Shollin

Ravenous is dead sexy on me. I may have mentioned that before.

Rapture is another good one. I'm not sure I'd classify Dragon's Heart as sexy, but it's very warm and intriguing.

First sniff: The Ace of Wands is warm and sweet-spicy (no cherries here!) with a touch of incense. Matches its bright red-orange colour very well.

Wearing: More sweet spice. I can almost picture little tongues of flame flickering up my neck from where I applied the scent. It strikes me as a bold scent even though it’s quite light on my skin. The sweetness dims quickly, but it leaves a hint of something that’s astringently sweet, maybe even licoricey. There's a dry feel to it too, not dusty but more like sunwarmed sand sifting through your fingers.

First sniff: I swear the Ace of Swords smelled like cherries at first sniff too. Crazy nose. It cooled off after that first impression and now it’s more of a spice scent, a kitcheny spice like rosemary more than anything cinnamony/Christmasy.

Wearing: The immediate aura is herbal tea. I can still smell the cherry (or maybe sweet almond) if I sniff my wrist directly, but mostly it’s cool green spices – and now I do get a hint of lavender, again it’s the very firm, almost sharp, smell of real lavender buds and not the generically soft-soothing fake lavender you find other places. This one is really interesting to my nose – I suspect I’ll be trying to pin it down all night. I can see why this is an air elemental – it’s not a typically airy/floaty sort of scent, but though it doesn’t smell like smoke or incense to me at all, I can picture a light wisp of smoke from a censer trailing up to a wide-open sky.

I will be wearing this again – I just adore really complex scents like this that are slightly different every time you sniff so it’s really hard to pin down anything definite. Even if they drive me nuts.

Oh, sweetie. Would a hot bath help relieve the cramping any, or are you not allowed to do that while you're... er... open?

Failing that, if you have a heating pad for your belly, that always helps me when Mother Nature's being a bitch. I've never been dilated, but I'm guessing it's the same sort of muscles involved as with period cramps, just to a much more painful degree?

Drink tea. Feel better. We you too.

No incapacitatin' our labgoddess allowed.

Feel better soon. 'Cause we say so.

First sniff: The Ace of Cups is wet and faintly citrusy… it smells a little bit like cherry 7Up.

Wearing: Cherry, cherry, cherry. Very bright and playful. There’s something a bit darker and more solid underneath, maybe a touch of wood, but mostly it smells like I spilled a jar of maraschino juice all over myself.

I'm a bit tempted to try layering this with Vice or Bliss to see if I can get a chocolate-covered cherry scent.

First sniff: Bright incense with an ornate tracing of flowers above.

Wearing: For some reason Seraphim smells very fruity on my skin, like grapes or berries. I’d think sacramental wine, but it’s not an alcohol scent, just ripe red fruit (though come to think of it, it does smell a bit like port, which the church I grew up in uses at Communion…) After a few minutes it turns sharper and makes me want to sneeze.

First sniff: Hymn is a lot more sweet-white-flowery than I expected – I figured the many incenses would be predominant. There’s a sharpness around the outside, as if the flowers are floating in a cut-crystal bowl with zigzaggy edges.

Wearing: There’s definitely a dryness under the flowers – it’s not the flowers that are dried out, but their environment. A fresh white bouquet in a bright sunlit room full of old vestments and dusty prayer books.

I'm not sure if the scent was the culprit, but the first time I wore Strength (from the tarot oils) I kept nodding off at work... a bit TOO calming, perhaps.

I find The Apothecary and Alice very soothing in quite different ways. Rosalind is another possibility - it's very calm and quiet.

First sniff: Wow. Cedarwood dipped in vanilla, big skies and wide-open plains with the wind blowing ripples in the yellow grass.

Wearing: Tombstone is beautifully warm, and really interesting. The vanilla is primary, and there’s a definite woodiness underneath, like vanilla condensed into the consistency of molasses and poured slooooooowly into a cedar chest. There’s a sharpness to the cedar that gets up my nose a bit if I sniff my wrist directly, but the aura is that gorgeous thick gooey vanilla with not a hint of sugar.

The texture of this scent reminds me of that amazing brandy-butter sauce they pour over one of the desserts at Applebee’s… thick but flowy and almost sticky but not quite. (Dang – now I really want a skillet blondie. ) It seems pretty unisex, but I have a feeling that if a man wore this scent he’d be sex on horseback. (Or maybe I’m just thinking of Viggo. )

First sniff: Harlot really does smell like wet roses, and there’s a hint of something else I can’t pin down, something a bit brighter. It boggles me that I’ve sniffed so many rose scents and they’re all different.

Wearing: There have been only two rose scents that were too strongly rosey for me – Black Rose and now this one. I’m trying to put my finger on the difference between them, ‘cause I know there is one, but at the moment it’s just screaming ROSE! in my ear and I can’t smell anything else. This one is more aggressively, arrogantly rosey, with BIG thorns. Black Rose is a bit more reserved. After a few minutes on I can smell the cinnamon lurking about underneath, reining the rose in a bit – and I forget until I smell something like this what REAL cinnamon smells like, because anytime I see cinnamon in something I expect it to smell like one of those spicy red jawbreakers (Red Hots, I think). But this is REAL cinnamon, like someone grabbed a curl of cinnamon bark and a fine-mesh grater and grated the spice directly over an enormous RED rose.

