elka_knits

this isn't really noted as an incense scent but Athens.... A reformulation and modernization of a true Classical Greek perfume, myrrhine: voluptuous myrrh, golden honey, red wine, and sweet flowers. that and defututa have sky rocketed to my top 10 on first test.....Olive blossom, honey, smoky vanilla, cinnamon, jasmine, sandalwood, and champaca flower.

I was very lucky to find a fabulous fairy and fairy broker!! I have given this a couple of tests so far as well as the sniff of bottle thing and unfortunately it does not work on me. Keeping in mind that I wear a lot of spicy heady floral scents, my final review: Very woody/herbal smelling. The sage is giving it a medicinal vibe and the sandalwood is turning into wood shavings on me. Neither my husband nor I like this on me much. Too masculine. The lily of valley is not coming out at all and I guess I had hoped for a stronger floral and or softer woods. After a decent dry down period it does seem incense-y but not a sweet or floral incense. Rather sage smudge stick clean herbal. Not my style at all

according tothe fabulous miss twilight's photo stream it is from 2007

I have had a bottle of this sitting around for a few years... somehow it always gets neglected in favor of other spicier scents. I am trying hard to rectify the neglect aka expand my horizons. In the bottle it is very perfumey and by that I mean a fairly generic flowery thing. I can't pick out any notes or even a family but within minutes of putting it on ...oh my The Lily of Valley blooms on me and smells perfect. I don't even get other notes although I am sure they are there grounding and sweetening and doing what not to it but this reminds me of being a child, laying under a tree with dappled sunlight streaming down and examining the little white bells of LOV. This is not to say I get grass or any of that stuff.... a gentle warmth, a lovely breeze keeping me from being too hot, and one of the sweetest scents of spring/early summer. Oh look! I think I spy a rolly polly! Fades fast on me as do most florals that are not mainly spicy resins and as usual my husband loves the very feminine scents. Coincidentally I was searching for a good LOV scent so am very happy to find this one. I do with it lasted longer or had a stronger throw but that is the story of my life.

wants this list so bad... my husband however is a different matter

I got an imp of this years ago and never tried it. To be clear, I ORDERED an imp of this, hoping for carnation carnation carnation. i was so disappointed to smell milky rose. Well I am on a testing jag and dabbed some on. OMG the carnation blooms on my skin and becomes perfection indeed. After a while the rose drifts in to dance with the carnation. I get no powder, no funky milk note nothing but spicy carnation and sweet pink roses. I LOVE this. Alas she does not last and I tore through my imp within 2 days. If only she had a bit more throw and longevity i would be buying a bottle in a nanosecond. Unfortunately given my skins love of this scent I would go through a bottle in no time. I am so torn

I like mama ji and morocco which you mentioned. Both have a spicy incense vibe

Occasionally the lab will resurrect a scent and there may be a slight reformulation. I personally think of the reformulations as batch differences and those have been known to happen for any scent, LE or otherwise, over the course of a small period. Although I do have less than a handful of LE or D/c scents that I am always on the lookout new favorites can overshadow the old. For example Bakeneko is a favorite but I parted with my back up bottle because something new came along that I liked better. Right now I am all over Shroomy Chocolates when I was all over Gluttony. Yeah both are no longer available but when I ordered the Shroomy I did so because I had just gone over the notes of Gluttony {crying over not having any} and noticed a similarity. I know that might not be helpful. I too am insanely curious about Cake Smash and Cabaret Goth cus it seems nobody will part with it and I was inactive during the time they came out but over the years, and there have been quite a few with BPAL, I would say that there really is something wonderful on the horizon despite it sounding like a 'there there' whilst clutching the precious

Purchased directly from lab in '06 and tested recently due to icky drearies as well as considering of current peony offerings... I love peonies. I love their pale pink, their huge overblown frilliness, and most of all their heady scent. Whenever I am down I open up this bottle and huff the glory of peony. Unfortunately wearing it is a different matter. Wet it is as in the bottle~ glorious, glorious heady peony but upon drying, almost immediately the reeds throw in a green aquatic which, tho not unpleasant, is not what I am seeking when I think of peony. I am not entirely sure what 'asian woods' means but with a good dry down, a half hour or so, I start to smell rattan or slightly musty baskets. On my wrists, both of them, this is the prevalent note and brought to mind the earthiness of mushrooms or the taste of water chestnuts strait out of a a can. However this is very faint and has little throw. It requires bringing my wrists to my nose to get that funky note. The peony, faint and wistful, fades but surprises me with her lingering scent whenever I turned my head. The cleavage drop lasted, fairly true to bottle, for well over 12 hours. Overall a 2/5 because of the lasting power, and lingering loveliness. Points taken off because I don't like shoving my head down my shirt, or giving myself whip lash, to smell peonies. I am so spoiled and used to just bringing my wrists up to nose for a quick shot of pretty when wearing my BPAL Editing to add: This perfume has always personified spring to me and it still does. Even tho I was unhappy with the green that peeked through at the 15 minute mark I did think how springlike.

