patina

I like oudh! That said, this heavy oudh plus vetiver is also unfortunately poopy at first on me. I do get the sparkling labdanum and I could see aging and deepening Snake Oil completely solving the poop problem but those first few seconds are a little alarming. As the snake oil warms up and the vanilla scent wafts the vetiver poop transforms into something s lot more palatable, sweet, brown, warm, and a little powdery.

The red musk is a little more sour and acrid than the one I'm used to, or maybe that't the blackwood. Not that it's unpleasant, it's just that it has an almost blood-orange smell to it. Like a blood orange musk with some oudh and patchouli. The patchouli is well blended though.

At first the closest comparisons I can make are Banded Sea Snake and Snake's Kiss (though it doesn't have the lemony note). I get oak and moss predominantly. The davana really stands out to me as a powerful white floral in the middle of all that snake oil, wood, moss, and unspecified dark stuff. I think this one will get better with age, though moss also has a tendency to get deeper with age so it might get too moss heavy.

I haven't tried anything that smelled only like clean bare wood, but Yggadrasil might have that note in it. At least that's what I recall.

It's not smoky and a bit more cologne-ish but you might want to try Odic Force from the Yule's. Same eerie green.

Okay, what about goblins? I know there's Goblin, but what else?

Wine. Or actually WINE!! I get an intense burst of something that smells like the Zadok Allen Vineyard, just heavy grape with maybe some oak or darker elements in there. This may be a little sweeter than Zadok though.

Slightly burned but accurate coffee. Or maybe the snickerdoodles were left on too long. That doesn't matter because there's syrup and toasted sugar and...marshmallows? It's hard to go wrong with those notes if you want a foody atmo.

At first this is bright lime. A guy's cologne with ozone. I'm not a great fan of citrus in general but the amber manages to mellow it out and ground it a little. I would compare this to 51, although that one is a floral and has deeper elements. It seems like such a simple scent but as I wear it I find myself increasingly intrigued. I ended up getting a bottle for all those times I want to smell like unearthly green flames.

I didn't care for a lot of the gingerbreads in this Yule, but it really works with the tobacco. Maybe because my skin is good with tobacco. I wish I could describe it better, but it's just a medium, standard molasses-clove gingerbread with caramelized smelling French tobacco. The tobacco is far stronger than the gingerbread. Incredibly snuggly.

Faintly powdery blue musk with a tinge of the lab's blueberry note. Just barely edging into "foody" but not quite. I could see this in a Federalist style room with pale blue walls. almost regretting having just the one bottle.

Almond flour and dry cacao with some golden labdanum and well-behaved cherries. It's like a delicious but not too sweet or moist cake. If the labdanum only shone a little more or the patchouli were deeper then this scent would have a lot more depth, but that might happen with aging. I'm on the fence with this one.

This is a bit heavy on the leather and teak which gives it a kind of cologne sense. It almost smells like celery at a close sniff. I get an occasional waft of plummy sweet lavender but I don't think the up-close smell is worth it. Very sophisticated though. After some aging the celery has calmed down though the leather is still prominent. I get sticky plum with cologne and red musk too. Now I can finally see the comparison to The Shadow in the Elevator

Nice! The vetiver mixes with and tones down the gingerbread. I'm not getting charred wood from it at all. The blackcurrant is dark and perfumy while just hinting at jam.

I could tell there was a blue element without reading the notes. Champaca is sometimes bad on me but this isn't at all. There's certainly an evergreen presence here too, though the scent softens it. This is very different from Perchta's sweet white powder snow, it's more ice for one thing. It is sweet in it's own right because of the resins. Almost a pineapple ice scent. It's a bit like a blue moon (or one of the lab's Blue Moons) hanging over an ice and snow covered fir tree in the dead of night. It's going to be a hard call deciding on a bottle between this and Perchta 2018.