Kimbernunk

I got October (2010 version) hoping it would be really dry ozone and crisp leaves. It isn't that. What it is is pretty much what I was hoping last year's Falling Leaf Moon would be: soft woods, leaves, and a strong aquatic note. Falling Leaf Moon had a spicy note that October doesn't have, so that October smells fully and only of outdoors things whereas Falling Leaf Moon smells of outdoors things tread through while carrying a cup of chai. I love both for different reasons and purposes.

To focus more solely on October, I think my NOSE reads the wind note as being aquatic - something in the combination of that plus the leaves seems to lean aquatic for me (and apparently for a lot of others), but it isn't something that my SKIN treats as aquatic, because the way my skin reacts to the aquatic-seeming note here is different than how it usually treats aquatics. The upshot is that for the first time ever, whatever is going on in this perfume smells EXACTLY like REAL RAIN, as in it's raining outside right now and the leaves are starting to turn and the smell outdoors and the scent wafting off my wrists are absolutely identical.

October is a unisex-to-masculine scent. I'm really happy wearing it, but I like a lot of woodsy/masculine scents - I could see where someone who goes for really feminine scents might not be happy with this. But for me it works beautifully, and I'm thrilled to finally have a bottle.

This reminds me really strongly of Vixen, but with a more noticeable orange blossom note. The sandalwood/champaca blend is nice and calming and the orange blossom sort of floats over it. It's really pretty, but I'm not sure it's so different from Vixen that I'd need a bottle of Paramatman as well. I'll have to play around more with my imp.

I get a super strong, very herbal mint to start off with. It dries down to a fairly strong white amber with a minty, slightly sweet undertone, and the tiniest, tiniest hints of neroli and violet. I was hoping this would be a strong neroli, but what I've got is still nice. I love the Lab's white amber note.

Definitely begins with a major screaming fit of grapefruit. It woke me up almost as well as my cup of coffee.

It calms down quickly into a really balanced scent - I can smell all four notes distinctly. It's really clean and cheerful and bright and happy. It does fade fairly quickly - I needed to reapply after about four hours, which is really short for my skin chemistry. It's worth it though - it's a gorgeous citrus!

On my skin, this is almost SN sunflower. There's probably a hint of some kind of golden amber in the back, and maybe a touch of something slightly green and a touch of something slightly clove-like, but it's so predominantly sunflower that I'm not really paying much attention to anything else.

I LOVE SUNFLOWER, so I'm thrilled about this.

Quick comparison to Sunflower in the Salon - Sunflower has a definite dark sweetness from the black amber, and smells like sunflowers in the middle of a grossly hot muggy day in August in the Midwest. Sundew retains the sunflower note, but it's not as OMG IT'S HOT OUT as Sunflower - Sundew is a bit more mellow, a bit cleaner.

This may end up being a bottle purchase.

This has NO business working on my skin. Honey is a death note, vanilla is usually a death note, rose and gardenia can both amp to headache level.

However, this is awesome.

Pepper starts out as slightly rosy shortbread cookies. I wasn't a fan of it wet.

It took about 15 minutes to settle in. Then all of a sudden, I get the pink pepper, the blood orange, the ginger, and the little hint of berry. The vanilla and honey are hanging out in the background and the rose and gardenia have behaved themselves, so that this isn't a straight floral.

I'm in dead shock, and absolutely in love with this.

5/5

Definitely the Host of the Air for every reasn already mentioned, and Pa-Pow. Also, June Gloom was very definitely "yellow wildflowers" (very distinctly yellow flowers) plus grass, dew, and something sort of airy. Rosalind is very grass/dew/slight berry.

Man, I thought this would be awesome.

Light floral, light resins, davana - all things that tend to work on me.

What I ended up with was a combination of baby powder, SweetTart dust and wet diaper.

I don't know if my skin is being weirder than usual today or what, but this is 0/2 for the day.

In terms of metaphors, persianmouse NAILED IT.

In terms of what it smells like on me: started as furniture varnish; ended as cheap men's aftershave.

EPIC FAIL.