I have had this bottle of Vixen sitting around for about 5 years now so it is well aged....not because it isn't lovely but because there are so many many things to smell and wear that sometimes something slips through the cracks. Anyways patchouli is the note of doom for me. Always has been and probably always will be. Not to start an argument but a while ago I remember reading something about patchouli being considered one of those sexai smells however in reality it is off-putting and gross. So anyways whenever I tell The Flame I dislike patchouli he seems surprised because it is such a universally known sexy scents. Vixen is what I WANT patchouli to smell like~ earthy but sweet and mellow. Unfortunately the wet stage is please poke my eyes out horrid patchouli smell. Thankfully the wet stage only lasts oh half an hour and once the headache eases I am the happiest girl ever. I do have a friend that steps away from me whenever I wear patchouli {and totally turned me off mme moriarty which I had loved and stockpiled until then} so I am going to test this one around her. Anyway all this patchouli hate is to encourage those who normally don't get along with it to give Vixen a try. She really does mellow into something sweet and sassy!

Interesting, very very interesting. When I put this one on it was red hots on steroids. Pure cinnamon burn baby burn. Seriously my skin burned. And all I could think of was cinnamint gums or red hots or any other red red red cinnamon scents. About an hour later the cinnamon fades and the cardamom, lovely, lovely cardamom, comes out and it is slightly grounded by the patchouli. Keep in mind that patchouli had become the death note of hell. I love it in the bottle and always think I am going to love it on me but nah not really. Here it plays super nice. Very faint within two hours~ my skin either eats it up or it is such a me scent {I do bpal cardamom a lot} that it just seems like a skin scent. It is fainter than Mama Ji~ my all time favorite~ with the same warm vibe but dryer ala Morocco. After the morph down it reminds me of Gypsy Moth sans wax. I like it but will not be reordering this one. I might even part with it since I have too many other similar scents to compete with when I am getting dressed.... Either way it is beautiful and warm and spicy but doesn't last well on me.

The Scarlet Woman, aglow with sensual indolence: red musk, benzoin, caramel accord, golden honey, and spiced Moroccan unguents. I'm going to be totally upfront and honest by saying I didn't expect to like this one. Oh I did when I purchased a bottle many moons ago but fairly recently I sniffed all my bottles and set aside the ones that wrinkled my nose. This is one of the nose wrinkles. I was pleasantly surprised when I put it on. The sticky sweet honey note [which translates to day old sweat socks on me and is so consistent about it that I now skip the skin morph and associate that note to the point of not honey ... sweat socks] didn't appear at all on my skin. Until later. MUCH MUCH later. Like 8 hours which makes this one wearable. The smell was oddly familiar and soothing. At first I thought it was sandalwood and then, after a day thinking about it, I realized it was the smell of my old boss from 1983 at language lab. He was an Indian man and I always loved how he smelled. I guess it is a combination of all those exotic unguents , incense, and spices. Actually he was my high school friends dad which is how I got the job but hey I always loved that smell. Very comforting, extremely long wearing~ it has been 24 hours and it is still going strong, and very beautiful. I do think that, due to old boss association, it has a masculine vibe in my head. A drier, more woody Morocco, that probably should be an atmospheric instead of to wear. I vote this the love child of CARCERI D'INVENZIONE and MOROCCO. Make that a boy love child with all of the sandalwood amped and less of the carnation and frankincense. For those that love honey it did get the honey in there at around the 8 hour mark on me, as mentioned above, and during that time the woods made it what I wished SMUT had been. I totally get other reviewers commenting on the similarity to smut as well. The woods ground the honey in such a wonderful way. This bottle has moved from the icky pile to the test further pile.

