bheansidhe

Because I ran a decant circle, I had the chance to sniff (most) of the perfumes and compare them with (most) of the matching hair glosses. (I don't wear most rose notes or hair gloss myself, so my reviews will be more nose-test and less wear-test.)

Huit-the-hair-gloss opens with the black rose in front and a woodsy-green fig note behind. It smells like a rose-toned black Gothic funeral veil. It smells like the shadows in the beautiful but evil queen's formal robe. The secondary notes stay woodsy rather than fruity.

Huit-the-perfume needed time to rest after the mailbox, or maybe after the stress of its creation. On first decant it was a black and severe rose with bitter, woodsy-green fig behind and no juice at all. After the dregs sat for a week in the bottle and breathed, the fruit came to the foreground and Huit overall became more rounded, balanced between sweet, but not too sweet, apricot in the front, and black-rose-green-figwood in the back.

The rose component stays a flat ROSE throughout - kind of a matte rose scent? - but definitely black and straight rose with no fruit or tea.

If you love the notes but the wearing experience isn't what you wanted, you should definitely try layering the two.

Because I ran a decant circle, I had the chance to sniff (most) of the perfumes and compare them with (most) of the matching hair glosses. (I don't wear most rose notes or hair gloss myself, so my reviews will be more nose-test and less wear-test.)

 

Huit-the-perfume needed time to rest after the mailbox, or maybe after the stress of its creation. On first decant it was a black and severe rose with bitter, woodsy-green fig behind and no juice at all. After the dregs sat for a week in the bottle and breathed, the fruit came to the foreground and Huit overall became more rounded, balanced between sweet, but not too sweet, apricot in the front, and black-rose-green-figwood in the back.

 

The rose component stays a flat ROSE throughout - kind of a matte rose scent? - but I can see where it would lose dominance to the fruit notes after wear.

 

With Huit-the-hair-gloss, the notes open in a different order and it's much more rose-forward from the start. It smells like rose-toned black Gothic funeral veil. The secondary notes stay woodsy rather than fruity.

 

If you love the notes but the wearing experience isn't what you wanted, you should definitely try layering the two.

Freebie in a recent swap package, labeled "UOUO4: Prototype."

 

The top notes open with big white and creamy florals, like gardenia and/or magnolia, plus a green-white pollen-heavy floral, like lily-of-the-valley.

 

The more I sniff the more I get a delicate tannin astringency in the background, like oak bark or white tea.

 

Overall this is a cool white floral that opens big but settles quickly settles down to the skin. Feminine, but not innocent or girly.

 

I don't personally wear this combination of notes, but florals fans should seek it out.

Look, I was very curious about the combination of notes, but I really hate rose perfumed anything.

 

Nevertheless, I skin tested!

 

>LOOK

You are standing in a formal Victorian garden. To your east is a green lawn. To your west is a brick wall. In front of you is a greenhouse.

>LOOK AT GREENHOUSE

You see an ornate wrought-iron and glass greenhouse. The glass is misted. There are blooming plants inside.

>ENTER GREENHOUSE

You enter the greenhouse. Oops! The door swings shut behind you, locking you in. I'm sure there's nothing to worry about, though. Doesn't it smell pretty?

>LOOK

The greenhouse is full of pink and red roses in full bloom. They smell heady and lush. On the floor is a plate of shortbread cookies. They look mouth-watering.

>GET COOKIES

You head toward the cookies. You're having a hard time seeing them for some reason. What you thought was mist is actually steam. It's getting thicker by the minute.

>LOOK INSIDE GREENHOUSE

Behind you is a locked door. The eastern wall is covered in climbing roses. The western wall is thickly planted with shrub roses. The north wall has a potting bench, a sink, and a camp stove. There's something boiling on the stove.

>LOOK AT STOVE

You see a lit stove, a metal pot, and huge clouds of steam. Something is boiling vigorously on the stove. It smells like rose syrup.

>TURN OFF STOVE

I don't recognize that command.

>LOOK AT POTTING BENCH

You see a few empty plant pots and a huge knob of butter. Hm, that sounds dirty.

