meaganola

One thing I noticed about this query that no one has touched on: These oils are four years old. I've had levels in quite a few bottles go down as they age -- after just a year or two -- even when they have been sitting unopened in a box. It's possible that these bottles were full when the seller bought them and have never been opened yet are noticeably less full now.

It requires a bit of forethought, but would electric/Pluming tape around the lid and neck of a new bottle help prevent this?

I have a couple LE bottles that are a few years old and living in a dry climate, I'd like to prevent this as much as possible.

 

I don't think it's an evaporation issue. I think it's just part of the chemical change that comes with aging. I notice it more with the scents that change a lot as they age, like Snake Oil and Vixen (and, wow, I need to get a bottle of this stuff to sock away for next summer, but that's a topic for a different thread). My theory is that the molecules themselves are shrinking, which makes the scent deeper and richer.

One thing I noticed about this query that no one has touched on: These oils are four years old. I've had levels in quite a few bottles go down as they age -- after just a year or two -- even when they have been sitting unopened in a box. It's possible that these bottles were full when the seller bought them and have never been opened yet are noticeably less full now.

Ok, I ordered on the 13th of May for a bottle of 13 and an imp pack.

 

I know that orders sometimes take a few weeks, I've ordered quite a few times in the past, so I didn't think anything of it until today. Honestly I wouldn't have thought of it anyway last week, with having a death in the family and everything else going on, but today I sat down to check my e-mail, my debit card account and so on and thought I'd check on my order status. I've had no CnS emailed to me and I've looked everywhere, even in my junk mail. I did however click the "check your order status" link in the original e-mail I got from CCNow today and was told that my order supposedly shipped on the 15th via USPS.

 

It's been over a year since I placed an order, so am I forgetting something? Is it normal for CCNow to say shipped and it still not be here? Or to still not have a CnS when CCNow claims it's been shipped? I'm starting to worry. It would be a slight pick-me-up if it ever comes, God knows I could use one, but it was around $50 with shipping, and now that we have one less person in the household and bills mounting up, losing a $50 order is really going to sting.

 

As Silvertree explained a few posts ago, CCNow's shipped status is not really a shipped status. All it means is that your order has been harvested and is getting picked/prepped for shipping. I'm not sure how many days typically elapse between order harvesting and shipping since it has been something like three years since I've paid via CCNow, but you will know your order has truly shipped when you get the Click'n'Ship notice from the USPS with a tracking number. It's pretty much a two-stage process: When CCNow says an order has shipped, it basically means that the Lab has generated a pick ticket for your order. Until that tracking number email from the USPS exists, your order has not actually shipped.

 

[i've had a weird afternoon and am deleting my restaurant analogy here. There were sous chefs involved.]

There's a whole thread for this over in the BPAL FAQ section right here.

I just took a wander through my spreadsheet sorted by date, and my best guesses are:

Hunter Moon 2004 -- A blend of traditional lunar oils touched with dry leaves, autumn bonfires, warm mulled wine, feral, animalistic notes and the chill of approaching winter.

 

The Castle -- A distant whisper of pine, wet moss and dry leaves passing through vast halls and winding dungeons whose scent bears the memory of blood, faded splendor, imperial elegance and stunning violence.

 

Unfortunately, they're both LEs, as is my all-time favorite decaying leaves scent: Falling Leaf Moon. It's bottled Portland Autumn: Rain, wet decaying leaves (for some reason, I can't stand *dry* decaying leaves), and patchouli. If you can find some, snag it immediately.

 

ChipNoir, if you want non-pumpkiny Halloween scents, just wait until August! There are always a *lot* of non-pumpkin Halloween scents. It seems like I counted last year and figured out that fewer than a quarter of the Halloweenies over the years have pumpkin. In 2010, we had 41 scents -- and only three of them had pumpkin. Not even ten percent. I think my favorite recurring Weenie is Dia de los Muertos, although we didn't get it last year. While we usually do get a Pumpkin Patch with five or six different pumpkin blends, this past year, we got the Pomegranate Grove. And I second the fact that Samhain's other notes pretty much kill the pumpkin. I even forget it's in there until I read the notes.

This one is very frustrating to me. It smells lovely (it's a somewhat herbal (I'm not sure where that comes from, but that's just how my nose works sometimes) woody scent with a it of honey that drifts in and out), and it doesn't change very much on me for the first few hours (now that it's six or seven hours later, all I'm smelling is the pine, but it took a while for the other notes to burn off), but there's something about it that makes me unable to handle wearing it. If this was a room scent or a candle, it would be wonderful, but as a skin scent, it comes close to giving me a headache, although it doesn't *quite* bring the pain. Pine is an iffy note for me, so I'm really not surprised it's a no-go. I'm glad I tried it, but I'm also glad I tried it on a day off.

