septima_pica

(aged review) So I bought a bottle of Death Cap and an imp of Destroying Angel and kept them both around for a year. The first became way more awesome, the second...well... So Destroying Angel was mostly spicy floral dirt to begin with. Now the dirt's almost entirely gone, which is really weird -- it's almost completely unlike mushrooms in any way, even more than it was to begin with. Notes I can smell? Well, something coniferous, a mild floral, and something that reminds me of cucumbers or maybe underripe cantaloupe. No dirt at all, regrettably -- it appears to have done a runner sometime in the last year. But more crucially, it's evoking a really strong scent memory. I think my Papa must have used a soap or cologne that smelled exactly like this, because it sure does smell like him. And the funny thing is, it didn't originally. Yeah. I don't need to wear this, but I'll keep it around. I'll put it in the drawer with the bottle of Chloe and smell them when I wish Nana and Papa were still around. Funny thing, that Proustian memory.

Grapefruit oil really works for this purpose, according to a study done in Japan recently -- in fact, anything with limonene, but grapefruit has a lot in particular. Also, if I was looking for an appetite suppressant, I'd personally pick something with mint in it. Therefore, I'd say that one of the following would be your best bet: Night-Gaunt ("yuzu, white grapefruit, and kumquat mixed with the snow-dusted flowers of Mount Ngranek") Baobhan Sith ("grapefruit, white tea, apple blossom and ginger") Manhattan ("sheer amber, black leather, white mint, lemon peel, white tea, grapefruit, kush, teakwood and orchid") Shattered ("white champagne notes, grapefruit, lotus, slivered mint and crystalline aquatic blooms")

Well, that sounds a bit like my favourite BPAL combination, which is Perversion + Death Cap. Death Cap is a soft vanilla-y dirt smell, perfect for adding a little bit of earth to sweet scents. It's really nice with Nemesis too, and I can see it being the best way to add dirt and vanilla to Eden.

Anubis always makes me think of late summer afternoon sunlight, even though it's got none of those notes listed above.

re: Paloma Picasso -- Mousse de chene is oakmoss. I second the rec for Marquise de Merteuil. re: Hypnose -- You might like anything in the general Snake Oil family, for a woody vanilla. Cottonmouth has passionflower and a couple of other flowers, and Death Adder has vetiver plus coconut and stuff. Also Lyonesse, which I haven't tried but it sounds like the right sort of thing (vanilla, musk, lily, sandalwood, and several other things).

Well, a quick few minutes massaging the Internet gives me the following scent summary. Acapella® Eau de Toilette Fragrance Notes: Top: Italian Mandarin, Crisp Orchard Pear, Crushed Red Raspberries. Middle: White Jasmine, Lily of the Valley, Red Damascene Rose. Bottom: Rare Woods Complex, Resinous Golden Amber, Warm Musky Skinscent Accord. Do with this as you will.

A weird mental tic of mine makes me absolutely cringe when I hear people pronouncing acronyms so I just call it "Black Phoenix". I'm not surprised everyone pronounces it though.

Bengal = homemade chai and baklava. Mmmmm.

Just popping in to say: there's no clean like Elder Clean -- fresh as a wet shoggoth!

Oh man, myrrh is my favourite thing ever. I think all my favourite scents have it as a base. Athens is the strongest of all (look out, don't put on too much!), but Sri Lanka and Anubis are also really nice clear myrrh with other incensey things added, cedar and weird herbs respectively. Nyarlathotep must have some myrrh in it, although it goes screaming lemongrass yellow because of the ozone note, rather than that dark amber colour that myrrh always smells to me. Lilith is good as well, if roses and wine work for you. Three favourite scents: dirt, tonka, myrrh. If I could find something where those three all worked together, I'd have my perfect all-time perfume.

I'm a bit surprised that no-one has yet suggested Whitechapel for lilac.