>GET BUTTER

You get the butter. Whoops! It slips out of your hand and lands in the boiling rose syrup, you butterfingers.

>LOOK

You can't see anything. You are surrounded by thick white clouds rose-and-butter scented steam. It's very pretty, but it's getting hard to breathe.

>HELP

I don't recognize that command.

>GET COOKIES

There were cookies in here somewhere, weren't there? Unfortunately, you can't find them in all of that rose and butter scented steam.

>BREATHE STEAM

You breathe deeply, filling your lungs. It's rich and heady, but too much for your system. You pass out.

>LOOK

You see darkness behind your eyelids. It's rose-scented.

>LOOK AGAIN

You open your eyes. You are sitting at a kitchen table. In front of you is a plate of shortbread cookies and a vase of lush red roses. Would you like to eat the cookies, smell the roses, or flee in terror?

>FLEE

 

Wisely, you decide to leave the delicious cookies and beautiful roses for a more appreciative audience.

I am a huge fan of the Lab's snow note + anything atmos, so I tend to blind buy at least one of those per release. With the birch and willow, I was expecting something on the sharp herbal end of the scale, but The Snow-Covered Plains is lighter and sweeter than I anticipated.

 

Wet, I get an initial combo of spicy snow and a cool wintergreen on the spearmint-y end of the scale (not camphorous). The middle is filled out by a surprisingly round, juicy note, and the finish is wrapped in dry greenery. Specifically, I get dried ivy leaves and bits of a mossy fougere from the green component.

 

It's not *floral* per se, but you are definitely viewing those snow-covered plains from inside a high-end florist's shop. Because it's winter, it's filled with a wintertime selection of curly willow branches and ivy wreaths. Because the snow note always reads to me as "spicy," it's like the ghosts of cinnamon brooms are still lurking in the storeroom, even though there's none in the actual shop.

 

I feel like this analogy ran away from me, so I'll end by saying that if you normally shy away from cold atmospheric scents, this is a warm and comfortable *painting* of snow-covered plains, and not actual freezing-your-eyelashes-off trudging-through-snow covered plains.

 

Gentle coolness, slushy snow, spicy greenery.

My nose reads this as gin-soaked Bliss from the bottle. Gin always smells fruity-sharp to me, instead of boozy like the Lab's rum note, so it's red fruit and milk chocolate forward at first. Then black leather unrolls in the background, making the chocolate deeper and the gin sharper, occasionally peeking out on its own.

 

Certainly an unusual combination - unique in the BPAL lineup as far as I can remember. If you're a Bliss or 13 fan, this might be a winner. I'm neither, so it's off to swaps.

This is the sweetest and lightest of the dead leaves this year, and is surprisingly lovely. It's like the perfect kid's version of Dead Leaves.

 

This is not a soapy floral violet. This smells like Choward's old-fashioned violet pastille candies, which to me smell like happy road trip memories.

 

After the violet wears off, you're left with a light, simple sugared dried ivy note.

 

I'm still working my way through the Dead Leaves and Blackberries from last year, so I don't need this one, but if you enjoyed that one, DL VC & SC has a similar vibe.

This is an opulent, bitter purple-black blast of the back room at a Goth dance bar. It comes off my skin primarily as incense and dark plum, and less as dead leaves and clove, with a background vibe that reminds me of the commercial Opium perfume. It squirms around a bit to become spicy plum, then plummy oudh, then clove-tinged incense, but never strays far from its basic spike-heeled leather boots and purple velvet dance moves.

It's been so long since I've had candy corn (squished or otherwise) that I don't remember what it smells like. When I was a kid I would smoosh them on my canines like vampire fangs, then spit them out when they started to dissolve.

 

Wet, this smells more buttery and sugary than dead-leavey. I agree there's some wax in there. It morphs dramatically on my skin to somewhat bitter, earthy dead leaves and caramel, with maybe some dry pumpkin spice blend in the background.

 

Edit: dries down to a light, pleasant dead leaves and buttery caramel with low throw.

