Shollin

First sniff: Tropical paradise! Creamy coconut, sweet flowers, bright fruits, soft musk. Absolutely drop-dead gorgeous.

 

Wearing: Huge bright tropical blossoms and just a hint of coconut (weird, because coconut usually stands out on my skin). It starts out very sunny and bright and just shy of being headachey-sweet, and dries into a beautiful creamy soft sweetness. Fantastic.

First sniff: Yellow-green and a bit medicinal. Quiet and reflective, dried flowers and herbs and incense. She’s sad and confused, not angry.

 

Wearing: It’s very soothing, despite the emotional inspiration. Yellow grass and cool evening breeze, a wind-rippled field in the moonlight.

First sniff: A hot, rich, sunshine-bright floral. This tryst is taking place in broad daylight with all the windows flung wide.

 

Wearing: Sun-warmed flowers, sun-warmed sheets, sun-warmed skin, blazing yellow and electric orange and flamboyant and exhilarating.

First sniff: Honey-dipped incense and warm wood. It’s skin-warm and almost spicy in its resinousness (is that a word?).

 

Wearing: The waft is all golden glorious honeyed amber. It’s very reminiscent of a resiny O. Sadly, the resins get louder and louder over time, and turn into the sweet-sharp edge I’m unfortunately very familiar with. I had such high hopes.

First sniff: Bright lemon and licorice over a bed of powdery flowers. I want to drink these flavors in a tea.

Wearing: It’s all lemon and powder. Lovely for tea, not so great on my skin.

First sniff: Fresh, soft, airy and slightly powdery flowers.

 

Wearing: Ooh, yay! I always forget how much I like orchid on my skin until it gets there. It’s gone from airy-powdery floral to fruity-creamy floral. The rose is still trying to assert its powdery self, but the other notes are keeping it in check.

First sniff: I adore the phoenix made of snowflakes on the label. The scent in the bottle is very white indeed, and very very sweet.

 

Wearing: A very strong white floral sweetness with a sun-on-snow brilliance. It’s dazzlingly beautiful, but it’s just too much.

First sniff: I blame the wisteria and iris for this, but it just smells like powdery candy. Cold, powdery candy. Like frozen SweetTarts.

 

Wearing: Lime-flavored cotton candy. I can’t figure out why it’s so off-puttingly sweet. After several hours, the candy powder fades, leaving a gorgeous honeysuckle-vanilla warmth. I wish I could get that from the beginning; I don’t think it’s worth wading through all that powder.

First sniff: Frozen green apples. Incredibly tart, incredibly crisp, incredibly cold.

 

Wearing: There’s a hint of warmth and sweetness creeping in, making the apples even more tempting, even more dangerous.

First sniff: A riot of sweet, powdery flowers – rose, violet, jasmine. I suspect this will not go well for me.

 

Wearing: Sweet and floral and very perfumey. It isn’t powdery, which surprises me, but it’s sweet enough to give me a bit of a headache.

First sniff: A very rich, sweet and slightly spicy floral. It’s cozy-warm and velvet-soft.

 

Wearing: Sweet and strong and wild, a passionate woman who knows her own heart and goes her own way.

First sniff: Very dark and menacing, with a lighter splash of stormy-air-ozone-sea-spray in the afterscent.

 

Wearing: Cold and dark and wet. There’s a bit of wood, a bit of moss, a bit of stone, but overwhelmingly it’s just cold and dark and wet and not somewhere I want to be.

First sniff: Spring flowers and greenery plus… soap and incense. Bah!

 

Wearing: It’s just too darn soapy. Sweetpea is usually the culprit when otherwise-good scents turn to soap, but it’s not listed here and I can’t figure out what’s making it not work. Dangit. I can smell enough of the good stuff underneath that I know it would be awesome if it weren’t for the soap.

My original instinct was Stardust too, but I do really like the idea of wearing something appropriate at midnight to get me off to a good start for the year... so I may dig out my bottle of White Light for a clean, calm dose of kicking-out-the-old-crap.

First sniff: Rich, musky cocoa with the vague idea of fruit whispering around the afterscent. It’s endlessly deep, and very intriguing.

 

Wearing: The immediate skin-scent is completely devoid of cocoa; it’s more of a swarthy patchouli muskiness, and on my left wrist there’s still that hint of unspecified fruit. Within a couple of hours, it’s completely gone. It was lovely in the bottle, but it doesn’t stick to me at all.