Interestingly, this is the only one of the 10 Love Potions I’ve tried so far that I really haven’t gotten along with. For rose fans, it's a must-try... the cinnamon adds an interesting lighter note, but it's still just too rosey for me (though Rapture and Othello are slowly bringing me around from the rabidly anti-rose crowd).

First sniff: I’ve never read the Story, but O strikes me as being wistful almost to the point of sadness, and I can’t figure out why. The scent itself is very smooth and golden, and I suspect it’s the amber that restrains it from being too foody or too sweet.

Wearing: Very warm, quiet and gently smoky. After an hour or so it developed an odd overtone… almost a mustiness, which didn’t suit me at all (betting that's the amber again, I can't wear Aureus either). It was quite nice in the early stages.

I swapped for another imp of this scent after deciding I didn't give it a fair chance the first time:

Trying again: Goes on golden and glorious, definite honey. It’s quite a bit sweeter than I remember. Actually, the wet stage reminds me of Lush’s B Never honey shower gel. This stayed wonderful on me all night – I must have been having wonky chemistry when I tried it on before. Another scent to test my guy's reaction.

Testing my guy's reaction: Oh my. I'll leave it at that. Well, no, not quite. O is only the second scent he's ever requested I wear - the original Siren is still his first love, but he's very VERY fond of O.

First sniff: There’s something in Alice, in the vial, that smells a bit “off” to my nose. I’ve never been a huge fan of the scent of milk, so maybe that’s it. The overtones are more fruit than floral.

Wearing: It’s the aftertaste of this that smells slightly weird – just when you stop inhaling but there’s still a scent. It does smell a bit like some sort of milk soap I used a long time ago. Over that I smell a slightly sharp-edged flower – I’m guessing that’s carnation – and the fruit seems to be gone, or at least toned down. The weird aftertaste disappears very quickly, fortunately, and the overall effect is quite sweet, with a nice powdery spice to it. It’s morphed into something I really, really like, an unconventional sort of soothing like a kitten sleeping in your lap.

I wasn't expecting to like this one based on the weird milky scent, but it turned subtly gorgeous as it dried. An older man in the post office kept glancing in my direction, and considering I went out with the Chin Zit of Doom and no makeup in a ratty old T-shirt and Birkenstocks, I gotta think it was the way I smelled rather than the way I looked... The closest I can come to "what this smells like" in its final form is a less sweet version of Burt's Bees buttermilk bath.

I haven't tried it on yet, but Tombstone smells a bit like cedarwood dipped in vanilla. Very intriguing.

Also, Dragon's Heart went a bit vanilla-y on me, and that one is all warmth and musk and just all-around gorgeous.

Siren is mostly ginger, but if you like that, it's a really gorgeous bakery scent with a definite vanilla undertone.

Carnivale was nice at first and then the amber went weird on me - my skin doesn't get along with resins (though apparently it's OK with dragon's blood...) It struck me as much more of a berry scent than a vanilla, but would probably match your warm-sweet-spicy tastes. And Snake Oil is awesome, of course.

First sniff: Dragon's Heart is very red and wicked, with a spicy bite. I’m betting it will be very slinky on me – there’s something in it that reminds me of Ravenous.

Wearing: Ooh. I LIKE. If this is a dragon, it’s a mysterious, sinuous Eastern dragon with dark red scales, not the barbaric dinosaurish sort that show up in movies and are generally bent on destroying everything they lay eyes on. My brain wants to define this as spicy, because it’s very warm, but it’s not really spice. If I sniff my wrist directly there’s a lighter round scent that hovers just this side of sweetness… almost vanilla but not quite.

First sniff: Wicked is a very cool, ethereal scent – more than cool, almost to the point of chilly but not quite biting. I know it’s jasmine, but I don’t smell that bright sweetness jasmine usually has – this is much darker, very shadowy. It reminds me a lot of the evil queen from Snow White – that regal, haughty beauty as she sweeps out of the hall with her long cape billowing behind.

Wearing: Reminiscent of Twilight, but a very cool version, and darker. The drydown is almost exactly the wet green stage of Twilight, which I madly adore, and it lasts for ages – I can still smell it clearly more than 12-13 hours after applying.

I suspect I’ll be wearing this one a lot once I get through all my imps.

I was blaming computer gremlins. Glad we're back!

Hey, while I'm thinking about it - I have my profile set to e-mail me when I get a PM, and it hasn't been. Any idea how I or you or someone can make it work right?

Strength, from Tarot Oils. Strength is my soul card and personality card, and I really liked her even before I knew that.

First sniff: A green scent, slightly fruity with a touch of grounding earth. It strikes me as very feminine and very complex – I’ll be very interested to see what it does on my skin, and whether the lion ever shows up.

Wearing: Softly earthy and very soothing, but with a firmness behind it. There’s a very faint sweetness dusted over the earth – I think this is what I translated as “fruity” at first sniff, but on my skin it’s more like honey. A few hours into wearing I sniffed my wrist and I swear it was cocoa - not sweet at all, and not nearly as rich as Vice, but cocoa. A hint of the overall earthiness is still lingering about, twelve hours after initial application.

