourself. My wallet better gird its loins. 😤
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Echoing the above, this is quite nice! The wool indeed smells warm, like drying your scarf over a radiator. I don't get any funkiness from the milk and the cacao isn't very strong, both of which I'm very thankful for because I was worried about those two. Overall it smells like a coming in from the cold to a toasty, cozy home and being greeted with a hug. I really like this (and for some reason it makes me think of To A Wreath of Snow but I don't have that any longer to compare, and there's no notes in common iirc so I've no idea why!)
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This makes me think of Mr. Ibis, the dry paleness of it, but instead of his scrubbed clean musks, it's accented by a soft spiciness and chalk. The chalk has an almost...dampness to it? A hint of sea? Maybe that's just my associations because my partner is a geologist lol. This is really lovely and definitely could be a genteel skeleton's signature scent. I get a little bit of throw but overall it is demure and mindful. Pairs really lovely with my lavender deodorant!
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This is my wedding anniversary 13- there have only been a few August Friday the 13ths since I was married in 1976, much less since I discovered BPAL in 2006! I rarely wear them, but have to collect the ones falling in August. Now that this one has aged, let's see how she wears on me! This is simply a deep herby chocolate, neither milky nor sugary sweet on me. A hint of spice from the clove pink comes through, and maybe it's just the overall herbal mixture. I can't really identify any other single notes in here. This isn't as dusty cocoa as one of my other 13s, but fortunately not milky sweet. I actually think I should wear this more often now!
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All compiled here in one place: https://blackphoenixalchemylab.com/product-tag/march-2026-lunacy/ March's iteration of 13 comes with a free imp of FORSAKEN ELEPHANT PUPPET: well-loved gray cotton, clover honey, kettle corn, and soft white amber.
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I don't know what shenanigans eleven Kabuki actors might have been up to, but they evidently inspired a gorgeous toasted almond cream with a hit of bourbon and the honeyed undertones of mimosa. Mimosa flowers are supposed to smell like honey and almond (I looked it up since I've never actually smelled one in person). As it dries down, a certain warmth emerges from the subtle hay and sandalwood lying underneath. This is as beautiful as the Edo-era art it reflects.
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On my skin it is predominantly a tropical floral scent. The banana is prominent when first applied but once dried it is mixed down with the fig. The floral part is not big and hot-house, but very present. It is a scent for feminine mischief and emotionally feels care free and relaxed.
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The ultimate personification of the Lovers, the crowned White Queen and Red King appear as personifications of solar and lunar forces, opposing currents poised before their great meeting. Here the King extends his branch and the Queen hers, and in the symbolic imagery the sun and moon stand beside them in the watery vessel where their union will be enacted, reflecting the ancient alchemical principle that the opposites must enter the prima materia if transformation is to occur. In the illuminated plates of the Rosarium Philosophorum, the crowned King and Queen stand facing one another beneath a descending dove, sovereign and sovereign, fixed and volatile, their bodies poised at the threshold of sacred union. He burns with solar tincture, sulfurous and red, the embodied heat of will and form; she gleams with lunar pallor, mercurial and receptive, the shining mirror that receives and transforms. Their meeting is courtship through coniunctio, the deliberate joining of opposites beneath divine blessing. They are the Lovers stripped to archetype, the sun and the moon brought into perfect equilibrium. The King must surrender his isolated dominion, the Queen her cool separateness, and in their embrace the sealed vessel becomes a womb of transmutation. Above them, the spirit descends; below them, the bath and tomb await. What appears as union is also dissolution, for each must die to solitary sovereignty in order to be reborn as unified essence. Alchemically, their conjunction generates the Stone, the filius philosophorum, the radiant third that arises when polarity is neither denied nor allowed to dominate. From red and white emerges the tincture that perfects, the hermaphroditic child crowned in both suns and moons, embodying the reconciliation of sulfur and mercury within a single body of light. The Lovers here transcend flesh and narrative, becoming emblem and equation, the purest symbolic revelation of the card’s mystery: that true union is the marriage of contraries under spirit, and that from such sacred joining comes incorruptible gold. Crimson musk and white amber twined with solar frankincense and lunar myrrh, warm saffron steeped in cool iris root, gold-threaded honey darkened by silvered benzoin, a marriage of fire and pearl beneath a rain of distant stars.