Golden juicy lychee and peach - the classic "Dragoncon peach" note - over dark wet musks, sharpened by bergamot.

 

On me, this wears like filthy dirty sex with a spray of peach juice.

I absolutely love cedar - They Lie Thus Chambered and Cold to the Moon was a big bottle buy last year - so I was pleased to try this one despite its lengthy list of bad-for-me notes.

 

Sniffed, this reads like one of the more elegant and cerebral Shunga blends. It smells like it should be named The Pale Naked Moon Maiden Scorning The Embraces of the Pepper Demon Askishikawa As They Struggle By Moonlight In a Black Cedar Grove. Like, there is just SO MUCH going on here: big perfumey blasts of white and blue and black musk, the light floral notes, the dark wet tobacco and the dry cracks of pepper. The honeyed orange blossom plays tug-of-war with the black pepper-tobacco, yanking the blend from masculine to feminine and back.

 

Mostly, though, it's blue musk and cedar. "Perfume pencil" kind of nails it. I do love pencil perfumes, but Chambered already fulfills that need, so I don't need a bottle. I'm glad I got to keep an imp, though.

This starts as a blast of big, chewy, in-your-face caramel and sweet pipe tobacco with some spiced cocoa steaming in the background. It softens almost immediately to a dry, sweet burnt sugar-and-caramel dusted with cocoa, plus the mellow blonde tobacco that I associate with the Ares blends (closer the Bulgarian than the French, which smells like ashtray to me). After a while I start to get a black sweetened demitasse coffee note in the background, but at no point does this read as a coffee blend. The caramel-and-tobacco combination reminds me a tiny bit of Red Lantern, but the cocoa and milk chocolate notes stay in the forefront. I also get an on-again, off-again hint of spicy Mexican chocolate.

 

Unlike 99% of the Lab's chocolates, it never goes plastic on me. So if you have that specific problem with blends like Bliss, it might be worth trying Badgered.

 

Mellow, sweet, dry, and only slightly foody.

This opened with a rainbow parade of sour-sweet, fizzy citrus notes, and then settled into something intensely familiar that I couldn't place. It wasn't until I re-reviewed the notes and spotted the rum that I realized it's a dead ringer, scent-wise, for one of my favorite cocktails, the Boulevardier. The bitter orange and sharp neroli really mimic the rhubarb-and-citrus-pith astringency of Campari liqueur.

Links that better describe what I'm talking about (TW FOR SUBSTANCE ABUSE):
https://drinkstraightup.com/2012/12/14/boulevardier/
https://drinkstraightup.com/2013/05/07/side-by-side-bitter-orange-spirits/

I don't specifically get "rum" from the blend until it starts to wear down, but honestly it winds up smelling like a pretty close cousin of Swank on my wrist.

Definitely a classy cocktail, not a pirate-rum boozefest.

Full disclosure: I love the actual mint plant, but I dislike* mint flavor or scent mixed with anything else** (the sole exception being Andes chocolate mint wafers). Further disclosure: 99.99% of any "honey" or "beeswax" or "candle" note goes horrifically bad on me, so this skin test is legit Taking One For the Team.

 

Sniffed, this is a 50/50 blend of cool vanilla mint and the same juicy, golden-sweet peach note from some of my favorite past Dragoncon blends. I don't get the minty blast I remember from Lick It; this seems like the softer vanilla mint note of Snowblind. It takes about 20 minutes for the marshmallow to develop.

 

The notes stay pretty true during drydown: candied honey, warm peach, and a touch of after-dinner mint. It has a pretty low throw, and the peach reads almost like a warm skin musk, so this would be a good "up close and personal" kind of scent. It's sweet but not in-your-face foody; you'll smell like hard honey candies, not a walking dessert case.

 

 

 

*Mint in coffee is an abomination.

 

**I know mint plus fruit is a thing, but it makes as much sense to my nose as mint plus steak.

The combination of the sweet Snake Oil resins and the salty nutty prank base make me think of caramel corn, which makes me think of this blend as a mashup between Snake Oil and Midway. It's been years since I smelled Midway, so I may be off base here, but there's still a jolly dark carnival vibe to the blend.