I am wondering what I tested and rechecking my decant label after reading these reviews. It sounds like what I thought it would smell like but what I got instead was a sharp piercing soapy smell when wet that lingered for hours afterwards. Yeah it lost the sharp poke my eye out please strident note but soap soap soap. Maybe it is the bergamot? I was thinking, prior to looking at label to check notes listed, that there might be some red musk in there. That soapy fruity sharp note I am growing to dislike. At least I think it is red musk....? I will retest this one again next week just in case I was doing something funkalicious with it but until then can somebody please tell me what in there would turn into a tortuous soap note? Please

I purchased this for the beeswax, vanilla amber, and carnation. Maybe lily of valley as well. In the bottle all I got was rose rose rose. Overwhelming rose so never did more than open and sniff. I just tried it on today to be fair and well you know that smell you get when you cut a flower to put in vase? That green stem smell? Now imagine you are in a room full of roses and you just started trimming them to put in vases.... green overshadowed by rose. Then, within a couple of hours, poof! Gone. I was rather enjoying it actually but kinda hoping for a wee bit less green and a wee bit more spicy carnation or creamy amber vanilla or mellow beeswax. Not enough lasting power and I just know there are rose lovers out there who will love this more than I. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ hours after writing my review I am getting faint whiffs of a delicate rose. So PRETTY. I suppose it was such a sudden drop in throw that I thought it was gone {or my nose died for a bit} The Flame will get a chance to weigh in soon enough. My Husband Loves this on me. He asked that I buy moar. This and Mama Ji are two scents he just recognizes and thinks of when I ask what to wear.

I am not fond of the wine scents. There is also patchouli in this one and patch has turned into the no-no scent. HOWEVER for some reason both are tame in this particular blend. On me a dusty musty scent with the sweetness of wine. When I first ordered these this one was the scent I was sure I would love but I ended up liking vamp tears more over time. It kinda reminds me of the plummy scents out these days... that sweetness from Snake Charmer? Maybe the red musk... Something similar either way. I so like this one but my personal scent profile is skewering towards the innocent and this one is not

grapefruit which I really like and something green underneath it... probably one of the flowers but I am not sure which one. Which actually gives it a pithy vibe. Or should I say rind? Very fresh and light with lasting power due to tonka. A little sweet. Candied grapefruit rind. soap! soap soap soap soap. stupid chemistry.

No. Just No. Oh okay in an effort to review for others: All berry and rose on me. Mainly berry. Pom or something like that.... sharp and juicy red fruit. editing to add: it mellows down from the acid berry rather quickly into a mellow one but becomes so faint that I literally need to have my nose against my wrist to sniff it. So from screaming jarring Berry Hear me Roar to nearly nothing. Very very quickly. I could be nice and say that frankincense and or sandalwood tame the berries and give it a nice round edge... ground them or something but by the time it is mellow it is so faint I cannot really pick out one note over the other.

I believe the carnival went down due to redoing the artwork and will be live again asap. I believe there is a thread on the carnival here: http://www.bpal.org/topic/34409-carnaval-diabolique-discussion/ On page 173 there is a note from Beth stating that it is a priority getting it up and going again. With a surprise project.

After much thought I figured out that this is Cream Soda maybe a cream soda float. yeah

The Salon isn't LE that I know of... eek I forget what it was since I haven't been on forum to keep up. I do remember when the first salon came out but I forget the theory behind the salon...if it was a series that would go live then come down like carnival or what. You can buy the great he goat and smiling spider in the 5ml bottles. Imps are only available in packs such as the entire salon exhibit pack. I believe the ones that are discontinued were done so due to component issues.

Lupers come out by mid Jan usually and stay live until the last week of March. I wouldn't worry about being prepared for the LE's~~ way too many of them to kick yourself over missing something in particular. There are 64 live scents on the LE page at the moment. The weenies and pickman gallery stuff just went down but there was some overlap. Leather Phoenix sold out quickly. The Rainn scents are still clickable on the website {which makes me happy cus I hope to get my matchstick girl and phoenix decants and be able to order all together} and those are LE as well. The Sticky bat is LE so lets say that we are up to 69 LE's live at the moment. Move on down to the trading post and you have another 9 scents {3 in bottles 6 as part of stockings} and well... There was a day there {the lunacy, weenies, yules, pickman, etc etc} where I believe there was at least 100 live LE scents. At $20 a pop it just isn't feasible to stress over missing out. I am forever grateful that the lab is so creative and offers so many interesting things for us to try. I do like getting LEs and have some favorites as do most people. I have also been ordering GC stuff with every order I made for oh about 6 yrs now. I don't order very often because I go in spurts where I madly try to buy a lot of stuff then knock myself on the head for having too much to wear already. In the past month I have acquired 7 bottles and 8 imps not counting frimpage. I realize that is a lot for some and barely any for others but I won't get through these in a year even if I slathered several times a day. Oh okay maybe I will but you know...it will be a while. And I am already planning my yule order. Thank heavens the traditional luper favorites don't do it for me. Most people seem to pick an update that they go gaga over. Weenies vs Yules vs Lupers vs Lunacies as a favorite and then pick out maybe a scent or two out of the others. At least that is what I have observed.