I hate leather, beeswax has been known to make me want to barf, lavender has a tendency to amp and go *way* too sharp, and the less said about myrrh, the better. It should be something I try once and then spend the rest of the day tossing down Tylenol. And yet this is quite possibly my favorite of the Lupes and a strong contender for top ten. It goes all candied violet with a soft background of lavender. I'm a bit nervous that it will age into something unwearable, but I'll never know unless I keep it around, so it stays for now. There's something about it that reminds me of Lilith Victoria, although I can't quite put my finger on what that something is.

heh, I got all my GC's taken care of the old fashioned way via paper and pen. When it comes to all the LE's there ever were it gets pretty complicated but I remember most of the ones I've already tried. I just figure if it doesn't stick in my mind it probably wasn't meant to be. I've been loving the GC catalog (over LE's) more than anything here recently.

 

Outta curiosity, is there any place besides scentbase? I don't really like the style and set up of a spreadsheet.

I tried to look at hackess spreadsheet but I don't have any apps that support that on my pooter. I know there is google docs I tried that before with something else , and it kept messing up. I actually have a "notebook" app on my pooter so I kinda just made a huge list of all the LES I ever tried and How I thought about em. I don't really need to know alot of details like if I have a bottle anymore or not. Any other suggestions?

 

The scent database is awesome btw! Alot of work you peeps put in that.

 

I suggest installing OpenOffice (http://download.openoffice.org/), a free office productivity suite.

 

So much this. *Love* Open Office, to the point where I wish I could dump MS Office at work and use Open Office instead (but I work at a bank which, ironically if you know my background, is a subsidiary of the largest bank in the world, so chances are pretty much zero that open source software will ever be allowed there). I always forget that most people aren't even aware of it.

2010 incarnation: Ooh, *so* keeping the half-bottle left over from the decant circle on this one! I have a deep attachment to roses since I was born in Portland (aka the Rose City), but every single rose scent I have ever tried has just left me feeling kind of blah. Until this one. Rose Red is the the sort of deep, velvety rose that my parents had in the front yard under my bedroom window. And there's something in there that reminds me of raspberries, but *fresh* wild raspberries straight off the bush, and this isn't really *fruity*. There's just something there that is making my mind make the connection. In short, this is the rose scent that I hadn't even realized I had given up ever finding.

 

Side note: Last year, I got Hod. My birth flower if I go by the month is carnation. This year, I got Rose Red, my birth flower if I go by my birth city. Maybe next year we will get a gorgeous violet scent to go along with my zodiac sign!

have we seen the label for this year's Snow White?

I just got my decant circle shipment in the mail yesterday; haven't had time to take photos yet. I'll take some and get them up soon!

 

All of the yules (obviously not Nutcracker or Christmas Carol) that I received are the same label except, of course, for the perfume name. It's a beautiful design!

 

My bottle of Lick It Vigorously has a red-and-white candy-striped label!

Urgh. I had planned on Mr. Fezziwig's Ball or Changing the Shadows, but instead, I had to break out my imp of Oof. On the up side, at least I *have* that imp. Love how well this stuff works, but I hate what leads me to have to use it.

Definitely train yourself on the scents with few notes, so you get used to what they smell like, and try everything. I like to test the scent and take notes before I look at the Lab description. I usually get frustrated and look up the notes right away and then I'm like "Oooh so THAT'S what I'm smelling".

 

This is why I have finally come to the realization that I need to stay the hell away from Chaos Theories. The frustration at trying to figure out what's in there just obliterates all enjoyment I might possibly get from the scent.

There's a thread for application tips in the FAQ section, but I use coffee stir straws. One dip usually gets enough for me since I really don't use much oil. I got a box at a restaurant supply store a couple of years ago for two or three bucks, and I'm still only about halfway through the box (I cut them in half because I am uncoordinated, and I always feel like a full-length straw will result in flipping oil *everywhere*). I will also decant a bit so I have an uncontaminated bottle (this is important to me for swap/sale purposes) and a vial I can not worry about getting my own cooties all over -- or even losing, dropping and shattering at the bus stop.

I don't usually receive money with Paypal (sadly, my money usually goes out, not in...) but what about gifts via Paypal? Would that work at all? I'm not sure if that helps with US buyers, though (I always buy BPAL with Paypal because I'm in Canada).

 

I came here just to say the same! Is there a way to buy Paypal gift cards? I'm pretty sure the lab accepts paypal from anywhere, even that they prefer paypal over credit card payments because it costs them less, or something.

