marared

Reading all these reviews, it makes me wonder if I got the same blend as everyone else, because this smells like coconut wax crayon on me! I smell no pear, no carnation, nothing sweet - just coconut! It's definitely not suntan-lotion/oil coconut, though, which is definitely in its favor, but... yeah, I don't like smelling like a crayon, either. Oh well.

Bottle: sweet red musk. I smell the sugar and I smell red fruit, although it is not identifiably pom or raspberry.

 

This is Dionysia stuffing herself with red velvet cupcakes and smoking a cigar afterwards. I was a little concerned about the sugar - it starts out a little sweet, but not hyper-sweet, and it mellows out almost immediately as the tobacco melds seamlessly with the sandalwood. I almost can't tell there's patchouli in this. Unfortunately, the frankincense is starting to amp, and whether or not the scent survives this will determine if I stash this or sell it. Stupid frankincense.

This one is a significant morpher. In the bottle, I smell a bright and clean pepper. Immediately on my skin, it smells like herbal tea. Given some time to warm up, it turns into a resinous musky patchouli that is very reminiscent of The Hag - warm and faintly fruity. Thankfully, the rose and the myrrh are also so faint as to have no soapy effect. It's very pretty, I'm sure it'll age nicely.

 

ETA: there's also a mysterious pickle note in the bottle.

 

It's definitely gorgeous once it's been on the skin for 10m or so, it's just a little odd til then!

While it's very delicate, the bergamot is surprisingly bitter and sharp, and it reminds me strongly of the CTV Amber I got over the summer, which had a note that I had parsed as lime peel, but after having smelled this? Could very easily have been bergamot as well. I think this will be a lot more interesting in 4-6 months when that's burned off a bit...

Red Tide. It was all raspberry all the time when I skin tested it!

 

i have that on my wishlist, but wasn't sure if it'd be too boozy with it - did you find it that way?

 

 

It's not a true raspberry by any stretch, it's raspberry punch, and by punch I mean hooooly cow is it alcoholic.

 

I have not found a good true raspberry scent yet - it seems to be very hard to translate it to perfume without it being overly sweet or syrupy, when true raspberry is tongue-tinglingly tart. Dionysia is my favorite of the blends that *have* raspberry, but it's more of a general dark-tart-fruit than distinctively one berry.

Black tea with spices simmered with a clove-studded orange - a very citrussy chai. More citrus than spice. I'd almost agree with the cookie comparison, but I've never smelled cookies with that much citrus in them.

 

Yum.

This one does indeed have a very high-pitched, bitter start to it - it smells like the white tea was steeped way too long, plus jasmine always tries to go cat-pee on me for the first couple of minutes. It morphs very quickly, though, into a low-key white floral - the jasmine is there, but while it isn't as *loud* as jasmine usually is, it still dominates the other notes to the point that only the white tea asserts itself. (I was terrified of the tobacco flower after Tobacco Honey, but I can barely detect it.)

 

Between the initial bitterness and the soft floral that takes over, it's like getting a brief glimpse into the dark corners of someone's soul just before they put up the barriers of normalcy.

Hm. I tend to like the lab's LE honey blends, but this one really isn't doing anything for me, and I think it's because the red musk simply reminds me of SO many other blends that ... it doesn't really have a personality all its own. I can smell the Smut, I can smell the Snake Charmer, I can smell the Snake Oil, I can smell the Scherezade... the honey is far too low-key here. Maybe layered with O to kick it up... hm.

I got this as a bit of a joke, because my Warcraft character of 5+ years is named Hagrok and my nickname is Hag/Haggy, but I wasn't really expecting much with all those dark notes. To my surprise, a. it wasn't nearly as dark as I thought it would be, probably due to the currant sweetening it up just a tad and b. in six months or a year this might actually have a lot of potential. It's very bay-rummy, with just a touch of musk, and while I can smell the vetiver on first application, it fades into the background very quickly. It's thick and smoky without being eyewatering, and especially with the bay rum I think it will mellow out considerably.

 

Edit to note that even after a couple of weeks, it's smoothed out into something deep and musky and sensual. I couldn't wear this every day, but I'm pondering a bottle now, if the Yules don't eat too far into my paypal budget.

I was all set to declare this my surprise hit of the weenies. It's beautiful on application - wet and green and gold, something I'd expect to smell upon waltzing into a field of marigolds after a rainstorm. Kept huffing my wrist, amazed at how much I liked it. Thought about getting a bottle. So pretty. After about ten minutes, though, all those marigolds are dead and rotting vegetation on my wrist.

