magpiedee

http://www.coolmompicks.com/2010/03/black_...alchemy_lab.php

I just reviewed BPAL for Cool Mom Picks. Always good to spread the smelly joy.

XIV

My first Chaos Theory. And it's fascinating! Imagine you are at the zoo, and it's a very hot July day, so you stop to get one of those Minute Maid frozen lemonades. You eat it as fast as you can until there is nothing left but the whippy liquid froth at the bottom, and you feel sated. You are standing in front of the panoramic safari section, with elephants enjoying dustbaths and giraffes twitching their tails and zebras placidly munching, feeling like you are almost-- but not quite-- all alone on the veldt where everything shimmers and sighs. Then you smell the lemonade. It's a lot like that.

Notes? Um... hot lemon. Hot, honey, sunshine, dusty, dry lemon. Lemon in a yellow polka-dot bikini. Lemon sweat. Lemon that laughs at Pine-sol and other cleaning products because they're too mainstream. With the tiniest dry-down of something sweetly soapy, like baby soap or laundry detergent in the sunshine. In fact, the exact quote it brings to mind is Ron's fake magic spell from the first Harry Potter:

Sunshine, daisies, butter, mellow... my Chaos Theory smells like yellow!

It's a fascinating scent adventure for me. Doesn't make me feel sexy or sweet or womanly or spicy or responsible... just makes me see the sun wavering over stunted trees and everything bathed in golden sweat.

Hell's Belle... is like the sassy pirate wench that beat the crap out of Anne Bonny and stole her ship and is now drinking her rum through a straw in a coconut while working on her tan.

Seriously, Hell's Belle is what I had hoped Anne Bonny would smell like, because it is the perfect epitome of a fun-loving pirate wench for me. Knee-high black boots, big, floppy hat, floofy white shirt, lipstick the same red as the blood on her cutlass.

In more concrete perfume terms, HB is warm, golden, languorous, swingy like a hammock. Well-rounded, like it has aged just enough. It's the color of sun in rum, or of polished golden birdseye maple. Maybe just a touch of green and brown, but mostly gold. The imp, immediate smell and drydown are identical to me, and the scent keeps going for a good, long while. I am 100% behind Hell's Belle. She's me pirate buddy, and we read Cosmopirate together while we paint our toenails, yarr.

Yemaya... is like a glittery blue dragonfly caught in a puddle of melon juice and buzzing a bit with drunkenness.

I haven't decided yet whether my 5mL is a keeper. I love the idea of Yemaya, especially as a mother, but I think the Yemaya that struck me and inspired my big bottle purchase was the TAL blend. Yemaya is very strong, sweet and fruity for me, and although the drydown is lovely, it just doesn't last. Within an hour, I couldn't smell a single hint of the sweet, melony goodness. But lovely.

Shango... is exactly like Lady MacBeth deep-throating a banana.

In the imp, I found it vile and reminiscent of cough syrup and hearth smoke, but after reading the reviews, I knew I had to try it. And thank goodness I did! It's got that deep, mellow, smokey aubergine-merlot of Lady MacBeth, but with a warm summer component of coconut and banana that makes it infinitely wearable. I almost ran off the road this morning sniffing my wrists. I was going to order a 5mL of Hell's Belle, but I will probably get Shango instead.

Huzzah for Shango!!

I keep a little espresso teacup full of dry rice at work with the following imps:

Kitsune-Tsuki - soft, like snow and plums, competent but feminine

Bordello - a little more rowdy, but spunky - for asskicking at work

Queen of Hearts - fresh and strong, executive, playing by the rules

Persephone - girlish and sweet, for when I want to be humble

Old Glasgow - a very cold, crisp, deep smell, for tucking into work

I've also got imps of Rosalind (grassy, fresh) and Whitechapel (tea and lemon, unobtrusive) on the way for springtime.

Hope that helps!

I would have sworn I had reviewed this one, but I can't find my review. Weird.

