bheansidhe

Like zeezee, I picked this up and was immediately struck by its similarity to Silkybat - which I happen to still have a small amount of, lurking in my fridge. Sniffed side by side, they are kissin' cousins. Silkybat is rounder and more mellow, whereas Love Swing does have a woodsy sharpness on top that reminds me of The Antikythera Mechanism. It smells much more like either of these than it does like last year's Black Cardamom and Vanilla, which I also sniffed side-by-side with The Love Swing.

 

I love this. It loves me back.

Swatched at Will Call. Definitely a fiery glitterbomb. Gold, bright orange, and red-orange glitters, accented with tiny pinpoint black and green glitters. I seem to remember a bit of a holo flare; little red holo and gold flecks, maybe?

Halloween on a nail! Much brighter and more orange than the photo on the site (on my monitor, anyway). One coat was good but semi-sheer coverage, and two was solid glitter. I'm sure you could do some great layering with it, too.

#54

 

Wet: Weathered woods and pungent vetiver.

 

Dried: Woods, softened vetiver, and something balsamic or benzoic in the back. Actually quite pleasant if you like vetiver. Gender-neutral, but would probably smell better on a guy.

157: A strong blast of a sweet spiced booze note, like buttered rum or hard cider, and tons of burnt-sugar fruitcake. The fruits are earthy complex ones, like dried plums and figs and mincemeat, dusted with cardamom and allspice. It feels very Victorian Christmas Dessert. In fact, it's like Christmas Pudding, Butter Rum Cookie, and Hard Cider Cake had a three-way love child.

 

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

On me this was lighter and greener than I thought it would be - I suspect it wants a bit of aging to soften the balsam to my personal tastes - but on my friend it was ALL peach and leather and oudh, which was her personal idea of a Really Good Party.

There's nothing dark in this scent. I get blond woods and golden resins and young fresh-cured leather, with peach keeping it juicy at the edges.

Works for any gender.

Emphasis on the cream and the musk (like a soft skin musk), not the rose. This smells like plush fur feels, all creamy to the nose. It is shockingly lovely and understated, and if rose in all forms did not abhor my skin, I would buy it.

Intensely fruity red musk with the resins thrumming beneath.

This is the peach note cosplaying Linsner's Dawn. Is it too overt? Does it show too much cleavage? Or are these exactly the stiletto heel thigh-high boots you were looking for? Only you can decide.

Like clove, white sandalwood will usually dominate the top, middle, and bottom notes on my skin. True to form, this dries down to 90% powdery vanilla / white sandalwood and 10% green musk. It's like a green-tinted Paladin, which is nicely ironic given this is the dragon and not the knight, but I already have Paladin.

 

Clean, slightly soapy, but mostly powdery. Oh well.

Juke Joint is the glitter turquoise vinyl upholstering the booths at your favorite bowling alley - the one that wasn't retro-new but really truly built in the 50s, but it was in that little town your grandmother lived in that you hated to go visit in the summer, because there was nothing to do but watch TV and bowl, and it was only years later when you were a grownup and the alley was long gone that you realized how amazingly cool it had been.

Speaking of your grandmother, the crelly base is the same turquoise as the vintage atomic-print formica on her kitchen counters, and the flat silver glitter in this polish is the same dull metal sheen as the counter's metal edge banding (that snagged sweater cuffs and caught toast crumbs until everyone gave up trying to clean the cracks out).

And floating in this turquoise crelly base with its flat silver sand-scatter are pinpoint aqua sparks: a bloom of insouciant aqua jellyfish: gorgeous and deadly in this Aegean-blue surf-tumble, so that you don't dare go in the water, but you look and look and look at it.

So if you want to paint your claws with vintage 50s glitter vinyl, your grandmother's formica, and luminous jellyfish, with a smooth and workable formula to boot, Juke Joint will make you a happy camper.

It's the smoky vanilla, musk, and tobacco that dominate at first - in fact, when applied wet, this is strongly akin to the tobacco-and-caramel combo in Tiresias the Androgyne. Laura could be a coconut-free sibling of Red Lantern. Lavender flickers intermittently in the background, like grain streaks popping up in an old reel-to-reel movie.