Heavens to Ceiling Cat I love this stuff. I tracked down a decant on concept alone, and I'm blown away that this really does approximate my concept of selkies. It's very aquatic, with a light grassy/mossy/floral note and with something that struck me as very stone-like or rocky, which would be really appropriate given the Orkney coasts. It lasted pretty much all day on me. Absolute love - I'll be doing my level best to track down an actual bottle, but until that happens I'll be hoarding the daylights out of my decant.

This surprised me. What I was expecting as a heavy hit of the night air note (my favorite variation of ozone) with some sort of herbally floral background. It was like that while it was wet. Dry, however, it's almost like birdseed, except that saying "this smells slightly like birdseed doesn't make it sound very good and this is actually really nice. I didn't think I was really going to like it, but I kept sniffing and sniffing and sniffing, and it's a really calming scent. Not floral, not over-the-top anything, just nice and calm and pleasant, like a sunny morning.

Overall, it's a light herbal/grassy, almost hay-like scent. Pleasant. Not "perfume-y" in the slightest. Average throw, slightly less than average wearlength.

Probable bottle in my near future.

I'm getting mostly coconut milk, amber and ambergris. There was some orange blossom earlier, but that has disappeared. The musk is also really light on me - I can kind of tell it's there, but it's not a really dominant note. This is really pretty, but there's something about it that doesn't feel like "me," so I will probably just stick with my decant.

Very misty scent - the mist note is the most predominant. There are some light florals underneath. It lasted on me for HOURS. Bloody gorgeous! I'm glad I have an imp - I'll be keeping my eyes out for a bottle.

This is beautiful!

In the bottle, it's woodsy with a definite patchouli kick in the background.

On my skin, it starts out very patchouli and with a nice kick of the coriander and mint. The woods hide in the background.

Once it's fully dried, the scent says "outdoors" at me. Not really screams, not really shouts - this is neither screaming nor shouting scent - but merely points out that it belongs outdoors. It's like hiking through a forest (dry forest, definitely, not one that has been recently rained on) in the late spring or summer when the sun is out and there's a nice breeze (not that I think there's any ozone in this - there almost couldn't be). It's androgynous to masculine - it leans more masculine but not so masculine I can't pull it off.

I love it already, and I can't wait to see what it's like after some aging! I love me some aged woods.

Wet, this was an extremely sharp and sour blackberry. This is NOT a scent I'd want to put in a scent locket.

Given a couple of hours, however, something warms it up. This is reminiscent of the warmth of a glowing candle (probably from the wood and the milk - the milk, for once, did NOT turn all sour yogurt on me - YAY!), and there are blackberries somewhere. The blackberries aren't as strong on my skin as they are in the bottle. What I end up with overall is a warming blackberries and cream type scent with a definite wax feel to it. Quite nice.

This had an average throw on me and a slightly less than average wearlength.

I had the same problem as fairnymph. This is a GORGEOUS tangerine note - bright and sparkly and tangy and beautiful - and my skin amped it for about an hour, making me happy and cheerful. However, it's a little heavy on the white musk and a little light on the tangerine in the bottle, and the tangerine note only lasts about an hour or two on my skin before it disappears into an enormous cavern of WHITE MUSK OF DOOM. The cypress tips the leftover white musk onto the ever-so-slightly masculine side. I'm going to try and scent locket it, but I'm not sure the overpowering white musk afterward is worth the hour or two of ZOMG TANGERINE YAY!

I'm also going to let it settle for a while and see if that helps the white musk tone itself down a bit.

This is a really light, translucent green scent on me. It's slightly floral, but floral in a linden blossoms* type way rather than a jasmine type way - this is the type of floral I like, rather than the instantly headache-inducing white floral type that I don' t like. I can't pick out any particular note - it's just cool and soft and green and seems like it will be perfect on a rainy spring day.

Very strong throw and wearlength - I only dabbed a little on my wrist and it's been wafting around me for hours.

5/5 - excellent


*I don't know for sure that linden blossoms are actually one of the notes - the closest GC I can come up with is the Unicorn - this scent is very much in that vein.

So this was the scent from the Lupers update that I was absolutely and completely most excited for. I mean neroli, ginger, beeswax, what's not to like?