 

You can just send your recipient money via PayPal and pick "gift" for the payment type, and that would be like sending money to, say, your friend for a convention registration she bought for you or your brother for your joint Costco membership (or maybe that's just me...), but the money wouldn't be specifically earmarked in the PayPal system as something to go only to the Lab. It looks like gift certificates are considered a merchant thing with PayPal. BPAL would have to register as a gift certificate-issuing merchant, and we're right back where we started. Then again, if you just got money via PayPal not restricted to things ordered directly from the Lab, you have other buying options, like eBay, decants, Dark Delicacies (if you get a PayPal debit card), etc.

If you can find it, The Traveller (a Bards of Ireland LE back in March, if I recall correctly) is such intense leather that I had to get rid of my partial bottle of it because the microdroplets on the outside of the bottle triggered a headache. Also, go check out Red Rider, Black Rider, and White Rider in the Marchen section of the reviews. Those all center on different leathers.

Another vote over here for Falling Leaf Moon. It smells like the afternoons I spent walking in a certain park in Portland last October/November after the leaves had been falling for a couple of months, but there were still some leaves on the trees, and it had been raining about the same amount of time, so you have rain, leaves, dirt, and slightly-decaying leaves. If there was a Halloween: Portland scent, this would be it, although it's missing the way-too-pervasive-for-my-allergies woodsmoke, which actually makes it *perfect* for me since, well, allergies.

Nilla wafers dunked in dragon's blood. Maybe with some caramel sauce (but not the burnt stuff like I got with, um, one of the Yules whose name is escaping me at the moment) on the side. But somehow not foody. These are all very, *very* good things. I first tried it very early in my BPAL experience, probably two and a half years ago, and wasn't really wowed by it at the time, but my tastes have changed, and now I *love* it. In fact, I think it has overtaken Tanin'iver as my favorite Ars Draconis oil. Tanin'iver is still awesome, but Dragon's Milk is a more year-round scent. I'm not a huge vanilla fan because I have this weird olfactory blind spot when it comes to that note (it doesn't even smell plasticky to me. There's just usually *nothing* there), but I can sure smell it in this, and it's *wonderful*. And I tend to have problems with honey, but this is the apparently one of two honey scents I can wear (the other one is Josie).

 

The strange part, though, is that I apparently turn this to nag champa. Or maybe my coworker's nose just interprets certain BPAL florals as champa since she's also said this about Panther Moon and the Harp of Cnoc I'Chosgair. She thinks they all smell amazing on me, so I'll keep wearing them.

 

Anyway. This one is *fantastic* to swipe on my left wrist at about 1:30pm on a busy day at work. I have noticed that I tend to start propping my chin on my left hand at about that time (most of my current job is 10-key data entry with my right hand, so I don't really need my left hand for typing), and having a good scent like this on my left wrist makes me feel calmer. My current job is a temp gig, but if I get hired (as was presented as the plan when I interviewed for the assignment), this is going on my celebratory finally-got-a-real-job bottle order along with Morocco and Dorian (also awesome scents to swipe on at 1:30pm on a crappy afternoon. If this turns out to be a permanent job, I will be keeping rollerballs of each of these in my desk for emergency aromatherapy!).

 

As a side note, I have some mixed with perfumers' alcohol, and I sprayed it on my cleavage yesterday. Burning like whoa. That doesn't usually happen to me, so I'm not sure what's going on, but at least I don't have that problem with straight-up oil on my wrist.

 

Wait, where's the dragon's blood? This one goes all musky pretty much instantly, and it's mainly red musk, which has unfortunately been setting off The Quease the past couple of weeks. I had to wash it off after about half an hour because I just couldn't handle smelling it any more. I mixed this one with perfumer's alcohol in a sprayer quite some time ago, so it isn't off to the swap bag. I'm hoping that I'm just more sensitive to red musk right now and will be able to give it a better test in the future, though, so I'll have to try to remember to try it when I'm doing better on the red musk front.

I'm headed through a dragon's blood phase, so I dug this one out of my stash. If straight-up DB is a 10 on the strength scale, the DB in this one is turned down to about a 2, and then we have melons set at about 4. Salt? Nope. Very much not my sort of thing at the moment, although I can see myself wanting something like this for a family gathering (although those are few and very far between). Back to the stash, because it's good enough to keep this on hand (plus it's mixed with perfumers' alcohol in a sprayer, so it's not exactly the sort of thing that I would pass on to someone in the BPAL world anyway), but future imps that come my way will go into the swaps bag.