Not as ferociously buttery as past pumpkins. I smell vanilla, but it may be vanilla musk as mentioned above, because it's very light. I'm pretty sure there's booze in the mix, too, because in the bottle it's light and sweet and alcoholic, like a specialty vanilla vodka, but on me it turns kinda sour, which is often what happens with booze blends. I'm sticking with using this as room spray!

It's amazing how right on the ball this is - soft sugary gum a couple minutes after you've first gotten it all chewed up and the flavor and the scent are still so ripe that people can smell your gum from five feet away, kinda like Bubbleyum. It doesn't come across as any particular *flavor*, though, just the straight-up bubblegum, like Extra Original. Impressive!

Boomslang! It's made with Snake Oil, which has red musk, and cocoa. One of my faaaaavorites.

This one is whoa-patchouli, tempered and sweetened a bit by the honey, but it's still distinctive and persistent. I used a little bit in the shower last night, saw how thick the oil was (doesn't spread well directly on skin - obviously that's not what it's meant for, but we were just testing!), and spent several minutes washing it off. I still could smell faint patchouli for hours afterwards. I like it, but I would be cautious using it around anyone who *doesn't* like patchouli!

Yum, yum, yum. This was the surprise hit of my Inquisition box! It's a wonderful dry, natural apple, not over-sweet or fermented, and the woods add a wonderful autumn touch that makes me long for upstate NY, where there's an actual autumn.

Single note root beer! It does warm up and soften a bit after a while, but the sassafras is sitting pretty firmly on top of the other notes, so the tea and the champaca never really get a chance to make an appearance. Makes me think about going across the street for a six pack of IBC...

Actually, there's much to be said for the smell of a (clean) animal. When I worked next door to a PetSmart, one of my favorite things to do was run next door and huff a kitty. I huff my kitties too. My aunt huffs her kitty. There's just something so ... soothing about burying your nose in your best friend's fur, assuming you can do so without sneezing yourself sick thirty seconds later.

 

Not so sure that could be replicated in a perfume, though... it's as much in the mind as it is in the nose.

I love this. In the bottle, it is a seriously dirty, planty patchouli and hemp - archetypical head shop stuff. The same is true on a skin test, for about fifteen seconds. The vanilla swoops in almost immediately and mellows everything into a creamy yet dirty sweetness. And throughout the day, depending on body heat, it changes in whether the vanilla or the hemp is more prominent. Usually the vanilla, but every so often the green/brown planty scent would be considerably more noticeable. It lasts for quite a while, and it starts out strong, but within an hour or so it's close to a skin.

 

This is very young and fresh patchouli, which I like, but I can only imagine how awesome this will be in a year or two, and I hope I can keep my hands off it long enough to let it age that long.

Pretty floral honey in the imp. Very strong, very sweet, way more flower than honey. Smells a bit green in the background, too. Skin test = soap

I really, really love this in the imp - warm, rich, nutty honey, the kind that makes me long for warm and sunny autumn days. But that "caramelized" thing cfrancesca mentions turns into the Sour Stink of Doom on me. *sigh*

Wow. This was totally not what I was expecting. Fresh out of the bottle, it's nauseatingly gasoline-sweet. I suppose it should have occurred to me that honey comes from the flowers, not from the dried leaves, because what I think I was hoping for was that rich, smoky, cured tobacco + honey. I'm not even sure I can leave this on long enough for the drydown, let alone stash it for aging.

I was really really interested in this blend, but the myrrh scared me a little, as it can sometimes go kinda craft-store-soapy on me. And it certainly tries to do that, but that stage doesn't last very long. It definitely is a cousin to Dionysia, as I had hoped - what it reminds me of, really, is Dionysia + Ecstasy True Love without the patchouli, as it's got that nearly gooey dark floral aspect to it - I can really only specifically smell the orange blossom on immediate application, but then it blends seamlessly into a dark plummy amber that sits very close to the skin but lasts a good long while. If Dionysia is too much fruit and too much patchouli, this would be a good alternative.

#519: When I first opened the bottle, it smelled EXACTLY like the Chaos Theory O I got last year, with a super sweet syrupy strawberry whack. Almost *immediately* it turned to cheap soap. Yay for crappy chemistry!

#32: This has changed rapidly in 10 hours. When I first sniffed the bottle this morning, it was a cologney citrus blast that turned into a non-boozy kind of margarita. Now it smells like citrus *peel*, to the point that I'm pretty sure that the citrus in question is lime. But no matter what the opening stages, it consistently dries down to soapy amber.

Exclamation!