What I wasn't expecting was that it would be absolutely dead sexy. I figured it would be light and bright and cheerful. And it is all those things. But it's also ridiculously sexy. Sexy in a spaghetti-strap-falling-off-the-shoulder type sexy - sexy where the sexy comes through in a flirty smile or a lifted eyebrow and a wink. This is not in-your-face sexy; this is subtle and confident.

As far as the actual scent goes, it's slightly reminiscent of Vixen but without the patchouli, in that the neroli and ginger are both prominent. The beeswax is also noticeable in and of itself. The amber and musk give it a rich background. I do notice the rose, but it's not a loud rose (and I often amp rose) - the rose stays tucked in with the other florals. I don't really notice the coriander at all.

Anyway, it's AMAZING, I love it, and I'm really happy to have a bottle of it. This will get a lot of use.

5/5

Bright, happy, sweet berry scent with the neroli hanging out in the background to keep the scent from requiring an insulin shot. Very fun and very well balanced. It reminded me of Akuma, so I tried that alongside - Akuma is brighter, sharper and more citrus-y, whereas Jester is more on the sweet-berry side. The berries seem to be a medium purple rather than a deep dark red, if that helps at all.

Very fun scent - I could see it being a bottle.

Hooo baby BUTTERCUP. The honeysuckle/jasmine combo in Twilight works well on me since the lavender tones down the ZOMG FLOWERS aspect of the perfume, but Eos doesn't have anything to tone down the floral. Here we have buttercup. Lots of buttercup. What I ended up with was an unbelievably strong, heady, headache-inducing floral. I know honeysuckle can work on me, so I'm assuming the problems here are the jasmine and the buttercup. I didn't notice anything at all along the lines of what I think of as BPAL's skin note - I'm assuming the florals had beaten it and left it in a corner somewhere for being insufficiently flower-like.

Emphatically not my thing, but I could see where it would be wonderful for floral lovers.

Lovely, clean, and refreshing. It's very much clean laundry and a cool breeze to me. I don't really get the lemon that other people mention (though I think the lemon may have been responsible for the few moments early on when it threatened to go a little sticky sweet on me before calming back down again) - really, this is just a clean cotton-y linen scent, like laundry drying on a clotheline on a breezy, sunny day.

I'm really going to need a bottle of this!

This started out a very bright citrus and then faded into a combination of rose geranium and bergamot, with a hint of the frankincense, blood orange and lemongrass behind it). It's clean, bright and happy. It reminds me a bit of bathroom cleaner while it's in the bottle, but my skin turns it into a pretty citrus floral combo. I love citrus floral combos,* so this is a good thing.

*see:

June Gloom 09

Orpheus

The Zieba Tree

Shanghai

etc

This was massive screaming juniper and pine for about two hours, and then it all of a sudden shifted to ozone and dirt. WEIRD. I like it now that it's been on for quite a while, but I was enamored of the first phase. I don't really notice any dirt or moss - just the screaming bright juniper/pine and then the ozone. I'll keep playing with my decant, but I don't need a bottle.

I feel like this is 1/2 the bestest, juiciest orange ever picked right off the tree and 1/2 exactly the smell that comes out of a fresh knob of ginger right when it's been cut. There might be a hit of orange blossom in here too, but it's a sort of subtext behind the fruit orange and the ginger.

Absolutely awesome, uplifting and zingy. Really, zingy. This is definitely joining my anti-SAD arsenal!

This was all lemongrass for the first hour, very warming and uplifting and herbal and more or less what I remember wanting Arcana to smell like.

It seriously took something like three hours for this to fully settle on my skin and stop changing. It's predominantly a lemongrass scent, but with a metallic, airy feel to it. The ozone is there and very pretty - I tend to get along well with ozone, and this is no exception. Somehow the tonka manages to keep this from turning into lemon pledge, but it doesn't smell like candy on me either (and my skin is megasweet). I've never really smelled anything quite like this before, so I'm having a difficult time with it. It's herbal, metallic, uplifting, pretty, and androgynous. I like it.

The bottle artwork is really pretty too.