Aizen-myoo is my fighting scent. My sweating, fierce joy, bruising crunch of shins scent. I wear it to muay thai class, and it brings a certain animal light to my eyes. It adds bite to my hooks and flow to my 6-counts. It is the smell of hot, sizzling summer in the South, as a child forces a path through the blackberry briars. Torn green leaves, irridescent june bugs, bleeding milkweed, red scratches from wayward thorns. It is a smell that hacks through jungles, fearless of snakes. Sharp citrus, torn grass, summer sun. It nearly buzzes on its own.

Two words: Children's Tylenol.

For which I love it.

Glitter will be a sleeping scent for me, along with Alice and Bon Vivant. They are not scents that I want to wear for others to smell me, but rather, scents that I personally want to smell. They are memory-spiked and soothing for sleep.

For me, Glitter smells exactly like my favorite childhood medicines, the thick pink flu medicine in a brown bottle in the fridge and the tiny pink Children's Tylenol. After a long, hot bath, I like to dab it on my wrists and throat and sleep with my hands by my cheek to inhale the comforting goodness. The smell is light, pink, effervescent, comforting, soft and yes, a bit glittery.

Not a full bottle purchase, but one that i'll save for memory lane and sweet dreams.

If the Queen of Hearts gently took the grey-velvet clad arm of Whitechapel and went strolling through Old Glasgow during a deep blue evening, it would smell exactly like Queen of Diamonds.

I just want to *be* Queen of Diamonds. So lovely. This will be one of my signature scents until I run out and cry for weeks.

Mabon completely represents to me the concept of "dandelion wine". It smells deeply golden, harvest color, like the very last beautiful day of September, when you say goodbye to fall by lying on your back and letting red and orange leaves fall on your face while whispering love notes to the deepest blue sky.

Yellow-gold, clear, liquid, limpid, bold, benevolent, sweet, mellow, ripe. I smell dandelions and leaves and warmth, but that is all I can say of smell. It's like Lughnasadh without the apples and cherries. It is lovely like a sleeping lion, like the perfect leaf, like a bottle of olive oil, robust and lazy and deep.

Beautiful.

Would you believe me if I told you that O was horrible on me? One of the top 5 worst scents on my skin?

Perhaps we are cursed, O and I.

The smell of O on my skin... was of honey and baby diapers. Stinky, stinky baby diapers. I was so disappointed, because everyone seems to love it, but apparently no one told my skin chemistry about that bit. I traded it almost immediately.

So there you have it, believe it or not. Honey and baby diapers.

Whitechapel is one of the most polite smells i've ever encountered. It practically doffs its hat and stoops over your hand. And yet, underneath that spotless waistcoat, there is something twisted lurking quietly. Do you remember (perhaps lovingly, as I do) that moment in Bram Stoker's Dracula when the handsome prince first bows to Mina in the streets of London? His gray hat, immaculate suit, cane and glossy black locks, his precise accent, his warmth... and underneath it all, we know who he really is. And some part of Mina does, too, but she's still entranced.

And that is the smell of Whitechapel. I smell tea with lemons, Earl Grey, a white china bowl of limes, the dry scent of a visit to the apothecary lingering in a gentleman's handkerchief. Clean and clear, standing in the nave of an old church, lighting a candle for a sick aunt. It is grey and yellow, arsenic and old lace, a gold pin in a silver cravat.

I wear it when I feel tidy and clean and alone, when I knit and watch period dramas, when I languish on a Sunday morning. I wear it to go through nostalgic items and to hug my grandmother. So polite, yet... there's always something lurking.

Hamadryad is lovely, but it doesn't work for me, in a strange way. It crosses my wires and screws with my synaesthesia.

See, in my brain, things can't be both red and green at the same time, and Hamadryad attempts just that. It is green and clean and woody, but at the same time, red and spicy and cinnamony. So although I like it, it upsets something in my noodle and makes me scowl every time I smell it. Weird, eh?

Since it hurts to sniff it, it is hard for me to describe, other than that it is both red and green, cool evergreen but red hot, outdoorsy but kitcheny, elusive and tricksy. It smells very rich and enveloping, like breaking through a circle of trees to see what's in the clearing. It is confusing and natural and warm and distant. For me, it is a scent of opposites, a very unique combination that I simply can't wear.

And yet it's lovely.