I love the hippie scents too -- I don't know if you've already ordered, but here are my suggestions. Urd was too much with the grape for me, but Gaueko -- oh man, you've got to try it. The nag champa and sandalwood come out just perfect. I'd also recommend Sri Lanka and Anne Bonny. The Caterpillar might also work if you don't amp jasmine like crazy.

Awww. Balls. Well, it's no worse than I expected. This one was a gamble on the dark roses, given that amber and musk usually both dislike me violently. And so they did, although it wasn't the disaster of sour body-odour and baby powder that it could have been; somehow the blend held it together. No, it was just a bit too *not me* for me. I'll stick with Zombi for my roses, I guess.

Ohhhh, yeah. This is glorious. It was a bit sharp initially with the lavender, but I like lavender so I put it on anyhow and it just blossomed over the course of 10 minutes or so into the deepest, woodiest lovely hippie incense ever. I didn't initially jump for this because I had no idea how the notes would smell together, but I'm incredibly glad to have tried it -- thanks, generous Labbies. I just can't say enough good things about this blend -- the lavender and sandalwood give it a little bite, the tobacco and nag champa make it deep and sweet, somehow it's just incredibly calming and grounding. Now I'm thinking about layering this, and realizing that what I need in general is SN leather and SN dirt. These, I'm pretty convinced, make everything better. In any case, though, I need a bottle of this, 'cause I smell like a Hare Krishna. ::loves:: EDIT: My imp leaked! ::weeps:: Now I'll HAVE to buy a bottle... ADDED 12/20/07: Octopod reviewed this already. On Kalirren: smoky lavender is really loud first, and then disappears under sandalwood. Sandalwood goes away though, and the blend turns into champaca and smoke -- a little bit stinky and animalistic, honestly. Octopod will be keeping this one.

Urrrrgh. :-p Based on the listed notes, I wasn't expecting this to do much for me, but I didn't count on carnation turning into TOXIC FLORAL. The disastrously powdery musk isn't helping any, either. Oh, how I envy people on whom musk smells *good* rather than like a freshly-opened package of diapers... Yeah. Not for me. This one's definitely to swaps.

Well, with a scent named after le Baron, I knew I'd end up trying it eventually. Unfortunately, in the first hour it gets this baby-powder scent -- not sure what's going on there, I suspect musk is involved; curse you, musk! After two hours or so, it's still powder, though a little bit of spice is there. No, this is no good. (Why couldn't the Baron have -- oh, I don't know, tobacco and rum with chiles, instead?) This one's going, regretfully, to swaps. (But it smelt so good in the bottle...)

A sepulchral, desolate scent. Long-dead soldiers, oath-bound; the perfume of their armor, the chill wind that surges through their tower, white bone and blackened steel: white sandalwood, ambergris, wet ozone, galbanum and leather with ebony, teak, burnt grasses, English ivy and a hint of red wine. Ha. This is like a high-end department-store perfume gone GOTH. It starts out being pleasantly warm, herbal, with the sandalwood and grass and ambergris prominent, plus a strong smack of sweet wine. Then the ozone starts coming in, like a distant high wailing, and the plants catch fire and the leather warms up and everything just goes to hell in the best possible way. Wonderfully complex and evocative; not particularly masculine that I can tell, but YMMV of course. Much more sweet and herbal than I was expecting -- most similar, probably, to Nosferatu, but with warm leather and ozone rather than wet dirt. Edit: Damn you, black musk. This one ends in powder too, though not so quickly as Dracul.