First sniff: Soft, sweet, ghostly floral, with a little bit of chill in the air.

 

Wearing: OMG JASMINE. Good Lord. It’s very subdued and well-behaved in the bottle, but then it gets on my skin and throws a wild raucous jasmine party and invites all its drunken loud jasmine friends.

DXXXVII

First sniff: A vase of fresh flowers sitting on the windowsill of a bakery, so when you lean in to sniff them, you smell soft bright flowers first, surrounded by warm homey baking spices and brown sugar and maybe a little bit of pie-fruit.

 

Wearing: Who put licorice in my vase when I wasn’t looking? The warm bakery spices are still wafting around the edges, but the flowers have turned into a big bouquet of black licorice tied with a red bow. The licorice eventually dries away into a pure bakery-spices scent, but it’s really weird while it’s there.

 

Previously reviewed by wichapi.

 

CMXXXVIII

First sniff: A very cold, crisp, dark berry scent.

 

Wearing: Frozen wine grapes. It's pretty, but not a big standout.

 

MXXXV

First sniff: A single blossom in a winter garden. Cold air and sweet floral – it smells like a single flower and not a bouquet, but darn if I can figure out which particular flower it is.

 

Wearing: Is it a jasmine variant? It’s not as screamingly sweet as the usual jasmine, but it reminds me of the more-restrained version in The Perfumed Garden. And it’s cold. Winter jasmine.

 

Last reviewed by SueDonym, who sent me this lovely batch of Chaos.

 

MXXXVIII

First sniff: Resiny, sharp and dark – I’m betting it’s frankincense, and I’m betting it’ll hate me.

 

Wearing: Sharp-sweet incense with something powdery dusted over. Resins and I do not get along.

 

MCXXXIV

First sniff: This one is really spicy and almondy. My decant is a little more than a sniffie (enough for a couple of tests), so there’s not a lot of oil in here, but the scent is really big from just those few drops. Sweet almond and baking spices.

 

Wearing: It’s a very “hot” sweet scent, and I feel like the spices should be leaving red spots on my skin, but fortunately they’re not. Sweet cinnamon, sweet almond, and lots and lots of warmth.

First sniff: I think this is the richest ozoney scent I’ve ever smelled. The stormy-air scent is most prominent, but there’s something warm and golden and metallic underneath it (and it’s definitely a warm metallic, which isn’t something I’m used to either). Truly fascinating.

 

Wearing: It’s a mad scientist’s laboratory, lightning and metal and fire and unidentifiable liquids bubbling away in beakers. It’s weird. And I really, really like it.

First sniff: Ooh, this is very green. Grassy, minty, wet, cool, fresh. This would be spectacularly refreshing on a muggy summer day.

 

Wearing: It’s beautifully leafy-green and cooling, and as it dries there’s a gorgeous hint of green fruit. Very, very nice.

First sniff: In the bottle, it’s an enormous, screamingly red cherry reined in just a bit by deeper notes.

 

Wearing: The waft is all sweet cherry/almond, while the deeper bits, the musk and resins, cling very close to my wrists.

First sniff: Clean, crisp, and just a little powdery.

 

Wearing: A lovely rainwashed-air scent, pale and wispy and beautiful.

First sniff: Heavy, powdery, “old lady” floral.

 

Wearing: Rose is always hit-or-miss, and I can’t wear iris at all. The result? Heavy, powdery, “old lady” floral. The other notes sounded fascinating, but they’re hiding behind the ones that don’t work.

First sniff: The crumpets may be rebelling, but they definitely aren’t revolting! This is a fantastic buttery-cakey scent with a great big dollop of berry jam.

 

Wearing: It’s more sharply fruity on my skin – the cakeyness isn’t softening the berryness like it did in the bottle, and there seems to be a little splash of really rich alcohol. It’s like a crumpet liqueur.

First sniff: Insanely fruity (mostly melon?), with a nice waft of deep spicy dragon’s blood tokeep it from being too hyper. Very nice.

 

Wearing: I really like this! Layers and layers of bright juicy fruit. Given the notes, I expected it to be super-citrusy, but it seems to be more about soft fruits like peaches and plums.

I thought I remembered this! From Beth a while back.

 

Of course, it all depends on your chemistry as to whether it'll be all "HEAR ME ROAR" on your skin, but according to the lady in charge, it's in there. From my experience, it's a fantastic slightly-earthy spiced vanilla, and if I didn't know the slight earthiness was patchouli, I'd never know. Y'know?