I wore this to work and kept almost falling asleep until I resorted to coffee... I'm not sure Strength was the culprit, but I've discovered "grounding" scents do tend to make me a bit sluggish if I'm not hyper when I put them on. I'll keep this one around for days when my mind is racing a zillion miles an hour and needs to slow down and take a breath.

Rosalind, from Illyria:

First sniff: It’s not a very strong scent, but comes across as pale rather than soft… very pale flowers with a whisper of berry in the shadow of a tree by a stream.

Wearing: This isn’t nearly as quiet a scent as I first thought – I suspect my nose was just burned out from sniffing so many less-subtle ones. If a little girl ran down a sunny hill carrying a huge armful of flowers for her mother, and a few of them slipped free and floated down to rest on the grass behind her, that would be this scent. Very pretty and greenly floral. It seems to be fading already, and I've only had it on for about half an hour...

Azazel, from Diabolus:

First sniff: I have no idea what this one actually smells like, but it's bold and green-spicy and I like it a lot. More of a masculine scent, I think -- a male dancer, all fluid motion and shirtless grace... sorry, I think I'm drooling. I'll definitely be trying this one on -- maybe at night in hopes of interesting dreams?

Wearing: I figured out what the familiar scent is, and that so rarely happens! Republic of Tea makes an herbal called Desert Sage, and this is totally it -- a dry spice that's homey/kitcheny rather than exotic, green and not bright. Of course, now that I have the desert image in my head, the gorgeous dancer-man has turned into a cowboy... *curses her uncooperative imagination* After about an hour it loses its spice and turns into more of a clean, almost soapy scent.

Rapture, from Love Potions:

First sniff: Mmmm… warm, soft and quietly sensual, like being wrapped in a longtime lover’s embrace just to enjoy each other's closeness with no fooling around. There’s a food scent in here too, a spicy/baked-goods sort that I can’t pin down.

Wearing: This scent absolutely screams afterglow to me… not the moment of the rapture in question, but later, when you cuddle up together and you’re all warm and breathless and sleepy in such a good way. I definitely smell rose, but what a rose… warm and velvety like the caress of petals across your skin, a big bold wide-open rose still warm from the sun in the garden, not the little buds from the florist. In that sense it reminds me of the feel of the flowers in Old Venice.

I’m wearing this to bed… we’ll see what sorts of dreams it brings.

Eternal, from Funereal Oils:

First sniff: I have a very vivid (and odd) visual impression of this one – a blanket of white flowers pulled over a stone sarcophagus in an empty sunlit church. It’s not a wreath, but a long draping blanket like a horse gets when he wins a Triple Crown race. I can’t pick out specific floral notes, but it’s softly sweet and very sad.

Wearing: It’s warmer and sweeter on my skin, almost too much – the overwhelming jumble of too many flowers in one room, very white. I preferred the soft sad scent it was before it hit my skin… it was more of a gentle rose then, now it’s more gardenia, which I usually find too bitingly sweet.

Masquerade, from Bewitching Brews:

First sniff: I’m reluctant to say this for fear all the Lushies will rush out and buy it and then not sniff it the same, but… Masquerade reminds me very much of Icon soap, if it were brushed with orange. It has the same sort of dark mysterious Renaissance-angel feel to it without being sharply incensey.

Wearing: I can smell the orange more, but it’s still wrapped in soft black feathers and guttering candlelight, with a wisp of the smoke of burning herbs curling overhead. It’s not as darkly-purple as Icon, definitely, but the same feel is there. It reminds me a bit of the good parts of Anne Bonny before my skin futzed the incense up – that same intriguing-as-hell combination of dark and bright. I cannot figure this one out… and I LIKE that. I suspect this one will go into heavy rotation, as it's completely unlike any other BP scents I have, and I really must try it after showering with the remnants of my Icon soap.

Ligeia, from Bewitching Brews:

First sniff: Bright, sweet floral with a dark undertone -- a scattering of white flowers across black velvet. The jasmine is very obvious, but the other notes keep it from being screamingly sweet.

Wearing: Seems to be pure jasmine on my skin -- the aura is pretty nice, but it's too sweet if I sniff my wrist directly. After an hour or so I do smell something underneath, greenish and a bit more grounded.

Mod note: This scent was briefly resurrected from February to May of 2006 as part of the Limited Edition "Into the Maelstrom" series, with the same notes as the discontinued GC blend.

Baobhan Sith, from Diabolus:

First sniff: Definite grapefruit, with a bite – it almost smells like grapefruit peel rather than the fruit inside. The inside of the grapefruit when you’re done eating it and all the sugar is gone.

Wearing: The feel of this reminds me very much of Phantasm – they both have a misty, wispy quality to the citrus, but Phantasm is much brighter, where this one is in shadow. The ginger is very restrained, not biting like Siren but a very faint note of spice under the fruit, so slight I wasn't sure I was really smelling it. I really enjoyed this one, even if it did fade a bit quickly.