 

As it wears, carnation blooms over but does not obscure the gritty smoky vanilla/tobacco. If vetiver is your death note, have no fear: it's just a dark background supporting the other notes. Also, there's zero resemblance to TKO or any of the other lavender-based blends.

 

Overall impression: smoky, warm, musky, somehow gritty and feminine at the same time. The caramel impression never wavers. (I can't wear tobacco, so I'm just posting notes before I pass the bottle to its rightful owner ;-).

 

ETA: Oops, I lied? After two hours of yard work in the hot sun, I'm left with a soft carnation perfume that - as Herb Girl rightly notes- blooms on its inconspicuous vetiver stem. Very creamy and feminine at this point, with none of the gritty tobacco left over. YMMV.

Noooope nope nope nope nope.

 

Interesting to read the reviews above mine & see that nearly everyone got the slight, unsettling wrongness of it.

 

Wet: like breathing in a plastic bag of fake black licorice-flavored licorice whips. While standing in a stinky tobacco shop. That sells menthol cigarettes. With an open styrofoam cup of cheap wine fermenting on a shelf under the counter, because the alcoholic owner tipples between customers.

 

The person standing next to me at Will-Call said she was mostly getting the mint off my skin. I was mostly getting the licorice and nauseating white wine.

 

Like, an amazing trainwreck of wrongness on my skin. The Russian judge was laughing too hard to hold up a scorecard.

This has a solemn, still, cathedral-ish incense vibe.

 

The first wash of resins has a bitter tinge to the edges, which seems appropriate. But the bitterness softens into a dry, woodsy finish over the rich and nutty frankincense. The sandalwood lends a woody sweetness, but never tips over into powder territory.

 

This is gorgeous and subtle and has to be worn to be appreciated, as the notes list is deceptively simple. But if you miss out, there are many stellar incense blends in the Lab arsenal.

Wet: high, clear, winey apple juice, quickly deepened with the oudh. As it dries, it goes almost pure apple fruit single note on me - something rich, tart, and dark-skinned, like a Winesap or an Arkansas Black. I love apple blends and this one definitely earns a bottle spot.

Terry Pratchett invented a color called octarine, described as "alive and glowing and vibrant, and incidentally a kind of greenish purple." So, if this analogy helps at all, Lurid Bonbon smells like octarine dark chocolate to my nose. Chocolate itself is warm and fuzzy and matte, while lavender and currant and white musk are sharp and scintillating, so you would logically expect this combination to fight itself, but it doesn't at all. The resins marry the two poles beautifully.

The chocolate component is dark, and has the same feel as the chocolate in Chocolate Stout Cupcake, but where that was a brutal chemistry mishap, Lurid Bonbon was a bottle purchase after I skin-tested at Will Call. This reads as a musk/resin perfume with a chocolate haze, rather than a foody-forward chocolate blend, though YMMV.

Very sexy and adult, with tons of throw. One of the very few chocolate BPALs that succeeds against my weird chemistry.

Christmas in the dungeon at Hogwarts!

 

Lots of beautiful fresh pine and juniper notes enclosed by a kind of gritty dark, wet stone. The berry lends a crisp tang as well.

Incense and headshop fans: why are you not stocking up on The Demon's School atmo? Does big bad vetiver scare you? It shouldn't. It forms a kind of pugnacious herbal bass note to the nag champa and dragon's blood resin on top - but this is all about the nag champa. It smells exactly, precisely, like you are burning nag champa incense, but without a hint of smoke in the air. If you live somewhere that doesn't allow you to burn incense, or if you have respiratory issues, this is the best thing you could possibly find.

Looks like the butterfly's scientific name is Megathymus yuccae and it's found "in deserts, foothills, and woodlands where yucca plants occur," so it's a [Yucca] [Giant-Skipper], not a [Yucca Giant]-[skipper]. I'm no lepidopterist, but I'd say Yucca GI-ant Skipper.

 

Then again, I suspect you wouldn't make an ass of yourself unless you happened to be chatting about perfume with a very judgmental lepidopterist.

 

100% agree with Silvertree on, well, all counts.

"A bright jewel-green smell" perfectly describes the opening notes - like a cloisonné box lined with white sandalwood. In fact, at first the white sandalwood dominates this blend, but it finally settles into something pale and low and graceful, like white lotus petals floating on still green water.