Sexy and incredibly *dark*. The first note I smell is that high pinching odor of red wine, same as for Nosferatu, and mercifully (as in Nosferatu) it fades away within seconds. After that the roses come in -- wine and roses have a much stranger smell together than I'd expected! -- and then the myrrh shows up, warming and sweetening the blend, but keeping it as sinister as it was. The musk -- red or black as it may be, both usually turn to powder -- is nowhere to be smelt, thankfully. The whole blend conveys a distinct colour impression -- the colour of the petals of the darkest blood-clot-red roses you've ever been inclined to eat. (Or is that just me?) This blend reminds me most of Dracul, somehow, although the only common note (the musk) is one that I can't smell at all here and don't like in Dracul. There's just a similar feel -- though Dracul smokes and wears piney cologne, while Lilith drinks and wears rose attar perfume, one gets a sense that they definitely like to cause trouble at the same joints. And I like 'em both. The increased musk in Dracul means I have to use it as a leather scent only, while this makes a good body scent, but Lilith may be going on the bottle list too. ADDED 12/2/07: I had two imps of this, so I gave one to my boyfriend after a night of testing all the perfumes to see how they smelt on him... Well, anyhow, he wore this out on Friday night and it was just amazing. I mean, I thought it was pretty nice on me but WOW, yeah. In conclusion, this isn't just a feminine scent. He smelt like dark purple roses all night and into the next day. Utterly unfair.

Oh, this is lovely. The orange and apricot go together perfectly, the honey and ylang ylang are incredibly sweet in a good (non-foody) way. I wish that nice brown tonka bass-note came out more, and I don't have any too-great love for gardenia, but this is still a very nice blend. Maybe putting on a slightly larger amount would bring out the tonka more -- it's always another victim of "my favourite notes hide on my skin"-syndrome. Lovely as it is, though, I'm not sure this is a scent for me. It's too pretty and young and fruity-flowery-warm, and me in my ratty tie-dye pants with a knife at my hip and peculiar mannerisms just doesn't do it dramatic justice. I think I may, rather than swapping it, save it for a young acquaintance who's more girly than I ever managed to be and could carry it off admirably.

The few things that always turn to powder or nasty funk on me are amber, violets, red musk, and black musk. Myrrh, however, is on me what most people seem to claim for amber. If it turns out this is your situation too, I'd particularly suggest you try Sri Lanka, Dorian, Laudanum, and Perversion.

You might try Mandrake. Actually, combining it with other things might do what you want -- if you want an earthy scent, Death Cap or Destroying Angel might combine well, Death Cap being sweeter and Destroying Angel drier.

The immediate whiff is absolutely wonderful -- dark, incensey, sweet and dry. However, something in here makes it go unfortunately very sharp and floral -- I suspect it's the combination of sandalwood and rose, both usually lovely but together rather overpowering. The benzoin and myrrh are warm enough to keep it very pleasant for a half-hour or so, but in the spots where I applied a couple of hours ago it has become rather tart and not so interesting as it was. The moss, much to my chagrin, never showed up at all. It's nice, but (on my skin, which tends to eat my favourite notes) nothing to scream about. Blast. And I was so looking forward to this one, too. I thought it might turn out to be a more complex version of Zombi. Oh well.

Mm, I've just got to put in an additional 16 yuan here in favour of the sexiest BPAL I've found yet, that being the combination of Perversion and Death Cap.1 I really may have to buy both those at the next update -- and to think that I didn't originally expect that I'd want to smell that sexy on a regular basis! Sigh. It's worked -- and by "worked" I mean "the intended effect was produced, whether or not the scent is responsible, and I didn't ask either way at the time" -- twice for me now. Of course, it's reasonably likely that it's all because of how it makes me feel, but the other is also a possibility. Lord, what fools these mortals be. Has anyone else tried these together? What did you think?

Nothing but sweetpea and musk. Oy. I can't smell the tonka or the sage, which are the reasons why I tried it. This is Way Too Girly for me. ADDED 12/8/08: Octopod: Sage. Soap. SAGE SAGE SAGE. And then sage is gone and it's just...soap. Soap bubbles. Where is the tonka? I got this for tonka! Damn. Kalirren: Much more nuanced at first, and then...soap bubbles. OK, this one failed. Too bad. I was hoping for a somewhat less silly version of Mouse's Long and Sad Tale, but instead we got dish soap bubbles everywhere. ::shrug::

Gomorrah and Nemesis are similarly figgy, to my nose. Nemesis is a good bit drier because of the ginger and pine, while Gomorrah is more sweet and smoky, but the fig is very prominent in both -- and delicious.