Snow White, for me, is encapsulated by that scene in Legend in which the unicorn's horn has been cut, and the world is enrobed in sugary snow. When Lilly creeps into the cottage and finds everything once warm, welcome and familiar foreign and cold, dusted with glittering white powder, faintly tinged with blue. It is sweet and lovely and soft, but cold and sharp and glittering, too.

This is not, for me, the limp and fearful Snow White of the Disney Film, but a strong woman tinged with sadness, an ice maiden frozen in time.

The metaphor is all I have to give you, really. I can't pull out a single note. It is lovely and strong without smelling of food or flowers or wine or musk or smoke or another main "scent" that we use to describe the oils. It is a light, frosted, robin's egg blue to me, opaque and sparkling as snow in the moonlight. The balance appeals to me: soft but strong; glittery but opaque; somehow both cool and warm at once. It is a masterpiece, and I am thankful to Beth and quantum spice for sharing it with me.

Oh, lovely... lovely... lovely...

Lughnasadh is the smell of opening the door of a welcoming, warm home after tromping through cold snow in the night. The exact feeling of that door opening, and the warmth bumping against your face like bread rising over the side of the pan, and jolly voices calling welcome. It is warm things simmering, twinkling lights against worn wood, stockings and doorbells and someone else making hot breakfast. It's the smell of Christmas to me, of holidays with family.

Actually wearing it, it is all fallish colors-- pumpkin orange, cranberry red, fir green. It is sharp but mellow, winey, deep. The maraschino cherry bit hits me first, and then it mellows into apple and cinnamon notes that are nothing like cinnamon apples, but distinct feelings of the essence of apple, and the essence of cinnamon. I wear it when I want to feel crisp and bright and yet warm and welcoming. It's great with a red sweater.

If BPAL oils were irritating celebrities, Megaera would be the Mary-Kate Olsen to Kitsune-Tsuki's Ashley, and their sassy younger sister Aizen-Myoo would always be foiling their plans.

Megaera screams orange (the color, not the fruit) to me-- sharp, pungent, sunny, confident, bursting. If you remember that gum in the 80's that had squoosh in the middle, it's like that. Very juicy, very bright, very striking. This is what a fiery orange sunset would smell like, blinding and shot through with con trails.

Megaera is a redhead with freckles and a temper to match her fiery thatch. She would hit you between the eyes with a snowball. Her smile curves up on one corner.

I wear Megaera as a work scent when I want to project that I am a woman who is upbeat, spunky, proactive, scrappy and powerful, kickass and yet controlled. I wear it with coppery eye makeup and calf-high black leather boots. I wear it like a dare.

Do I get notes? Nope. Do I get images? Yes, in abundance.

This is the smell of a gigantic, 10-ton, hand-carved 4-poster bed, with a canopy and diaphanous layers of mosquito netting, softly blowing in the breeze from the open window. Tasseled sultan's pillows and roll pillows and scraps of silky cord are thrown all over the bed, and someone is clearly curled under the heavy, plum-colored throw, sleeping deeply in a soft, dark nest. The room is made of stone-- a turret in an old castle, perhaps. Slightly damp, but more cold than anything else. The sky is a velvety dark purple, the moon is barely a cold sliver of icy grin. The stars poke through like bat's eyes, and the clouds give off a puff of werewolf breath. The fire has burned down to embers.

In the corner, there is an old vanity, with a cracked mirror and scattered vials of perfume and poison, not that anyone can tell the difference. And sitting on the scarlet velvet cushion, gazing intently into the mirror, is a very forgetful and sensuous ghost. The person under the covers doesn't know it, but the ghost arrives every night, softly sighing and playing with all the colorful sparklies on the table. Ribbons get misplaced, buttons go missing, perfume bottles are turned over, but certainly that could all be blamed on mice?

The smell of Spectre, to me, is the smell of an innocent and sad ghost, who haunts beautiful places and longs to feel things again, clutching again and again at a cameo and never quite being able to grasp it. The dark indigo sky, the wolfbreath clouds, the heavy grey stone, the corded velvet, the mosquito net... it all surrounds the spectre like the backdrop of a play in which the same scene is reenacted every night. It is lovely and soft, but also sweet and sad, like a particularly poignant violin solo. It is lovely for sleeping and bathing, but it is not a scent to seduce or startle. Just to gently and sweetly prod the memory, letting bits of ribbon slip through.