Antiqued amber, cumin, saffron, frankincense, Atlas cedar, myrrh, mandarin, Ceylon cinnamon bark, and osmanthus. I just got this yesterday and need to test some more but for now Super Love. It smells rather smokey to me... like nicotine not smoke smoke. I couldn't stop huffing it. I kept putting it under the Flames nose and he said it was too sweet and then okay it is growing on me {probably to keep my wrist out of his face judging by tone} but I loves it. I want more. I do hope I will be able to order some in a couple of weeks. I know it is not supposed to be live at this point but the lab kindly respected my order for it. If I can't be getting it from the lab I suspect I will be combing the sales pages. LOVE LOVE LOVE. sweet, smoky, spicy, creamy goodness all the way.. some lightness from the occasional whiffs or orange or tangerine. I see somebody else said 3 Gorgons and yeah I guess so but 3 Gorgons, which I only tested once and am considering as a summer time scent, is nowhere near as nice.

2006 version On me beeswax, something woody, something skin musky, and underneath it all the resins. Not smoky incense but resins. The little blobs of myrrh that I used to burn way back when. Sooooo In the bottle it is sharper but almost immediately mellows into something evocative. Yes evocative instead of note after note. Very well blended and mellow. The woods to me seem like a fir tree I recently came across. Like hello where is the piney christmas tree smell? Very faint hint of tree smell that has been worn over the years by many many hands[skin musky], absorbed eons of myrrh which is all buried beneath the beeswax used to polish it all. Coming back to review this I re-read the description: five tears of this incense, each encased individually in wax sums it up pretty well. Throw in hands clasped in prayerful hope over wooden pews and you got it. I am glad I have this bottle and find it silly I only wear it one day a year~ Today Christmas Eve ! I may pull one off the sales page just to have a backup

I just received a wee bit of this as a companion for a purchase from the lovely Stellans therefore I have no clue how old it is. The label was nice and old looking tho and it was really a sniffle, or since it was a frimp, a friffle. Being the weirdo that I can be I frantically bumped the end of the friffle against my wrist in an effort to eek out a droplet. Success!! NOTE this is not a full fledged multi day test and yeah I usually do think hard about and sniff, resniff, and oh yeah slather prior to writing a review... in the bottle: cherry wet: some weird cheap candle wax vibe. There used to be some faux candy that tasted like I imagined wax did and yeah that is what it smells like about half an hour in: oh so this is what they soak the boxes in to give them that bpal smell. Squee. Too bad it is so faint it has been about 3 hours: Settled into a baby powderish , vanilla-ish dry slightly spicy-ish scent. Really indescribably but nice. Very very little throw but decent lasting power so far. I am not sure if this is due to the last desperate dregs from imp being banged against my wrist instead of the usual slather or if it really is a skin scent. I would love a full imp of this to give it a good college try. I think it is like my Dragons Milk {which come to think of it has that same weird funky plastic vibe when wet... hmmmm....} and I worked myself through 2 imps, not sure I really liked it, before I ordered a big bottle and made it my hey this is my body that naturally, sans perfume smells awesome, day scent. I might not be fooling anybody but it is real close to skin and fakes me out ;P

A surprising love. I have been wearing my florals lately to combat the Missouri rains that pass as winter blahs. Seriously, to digress, I expect glistening snow not muck Christmas week. In the bottle~ very floral, maybe even too floral. Orchid and roses with orchid being stronger than the rose Wet~ rose amps up A bit later~ lovely cream and musk very very faint floral that warms it all up and lightens up the scent. This is not the sour milky cream or vanilla sugar cream but a rich heady cream BPAL has turned me into a floral lover over the years. I don't know why I didn't trust that evolution enough to try this one before. My bottle is direct from lab to me many years ago. Curious to know what The Flame thinks of this one when he gets home tonight. Although.... I believe it will need to be reapplied. The staying power is not very long or perhaps that is because I am used to more in your face spicy scents. As The Flame likes to say about my favorite most worn stuff: dangerous This one is more discreet and ultra feminine