 

I don't get any aquatics; I do get salt, but it's what I think of as the "dry salt" base of Jolly Roger (and Gingerbread Jolly Roger, one of my favorite blends!).

 

Within the hour, though, this settles down to a lighter, nuttier, but still recognizable Snake Oil, except that Snake in a Can smells gold where straight Snake Oil smells mahogany, if that makes sense.

I love the cucumber and blue musk notes for when I want something springlike or feminine, and the bitter blackcurrant-and-tobacco tar Dead Leaves weenie was a surprise hit, so I took a chance with it.

 

This one wants the heat of your bathwater to bloom, I think. It smells like I'm floating in the inky blue-black waters of a Roman bath in an underground hall. The almond blossom lends a touch of warmth, but it's primarily blue musk balancing the sweet mimosa and the astringent, bitter-juice blackcurrant. Think "sullen, deadly sea siren taking her beauty bath."

 

I may sell a decant out of my bottle because I don't see myself reaching for it often enough to use it all up before the shelf life expires, but it's actually really gorgeous and unlike all of my other bath oils, which lean toward resins and warm notes.

I know I've posted here before, but my top 5 has changed quite a bit, so:

 

1. Mars Ultor

2. Perversion

3. Outlaw

4. Cockaigne

5. Wild Men of Jezirat al Tennyn

 

Most likely suspect would be Antikythera Mechanism, but I've tried it and it's not for me.

 

I love Perversion and Wild Men, so maybe we have some skin similarities?

 

Doc Constantine

(Sheer musk, cedar smoke, fir needle, chaparral, black amber and leather.)

 

The Black Rider

(Black leather, oppoponax, tobacco, and BLACK amber.)

 

Sarah, The Mother Bear

(tonka bean, soft brown leather, myrrh, white sage, gurjum balsam, Ceylon cinnamon bark, red sandalwood, sweet tobacco, and a touch of gunsmoke.)

 

Crowley

(Infernal musk, red patchouli, lilac cologne, mahogany, lemon rind, oakmoss, leather, and vanilla husk. )

 

Bread-and-Butterfly

(Its wings are thin slices of Bread-and-butter, its body is a crust, and its head is a lump of sugar.')

 

Kali

(This perfume is a blend of the sacred blooms of cassia, hibiscus, musk rose, Himalayan wild tulip, lotus and osmanthus swirled with offertory dark chocolate, red wine, tobacco, balsam and honey.)

 

Intrigue

(Black palm with cocoa, fig, and shadowy wooded notes.)

 

Ranger

(buckskin accord with Terebinth pine, Russian birch, black ironwood, elder bark, hay, armoise, juniper, patchouli, galangal root, Spanish moss, and cabreuva.)

 

Golden Priapus

(vanilla and amber with juniper, rosewood and white pine.)

LE:

Phoenix and Dragon, Lupercalia 2016

(Incense-blackened oudh and bourbon vanilla with tobacco absolute and 9-year aged patchouli.)

 

Dead Leaves and Tobacco (2015)

 

Pan Twardowski and the Devil (2015)

(Brown leather, bay leaf, tobacco leaf, lavender, and oudh.)

I love this, actually. Spanish Moss was a favorite note on my skin, while Oakmoss went sour and too masculine. Tomb Moss reads a lot like Spanish Moss with added notes of dry salt, fresh moist dirt, and what I think may (logically) be concrete. Despite the mossiness and saltiness, it's not an "aquatic" on me. It's lighter and sweeter and drier than I picture tomb moss to be. In fact, if you had told me this was really the "dead leaves" note, I'd buy it. This is more like what I expect from a dead leaf accord.

 

Contemplating a bottle! I bet it would layer well.

Sniffed at Will Call!