Indeed it is strange. From the bottle and at first dab, I get fleeting glimpses of running from plant to plant in my grandfather's garden as a child, looking for squash big enough to pick. There is a sharp, green, weedy smell to me, and also a deeper, earthy smell. Not dark, rich forest loam, but the drier, lighter, warmer earth from a garden, mixed with red clay and dusty in the sun. I can also smell the wood stakes holding up the tomatoes, and the dust in the air from a hot Georgia afternoon. As it dries down and soaks in, the scent becomes pungent and sweet, in an old, dry dusty way, like leather-bound books kept cradled in a locked room where a fragrant pipe has been smoked for 30 years. Funny how it goes from squash plants in the dry garden to books and smoke. But it does.

I believe I would snuggle up to a man who wore this, and nuzzle my lips against that soft place where the jaw meets the neck. A fire in an otherwise unlit room would flicker against his dark flannel shirt, and snow would pelt softly against the windowpanes, and I would be held safe, surrounded by down pillows. Grey, dark, flickery, parchment, old tobacco, pipe smoke, firelight, flannel, polished wood, a library with a rolling ladder, a gentleman in the garden, a scarf against the cold, surety, satiety, dry and dusty and comforting things all.

Dissipation is indeed a strong memory for me, almost a flashback to 1995 and the lazy summer I spent with a wonderful family in Toulouse. It's the smell of Maman's cozy hugs and tutting, "oh, la-la", of the many glittering bangles she wore on her pudgy wrists and her big, wild oh-so-chic glasses. It's the smell of sitting in the big rocking chair, reading Kissinger and eating sweet yellow plums while the family guinea pig scooted around the room on his little roller skate feet saying "oui oui oui". It's the smell of milk boiling for breakfast and the electric knife cutting the stale baguette. It's the smell of driving in the tiny car across miles and miles of farmland because they knew i'd like Ingres. I had flashbacks all night and smiled in my waking, and I can smell it with perfect clarity 10 hours later.

Oh, the notes? What does it actually smell like? I have no idea. I can't pick out a single note, or compare it to anything i've smelled before. I don't smell fruit at all, possibly a bit of Smarties sweetness, but it's not foody in any way. I don't get root beer or lemon. I smell something i've known in a store-bought perfume, probably the one that Maman wore every day. It's extraordinarily well-blended and the perfect catalyst for a step back in time.

It just smells very... French. Confident and settled in itself, not needing elaborate trappings, technology, American-style opulence or a full calendar. It's a smell that wakes up when it wants to, enjoys its breakfast and leisurely decides that today is a day for adventure, whether a trip to a museum, the sea, a church, the river or simply the balcony. It's a scent that would go just as well in the hammock as to a party.

To sum it up: cluck, cluck, "oh la-la".

Shattered is the smell of a broken heart. It brings back memories I had forgotten, of sitting in front of open windows in the winter, letting myself get misted with rain as I shivered and the tears half froze on my cheeks, reading old love letters with deep creases.

It is the smell of midnight under the pines by the lake, kissing against the mosquitos until your lips swell and ache, knowing it will soon be over.

It is the smell of the last hug goodbye, the fragile words, that way you hold your chin up and shoulders down, trying to be the ice queen with the bruised peach of a heart out of some beautiful old Baudelaire poem.

It is the sound of the phone never ringing, of the emptiness of not being loved anymore, of never being complete again.

How do you do it, Beth? What kind of gift have you been given, that you can bring something like this crashing down around old scars?

I am just. Just. Damn.

In retrospect, I think I was a bit harsh in my earlier review, so I take it all back. This is the second oil that has really gone awful on my skin, but that in no way changes my respect and love for BPAL oils.

That being said... this one had a lot of staying power and went wonky when it touched me. There is a very deep, almost moldy orange smell that strikes me in the back of the throat in a way that just doesn't work. I get the same feeling from Seraglio.

Ah, well. To swaps with ye!