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The Lovers suspended beneath hostile stars; innocent, youthful love caught in profound celestial tension. Two households, both alike in dignity, are bound by ancient grievance, and beneath their banners walk two young hearts caught in the inexorable turning of the spheres. “A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life whose misadventured piteous overthrows,” and the heavens themselves draw down to witness and grieve the dazzling catastrophe of first love. Their passion is as swift as lightning, tender as dawn, perilous as prophecy. They move as mirrored flame, twin spirits divided by inherited hatred, Gemini energy refracted through vendetta and family saga. In one another they glimpse completion, a reflection unmarred by the violence of the world beyond the balcony that hems them in. The polarity that surrounds them only sharpens their longing. Night and day, Montague and Capulet, poison and potion, oath and silence: each intrinsic, fated duality entwines them closer together. The “black-brow’d night” shelters their whispered promises and heart-rending declarations of love, wrapping them in a darkness that protects and consecrates, while the “garish sun” exposes, divides, and drives them back into the machinery of blood feud and overweening pride. In this reversal, shadow is mercy and daylight is threat, and their passion flourishes in secrecy as though it were a nocturnal bloom opening only when the world’s vigilance sleeps. Night gathers them into momentary wholeness, but the harsh light of dawn demands polarity. Their struggle is not only against their families but against time itself, against the relentless return of morning that tears them from the refuge of darkness and thrusts them toward consequence. Their love is not permitted to grow and thrive, and instead it burns brief, bright, and absolute with the shattering, pure conflagration of a supernova. In the long, shadowed sleep of death they accomplish what life denied them, and the warring houses, confronted by the cost of enmity, lay down their arms. Love as transmutation, sorrow as reconciliation, and what was divided is brought, through tragedy, into uneasy harmony. This is the Lovers as one soul divided, as the soul split and reunited through fate and consequence, union under celestial tension, and devotion that outlives breath and fundamentally alters the world that sought to forbid it. Crushed red rose and night-blooming jasmine unfurl over Verona stone warmed by summer dusk, sugared violets and bitter orange peel steeped in pale cypress smoke, with a single thread of myrrh rising like a whispered vow in the dark.
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In Tristan und Isolde, the music itself mirrors a yearning that cannot find solace within the confines of flesh, a longing that cannot be satisfied within the constraints of mortal love. “O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe,” they implore, calling down the night as sanctuary and sacrament, and in the final transfiguration, “In des Welt-Atems wehendem All,” they yield themselves to the vast eternity of the cosmos. The Liebestod unfolds as love’s consummation through annihilation. They lift the cup and the world alters its course, not by whim but by the immutable heartbeat of destiny dancing through their veins like quicksilver, dissolving the boundaries of crown and oath, eroding the rigid architecture of law until only longing remains. The potion works as mercurial catalyst, sacred and profane entwined so completely that no mortal decree can separate them, and their love is swept into an inexorable tide that pulls them beyond honor, beyond fealty, beyond the sunlit world. Here the Lovers are fate-struck, their devotion defying and shattering the visible order while revealing a deeper one beneath it, for in their undoing lies transformation, and in their surrender the eternal marriage of longing and oblivion. Then, being with the Queen for the last time, he held her in his arms and said: “Friend, I must fly, for they are wondering. I must fly, and perhaps shall never see you more. My death is near, and far from you my death will come of desire.” “Oh friend,” she said, “fold your arms round me close and strain me so that our hearts may break and our souls go free at last. Take me to that happy place of which you told me long ago. The fields whence none return, but where great singers sing their songs for ever. Take me now.” “I will take you to the Happy Palace of the living, Queen! The time is near. We have drunk all joy and sorrow. The time is near. When it is finished, if I call you, will you come, my friend?” “Friend,” said she, “call me and you know that I shall come.” “Friend,” said he, “God send you His reward.” As he went out the spies would have held him; but he laughed aloud, and flourished his club, and cried: “Peace, gentlemen, I go and will not stay. My lady sends me to prepare that shining house I vowed her, of crystal, and of rose shot through with morning.” And as they cursed and drave him, the fool went leaping on his way. – The Romance of Tristan & Iseult Drawn from the best French Sources and Retold by J. Bédier Rendered into English by Hilaire Belloc Dark wine spilled on oak, pine boughs and love philtres, rose petals and sea-salt, storm-wind over cold stone battlements, myrrh smoke braided with heart-pulses of red musk awash in tears, tinkling fairy bells and the bitter sweetness of forbidden fruit steeped in a silver chalice.