 

You know the old Warner Bros cartoons, where a character puts a seashell to their ear to hear the ocean and instead a giant wave sploooshes out and fish jump out their other ear? A Sea Ghost was like cracking the bottle to sniff and being plunged into a technicolor (well, mostly blues and greys) oil painting of a shipwreck - all salty spray and groaning dark timbers and rattling chains and wailing gales and noctilucent waves. I wanted to go back and smell it again, but there was only one bottle in stock and it sold lickety-split.

Sniffed wet: oakmoss-dominant dead leaves and lea-heh-heah-EATher. This is definitely a "wet" masculine fougere type.

 

Oddly, even though clove's usually the 900 pound gorilla in the blend, the leather completely smothers the clove at first. Clove's a fighter, though. Eventually I smell it around the edges - at this stage it's like a hit of spicy aftershave. The bourbon vanilla may as well not be there, unless it's just the glue softening the sharp edges of everything else.

 

Dry, I just get "clove-spiced fougere." This is too much of a dude fume for me, and the least dead-leafy of the five I tried. It's oakmoss all the way.

I don't specifically get "blackberries" at first sniff, but I do get an astringent-sweet dark berry note, crisp green leaves, and soft wet leaves. I think she may be using different DL formulas, because this one smells much more herbal and much less like the oakmoss base in DL Lavender and DL Cardamom. Here, it's the blackberries that sing.

 

DL and Blackberries is sweeter, fruitier, and more summery than DL Blackcurrant and Tobacco Tar, but not candy-girlish. There's still a wistful feel of early autumn and of gathering a ripe final harvest before the cold sets in. It does sweeten up as it wears, but it doesn't lose the realistic berry-ness.

 

I love this the most after several hours of wear; it's like a lingering berry lip stain of a scent.

[No additional description given.]

Of the five DL blends I tried, this one one smells the most dead-leafy when wet, with a strong, bracingly bitter edge. The leaf-ness of the dark tobacco marries really well with the leaf-ness of the DL note. The blackcurrant is tart and astringent and *just* fruity enough to keep the blend balanced and wearable. This is outdoorsy and cold and wild, not tame and pipe-shop. It takes a softer, more dried-fruit aspect as it wears. I didn't expect to like this one as much as I do.

 

ETA: bought a bottle! That's how much I liked it.

Is it masculine? Is it feminine? Time for..... *drumroll* tiebreaker review!

 

However you interpret the "dead leaves" note, this blend is dominated by a sharp, chilly, medicinal lavender when wet. I can see where the previous reviewer got a cologne-y vibe from the mossy, musky base under the lavender. To me it's unisex, but there's nothing soft or feminine about it at this stage. I'd actually peg this as a lavender and oakmoss blend if I were sniffing blind.

 

It becomes softer and more soporific as it dries. Long-wearing, too: I put some on before bed to test its sleepability, and I woke up with my arm smelling fantastic for the rest of the day. I liked it better after 12 hours of wear, honestly... and NOW it's soft and more feminine-leaning.

 

Like many of the dead leaves-and blends, I get "expensive Anthropologie fall candle" instead of "perfume." I actually like this on my skin, but to me it begs to be poured into an oil warmer to scent my room. I also think it would be a great fall sleeping blend (if your bed partner approved).

 

Conclusion: may not be your cup of tea for perfume, but I may buy a bottle for scenting a sleep pillow or warming in a burner. And if this ever gets released as a Post candle, I'm scraping together the coin to buy one.

I don't get any marshmallow, except as a bit of sweetness toward the end of the drydown.

 

Unlike 99% of lilac and mist blends, this is neither soapy nor green. It's a balance between the dry white orris and the misty pale floral notes, with a touch of earthy moss. I agree with the comparison to Moonshine and Mist; it also feels very much in the Ars Moriendi line of ghostly, ethereal blends.

This is a dry, earthy, husky patchouli-and-woods blend, with ambrette lending a nutty warmth. This isn't the toothy, gnarly patch in Banshee Beat. It smells autumnal and polished. It has a very male feel to it, but it's nothing like a cologne; more like a carved and oiled wooden statutette of a forest god.

 

I normally pass on anything with orris, but this one is beautifully done.