Depraved goes different ways on different people. It's definitely a love-it-or-hate-it scent. I love patchouli and apricot, but Depraved has an added earthy note. I'm starting to like dirt notes as well, but this combination turns to moldy apricots on me. Be very, very wary.

 

Sin is a good spicy patch. I tend to stay away from amber (it goes powdery) and sandalwood (can sometimes be a headache trigger), but the cinnamon and black patchouli drag it back into wearable territory for me even though I do still have to be wary of the sandalwood at times. Man, I wish I could wear it today, but I'm already dealing with a sandalwood-induced headache and don't want to make it any worse. I'm also a huge fan of Phantom Calliope and Tanin'iver, which are very, *very* similar to each other to my nose. The latter was discontinued due to component issues, but the former is still available. Unimpable since it's part of the Carnival Diabolique, alas, but *awesome*. Black cherry, patchouli, verbena, cassis, and cardamom. Fruity spicy patchouli wonderfulness.

 

The funny thing about Snake Oil is that I didn't even realize there was patchouli in it. It reminds me a whole hell of a lot of Guerlain's Shalimar, which was my mom's scent.

I picked up this imp because I love orange blossom, and, based on a coworker's repeated comments, champaca is a good note on me (and/or I turn other things to it, since she's commented on the champaca in the Harp of Cnoc I'Chosgair and Dragon's Milk. If you're thinking, "Wait a second, neither of those things have champaca," *exactly*). I'm trying this one today because I will be able to wash it off and change my clothes immediately if it turns out to go horribly, horribly wrong.

 

In the imp: Orange blossom and pretty much nothing but.

Wet: The orange blossom is still there, but as it's warming up on my skin, the spicy sandalwood is starting to come out. I'm hoping that it doesn't get too out of control because sandalwood is one of my problem notes.

Drying down: A little bit of sweetness is coming up. This is a good thing.

Dry: Not much more sweetness. Pretty much just dry spicy sandalwood.

 

Verdict: Nice enough to keep the imp, but not enough to put in a rollerball and collect more imps of. I'm headed to my brother's this evening, and I think it will be okay to not wash this off or reapply it and instead layer Panther Moon over it. *Love* Panther Moon. Except as a side note, pretty much as soon as this settled in for the day, I started craving something sweet, like Dorian or Dragon's Milk. Aaaand four hours into this, the sandalwood is driving itty bitty spikes into my brain. Washing off now, *and* moving it from the keeper stash to the swap stash. I knew this one was dicey. Here's hoping the sandalwood in Fledgling Raptor Moon behaves more like the stuff in the Harp if Cnoc I'Chosgair and Perfumed Garden!

 

I must have acquired this one as frimpage somewhere along the line. Wet, I get a sort of spicy dragon's blood and bubblegummy lotus. Both are favorites, but as soon as it hits my skin and starts drying down, I get something... earthy? Rooty? I can't pin it down, but it reminds me of something. Depraved, maybe? High John the Conqueror? Whatever it is, this one is not for me. I couldn't even wear it two hours.

I also think that a lot of things have to do with associations. For a lot of people, it's not so much that something is wrong in hot weather but more that, for example, someone wore something heavy to a music festival and got sick (food poisoning, heat/sun stroke, just got pissed off at the crowds, etc.), and the scent hasn't been *ruined* for them, but now they can only handle it when the weather is cool so they have a bit more of a distance from the Weekend of Porta-Potties from Hell. Or they wore it on a cooler day, had an awesome experience, and now wear it when they want to recreate that feeling, and the weather has to be *just right* (this happens to me a *lot*, most memorably with Falling Leaf Moon). I also have problems with hot weather in general (I've had them my entire life, as did my mom, her sisters, and their mom, so it's definitely a family thing), so I have to be careful about what I wear during heat waves so it doesn't set off a headache or similar nastiness. I've had many scents ruined by headaches even without hot weather. If you don't have these problems, you can probably ignore all of my "this is not for hot weather" rules and make up your own.

Common Jezebel. It's spiky pears. Not spicy pears, not prickly pears. Spiky pears. Like dry sticks shoved into a pear. I don't know how else to describe it or how I get *pears* out of its notes. And most of the notes are things that usually cause me pain and nausea, not near-obsession. A very odd combination, but I'm finding myself really digging it, although it's headed to the do-not-wear-this-one-at-work section of my collection.

Le sigh. This one is all white sugar and cardamom to me. Mostly white sugar. It's like smelling a bowl of sugar that has one lone cardamom pod in it. No vanilla, tonka, or musk, so, sadly, not for me. On the up side, if I have any left after decanting, it should be easy to rehome.