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Death had come into the land from the time Osiris had been closed in the chest through the cunning of Sêth; war was in the land; men always had arms in their hands. No longer did music sound, no longer did men and women talk sweetly and out of the depths of their feelings. Less and less did grain, and fruit-trees, and the vine flourish. The green places everywhere were giving way to the desert. Sêth was triumphant; Thout and Nephthys cowered before him. And all the beauty and all the abundance that had come from Rê would be destroyed if the pieces that had been the body of Osiris were not brought together once more. So Isis sought for them, and Nephthys, her sister, helped her in her seeking. Isis, in a boat that was made of reeds, floated over the marshes, seeking for the pieces. One, and then another, and then another was found. At last she had all the pieces of his torn body. She laid them together on a floating island, and reformed them. And as the body of Osiris was formed once more, the wars that men were waging died down; peace came; grain, and the vine, and the fruit-trees grew once more. And a voice came to Isis and told her that Osiris lived again, but that he lived in the Underworld where he was now the Judge of the Dead, and that through the justice that he meted out, men and women had life immortal. And a child of Osiris was born to Isis: Horus he was named. Nephthys and the wise Thout guarded him on the floating island where he was born. Horus grew up, and he strove against the evil power of Sêth. In battle he overcame him, and in bonds he brought the evil Sêth, the destroyer of his father, before Isis, his mother. Isis would not have Sêth slain: still he lives, but now he is of the lesser Gods, and his power for evil is not so great as it was in the time before Horus grew to be the avenger of his father. – Padraic Colum In the account preserved by Plutarch in On Isis and Osiris, Osiris is betrayed by the cunning of Set and sealed within a chest, a king slain and committed to silence and darkness, his body later torn and scattered across the land he once made fertile. Death enters Egypt with that closing of the lid of his sarcophagus. Destruction engulfs the kingdom, and the fertile soil of grain and vine yield to the encroaching desert. Isis refuses the reign of fragmentation and shadows. In a boat of reeds, she searches the marshes, patient and relentless, gathering one fragment and then another, though the gods’ penis has been consumed by a river fish. She laid the pieces together and reformed Osiris through spell and sacred utterance, enacting the mystery that Plutarch describes as the restoration of the good and ordered principle against chaos and devastation. She fashioned a phallus for Osiris through her craft and magic, and conceived their son, Horus. As Osiris was reconstituted, peace returned, the fields bloomed green once more, and through their union, a third god is created. Alchemically, the body is dissolved into multiplicity, scattered into chaos, and through the labor of love is gathered and consecrated into renewed form. From this restored polarity emerges a third: Horus, the child born of their union, guarded by wise Thoth and steadfast Nephthys, raised to confront and overcome Set. In Horus, the Lovers create continuity and correction, a living reconciliation that tempers destruction without erasing it, for even Set remains, diminished and bound within a larger order. Esoterically, this is sacred marriage enduring beyond death, the Lovers as integration and reconciliation of life and afterlife and the power of the passion and devotion of the lovers to create new life from death. Isis does not deny mortality but transforms it. Through her love and labor, Osiris lives again, enthroned in the Underworld as Judge of the Dead, dispensing justice and granting immortality through balance. The union of Isis and Osiris is altered yet unbroken, shifted from earthly kingship to eternal dominion. This is the Lovers as cosmological force, the force of the reassembly of creation itself. Isis and Osiris embody the Lovers as divine covenant transcending death, unconditional devotion that restores wholeness, and the sacred act through which two become not only one, but three. Their bond does not end at the tomb; it passes through it, transforms it, and returns bearing life immortal, a testament that love, when joined in true polarity, does not perish but remakes the world. Blue lotus incense and kyphi resin dancing in a dusk-shadowed temple, black loam of the Nile and green papyrus crushed beneath bare feet, myrrh and cassia steeped in date honey, a glimmer of lapis and gold leaf pressed into linen, and a surge of floodwater returning to parched earth.