 

It smells like the white sandalwood note used in Claircognizance, but where Claircognizance goes flat white and powdery on me, Shining Beak is tempered by a kind of green melon watery-ness, which I think is the musk and lotus. Alas, the orris dries and flattens it out in the end, as it always does on me, but I may still keep the imp.

 

Completely not what what I was expecting. Very feminine and soft.

Gossips sniffed: dark indeed. Tested, my nose reads it as a progression of colors. It starts as gritty blackened woods and black wet soil (without an earth or loam note; just the feel of black soil). It blooms from black into a dark but luminous mahogany, like sunlight through a jar of blackstrap molasses. I get the cedar and a hint of the lime, and lots of black tea leaf, but the other notes are seamless. It's gender-neutral and actually gorgeous. (Skin notes: tea is usually a winner; cedar can be vinegary if it's not tempered as it is here.)

 

Drydown: woods. Also beautiful, but completely different from the wet stage.

 

Verdict: I may slather this one, repeatedly, to gauge how well I like it in all of its stages, because it's a real morpher. Signs point to a permanent slot in the collection, though.

Huge billows of black and carmine stage smoke, filled with lit sparks of pepper whirling like evil fireflies. A hissing rattle of dried coconut sleeting down on a well-worn leather duster.

 

Confused yet? Psychodynamic Discharge is glad to hear it.

 

Sniffed, I get clouds of sweet sandalwood incense and white cotton -- not "clean laundry," but something white and cottony and opaque. I think this particular iteration of white amber is doing the powdery thing. It's not floral-forward, though the flowers advance as the blend wears down. Mostly, it's reading as benzoin/sandalwood dusting powder. There's a non-foody but vanilla-like sweetness (probably the benzoin, which contains vanillin). Also, somehow, the blend smells white.

The vanilla-resin-powderyness makes me place it in the XYZ Lace family of Lab blends (e.g. Antique Lace, Black Lace, Red Lace). So this is... Psychic Lace.

I think this is the best foody blend for non-foody-wearing people to try. My skin can take a sugary scent from sweet to a cloying, choking miasma in 5 seconds, and this stays the perfect level of spicy-sweet. Not to mention how well the spices balance; along with Moroccan Snake Pit and Gingerbread Snake Oil, this is probably my favorite Lab gingerbread. After a five-minute gumble over the aquatic and leather - always dicey for me - it settles into this long, low, dry spice that lasts for over a day.

 

The primary charm for me is the dryness. Gingerbread biscotti with sea salt! Gingerbread hardtrack, consumed outdoors in the salty ocean air! Woodsy dried gingerbread! Gingerbread jerky (not in the meaty sense but in the dried, leathery sense)! The bay rum blends beautifully with the allspice and stays truly gender-neutral, never cologne-y. There's just enough aquatic to bind the spices to the salt and woods, and keep them from drying up and blowing away; it never reads as "aquatic" per se. There's no clove-monster tromping over everything; it's all bright, peppery ginger and allspice and a faint dust of cardamom, wearing down to spicy woods.

 

In short, it's unique and I love my bottle.

These new Yules seem to have a lot of incense heavy blends. Haigophobia and Psychodynamic Discharge strike me as very incense-y.

Sniffed: wow, that's a brisk snap of the fingers under your nose. Peppery ginger, bright yuzu, and fiery red resins. This smells . . . martial and reverberant. I don't get any soul-crushing guilt, but there is indeed a frenzied energy to the blend.

Wet: I. Love. This. It's perfectly seasonal, too - the yuzu and pine with church incense notes make it smell like a room full of evergreen boughs and brightly burning red Christmas candles, turned up to 11. The dragon's blood is fruity and round; it's almost got a bayberry quality. How on earth does something smell like candle flame? I hope this dries down well, because it wasn't even on my list and now it's shot up to purchase status.

Worn: it gets drier and woodsier as it ages, fading to the ghost of burned incense. Really, really good incense.

I'm not normally into the incense-heavy blends, but this is a winner.

I have been using a spreadsheet since 2006. The only thing I've changed about my method in that time is storing it on Dropbox instead of one computer.