Chatoyant

The red wine and amber I loved in Lilith & Sekhmet, although the amber here opens earlier and has the addition of smoked resin and a hint of ash. I'll have to cagematch to see if I really need both.

Complex tobacco and clove with golden resins - @patina, I'm going to have to cagematch it with In Time of Plague!

I was hoping for a darker, dirtier Jacob's Ladder, but instead I'm getting cumin?! Possibly the sage/vetiver combination is going weird.

Pretty much single-note carnation for me, with maybe a hint of rose underneath threatening to go soapy.

I tend to amp rose into soap, but the comparisons to Chrysanthemum Moon's opium made me seek out a decant. Clermont smells almost EXACTLY like the rose-beads my grandmother indulgently allowed me to make one summer from her beloved roses (along with an orange-and-clove pomander and candied mint leaves - I was on an olde-tyme crafts roll). This is a deep red-black and bruised dried rose scent, with maybe the opium buried somewhere underneath keeping things from going soap. It's the kind of rose scent you imagine a fantasy or historical romance heroine making in a still room from the roses growing over the stone of the family keep.

Not sure I'll seek out a bottle, but I'll probably keep the decant for nostalgia reasons.

I've managed to find a few BPALs my girlfriend likes, but she's really enamored of Gucci Guilty Black. Her BPAL loves are (Not So) Penitent (Mini) Magdalene, Mouse Circus, Pink Lace, and Hope and Fear Set Free - so nothing at all like the commercial favorite. Any suggestions?

Beach roses! Something with the fresh wild smell of them growing out of the sand with the taste of salt wind straight off the waves and sun . . .it's not just "a rose" and "sometimg wet and sort of oceany" - it's the rose of summer from my childhood. The impossible dream.