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In the book of Book of Genesis, the first pair stand in untested unity, formed of earth and breath, innocence and possibility. “And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him” (Genesis 2:18), and from that declaration arises polarity as gift rather than fracture, difference as the condition of communion. Bone of bone and flesh of flesh, they are not rivals but reflections, two aspects of one living mystery: the soul and the spirit of humankind. Yet the drama of the Lovers is not stasis but choice. When the fruit is taken and shared, consciousness deepens and the seamlessness of Eden gives way to the currents of history. “Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken” (Genesis 3:23). Through Eve’s invitation and Adam’s consent, spirit and soul descend into the rivers of Time, entering the full measure of embodied existence with its labor and ecstasy, its birth pangs and graves. Mortality becomes their teacher, and the dust from which Adam was shaped becomes the destiny to which he must return, “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19). Esoterically, she may be seen as the animating impulse, the quickening spirit that urges experience, while he embodies the ensouled humanity that must walk the path she opens. Their so-called fall is also initiation, the necessary passage from unconscious unity into lived duality, where joy and sorrow are known rather than merely imagined. The Lovers here are not simply the bliss of Eden but the courage to enter time together, to face consequence side by side, and to seek, through exile and return, the restoration of a higher garden not of innocence but of awakened wholeness. In the first dawn of consciousness, before history clothed itself in shame, stand Adam and Eve as archetypes of a polarity not yet divided against itself. She is the descending brilliance, arching her consciousness towards the world itself, the soul drawn upward toward gnosis. He turns toward her, embodied will answering its own reflection. Above them burns the stark, pure radiance of unity and within them sleeps the yet-unforged Stone. The serpent coils at the axis of the Tree. It is the mercurial spirit, subtle and ascending, the luminous volatility of both knowledge and growth that refuses stasis. Through its whisper the fruit becomes the tincture that awakens innocence into awareness. Sulfur awakens in desire, Mercury stirs in receptivity, salt forms in the tears of exile. The expulsion is the separation required for conjunction, solve preceding coagula. What was unconsciously whole must become consciously divided so it may one day reunite in wisdom. In these Lovers, unity dissolves into duality, and in that darkening begins the opus. This is not the loss of Eden; it is the ignition of the Great Work. Skin musk, fig sap, pomegranate, apple skin, and the smoke and warmth of humankind’s newly-kindled fire.
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In the First Book of Samuel it is written: “And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul,” (1 Samuel 18:1) and in that binding the axis of a kingdom trembles. Robe, armor, sword, and girdle are given freely, a voluntary unmaking of inheritance in favor of devotion. This is love as sacred oath, not fever but fidelity, a bond forged in the shadow of Saul’s rising wrath and the uncertainty of exile. When David laments, “thy love to me was wonderful beyond the love of women” (2 Samuel 1:26) grief becomes testimony and loyalty becomes scripture. Jonathan’s renunciation is ego relinquished so that another may ascend, sulfur tempered by mercy, ambition dissolved into covenantal gold. Here the Lovers stand not in garden innocence but beneath the weight of throne and spear, choosing allegiance over advantage, devotion over dynasty. Love does not seize power but surrenders it, and in that surrender is transfigured into something that outlives both battle and crown. Shepherd’s wool and wild honey, cedarwood and olive leaf, sun-warmed leather, plumes of frankincense rising from a quiet altar, and a thread of red pomegranate seed crushed between steady hands.