*waving madly* Ooooh! Ooooo-oooh!

You must try: Lush Skinny Dip + BPAL Regan.

I'm seriously going to eat myself until I taste blood. It's the loveliest, spiciest, gutsiest vanilla, and the two products blend until I can't tell one from the other. Made me want to put on flippy little lacy underthingies for tonight's date. Not the black thong... the pink and purple see-thru boyshorts with the little bows.

Seriously. Yum.

Oh, Blue Moon... you are quite a surprise.

When I first opened the packaging, I knew I would like it. The smell was just... nice. Not too this or that, not in your face, not faded, just *nice*. The label is adorable and the amber bottle is cute. I'm not even sure where to start with the oil, though-- it's a shapeshifter.

It's tightly wound, ready to spring... not like a cat about to pounce, but more like a fiddle head, or a night flower about to open. It's laden with a quiet sort of power, and I can smell that it has a thoughtful purpose outside of smelling lovely. It is blue and clear to me, like the color of moonlight on a white mushroom. In fact, it's what moonlight *should* smell like on a clear night-- both soft and crisp, clearly delineated, with both stark light and shadow, ponderous with self-knowledge and wisdom.

Think of an ancient forest clearing at night, with juniper berries shining on dark bushes and glittering droplets on spider webs, with a little fairy circle of whitish mushrooms and fiddleheads popping open as frogs' eyes are lit up momentarily. Think of owls hooting Beatles' songs to themselves. It's that split second when the air finally cools, and things sigh softly. It's almost like the same forest I see for The Unicorn, but on the night that the unicorns *don't* appear-- same place, but with a quiet waiting that is never quite fulfilled.

A very beautiful and thoughtful and peaceful and wise blend. A blend for spiders and spinners and barn owls and mushrooms and ferns and things that are never seen in the shadows but are there, nonetheless. Perfectly blended, really, shifting from note to note with the sharp spark of juniper behind it all. Gorgeous.

Oh, the loveliest! It's all warm, honeyed orange and deep emerald green, like a splatter of lillies against the backdrop of the forest. It's the smell of something young and innocent hiding in the honeysuckle, the smell of hide and seek for wild things, of the dappled, sunny space where the forest opens up to a clearing.

This oil is one of the few i've known that smells the same to me in the bottle, on my body, and after a bit of time. It is warm and clear and clean, but not at all crisp. It reminds me of my grandmother, bees buzzing lazily in the sun, making tents of old sheets, glasses of sweet iced tea and taking naps in piles of leaves. Very carefree, very sweet, very simple. And very, very beautiful.

If Bordello wore a purple satin dress, it would become Marie.

I agree with the previous posters-- Marie plays the saucy violet to the comforting, sleepy Veil and the sharp, staunch Wings of Azrael.

When I picture these three scents in my head (please excuse the long, drawn-out simile), I see them as a family in an old-timey English tintype.

Veil is the mother-- she's still sensual and pretty, but she's gotten comfortable and gained a little curvy weight, and she spends most of her days in laudanum dreams.

Wings of Azrael is the father-- he's got a stiff backbone, wears his starched collar so high that it digs into his chin, and would say "but, my good sir, that's preposterous!!" several times a day. Yet underneath his English staunchness, you can tell he's still dark and powerful and debonair and dashing, and you can tell how he and Madame Veil provoked a good deal of gossip in their day.

Between them is Marie-- an impish nymphete who dresses in bright purple satins and wears rouge, even though her mama beats her for it. She's the sort of girl who kisses boys on the playground and might have shown Jean Claude her ankle once on a dare. She's going to grow up to take Paris by storm, as soon as she's had her debut. She has white, porcelaine skin, pitch black hair and startlingly violet eyes, and she knows she's a little Lolita and uses it to her advantage, sitting on the laps of her father's rich friends and wiggling while she admires their medals and mustaches.

So, there's my random metaphor for the violet family. I love Marie for the exact reason listed above-- when Veil is too sleepy and Wings is too sharp, Marie puts a bit of mischief and beauty and sensual energy into the mix. I love violet scents, and this one would be wonderful for going to a costume tea party or playing Spin the Bottle.