phaedrine

Living in the desert in the Southwest....

I'm gonna echo the rec for Coyote. It's a beautiful scent. The musk in it is soft and gentle, and makes me think of the furry skin-scent of curling up to sleep with a cat or dog. It also has the scent of hot, dry grasses and dust. Mm.

If you can get your hands on some Dia De Los Muertos, it's a scent that makes me think of home (New Mexico). It's perfect.

Seven African Powers, the Twilight Alchemy Lab oil, makes me think of the desert once it drys down. It reminds me of both the scrubby African desert I've been to, and the scrubby New Mexican desert that I live in.

Cathedral makes me think of Santa Fe at Christmastime.

Ra is another hot, dry desert scent that I love.

New Orleans actually makes me think of New Mexico in the early summer, because to me it smells like Honeysuckle and Spanish Broom when they're fresh in bloom, like they are right now.

I agree with the above reviews!

In the bottle, it's very wet, green, herbal. On my skin, it gets almost a bit soapy, but that vanishes as it dries.

After a couple of hours, it's still a green scent, but now it's a dry, dusty, woodsy green. It makes me think of the desert here in New Mexico, and it also makes me think of the desert in South Africa, both high, dry, dusty places.

Whenever I wear things, THINGS HAPPEN, so it's voodoo/hoodoo aspect is wonderful, as well as it's smell.

Thank you, African Powers, for bringing the rain today, I needed that...

After reading the eager reviews from QS and the other locals, I really thought I'd love this one.

Sniffing from the bottle, I got a definite redpink floral, but smelled a lot of O in it, so I was very excited.

Sadly...it was not to be.

It stayed mainly the redpink floral the entire time, getting very sweet and almost sickly on me.

After several hours, it did calm down and I got the warm notes I had hoped for, but still with an...almost an aftertaste of the sickly red/pinkness.

Ah well. Maybe next time!

Oh, so wonderful...

I adore honey scents. My all-time favorite is O, of course. When I read this description, the thought that crossed my mind was "this sounds exactly like ME"...though for some reason I didn't order a bottle, just an imp. Silly me.

In the bottle and wet on the skin, it smells an awfully lot like Jezebel does once it's dry. Luscious wet honey and sweet flowers. Yum.

After it dries, the warmer notes of the fig, clove and bit of patchouli come out, though all they do is make the honey deeper, I never have any of them take more than a supporting role.

After 10 hours, it's still warm, sweet honey. Perfect.

NEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed bottle!

For me, Wolf's Heart is the surpreme confidence enhancer. I've taken to using it anytime I have to go to work, as there are a few people I work with that are really good at poking holes in any confidence I do have.

Tho for all three, I might bust out the Black Cat. Meow!

I'm more on the dark scent side, but the ones I see myself wearing lots this spring are Eos and Villain.....need to pick up a bottle of Eos. Oh, and New Orleans. I'm trying Dirty right now as I type, and as long as it lasts on me, I think it'll be lovely for spring, as well!

Ooooh, have we a new addition to the top ten??

I don't get cherries out of this, at all, at any stage.

In the bottle it's exactly as it is dry on my skin, just more intense.

I get the warmth of myrrh, spiciness of clove, and then OOMPH and RED of dragon's blood.

A couple of hours later, it's softer, but the same lovely mishmash blend.

Going on the bottle list, for sure.

Florals and I don't often get along, but I picked this one up because I love white roses, so I thought I would try a white rose blend.

Sometimes lotus turns sickenly bubblegum on me, but not in this blend, thankfully.

It was ... nice. Pretty, white floral. That's about it...I didn't have too long to sample it, because it was mostly gone within a half hour. An hour later, I smell nothing on my skin at all.

*adds another to the list of white florals eaten by the skin*

Amber works well on me, as does lavendar, and I like sage and mangos. Red musk, on the other hand, can go either way. Some blends that have it I adore (Scherezade), others make me go "eww, stinky!" (Fenris Wolf).

As tempted as I was to buy a bottle of this, I knew I needed to try an imp first, so I bought one off the swap board. I'm glad I did, as this sort of falls in to the second catagory.

While it wasn't stinky in the bottle or while drying, just smelled like warm ambered mangos, after a little while all the lovely notes faded and I was left with just plain old red musk. Stinky.

I threw the imp in with a package for someone that I know that loved Fenris Wolf. Here's hoping she enjoys the poor little donkeys more than I did.

I got an imp of this from the lovely Theravada.

I really, really like what it does on my skin, all blackberry and myrrh. I've not been too keen on any fruity blends before trying this one, but now I want to gobble up anything with blackberry in it.

The only said part is that it doesn't last too long, maybe an hour or two, so it'll go in my "imps that I use for a pick me up but probably won't buy in a bottle" pile.

I bought this without thought, it was Spooky, so how could I not? Later, I worried about about the foody nature of it, as I'm not usually a foody scent type of person.

Now that I've got it in my grubby little hands....I'm still not sure.

In the bottle, I get wet, boozy mint. Verrra interesting...

On my skin, while it's drying, I get all of the description. Rum, mint, cocoa, coconut, it's all there in a really silly, crazy blend.

After it's dry, for the next half hour or so, I get....minty suntan oil. Ew. Not so good.

That was almost enough for me to wash it off and put it on the swap board...but I decided to hang in there for a little while longer...

At about an hour, I get deep, dark minty cocoa. As if you'd dipped a thin mint into an extra coat of really dark chocolate. Well, that's ok...

This goes through YET ANOTHER mutation, though I'm not sure when it happened. After a while, the mint faded, and the booze came back. Hasn't changed since I noticed that, so for the last several hours I've had a nice chocolate liquer thing going on.

I'm still undecided. It will take a few more tries to figure out. I'm definitely not a fan of the coconut stage, though.

(edited for spelling)

I wanted this one for the clove, as clove blends tend to work really well with my skin.

NOT this one.

Bright violet with sweet clove, Mediterranean incense notes and tonka bean.

In the bottle, it was so sickly-sweet that I almost didn't try it at all. I had to remind myself of the sometimes violent ways that bpal changes on the skin, and tried it anyway.

VIOLET. VIOLET violet violetvioletviolet. No clove. No incense, no tonka. Just violet.

Blech. And I can't get it off, either, I've scrubbed twice and I still reek of violets.

Just received a bottle of this in a swap....and BOY, am I glad I did.

I had read the reviews and knew that it was a cherry blend, so I was a bit wary, but curiousity won out....

In the bottle, it is VERY cherry. The comment about cherry cider above is dead on. It's not a cherry cough syrup type, like some other blends I've had with cherry, but just a perfect, natural cherry.

As it dries, it slowly shifts. It starts with the natural cherry, then becomes cherry with a background of deep, sweet spices.

After about 20-30 minutes, the two trade places, and it's spices with a background of yummy black cherries.

As the day wore on, I got less cherry, but the sweet spices stayed with me for quite some time afterwards.

Overall, very plesant and I'm so happy I have a bottle of this all to myself!

I'll second the recs for Coyote and Sudha Segara, and add my own for Phantom...to me, it's like a me-scented dryer sheet.

This is a lovely, warm, sweet blend, but dark and rich at the same time.

Both in the vial and on my skin, I mainly get fig fig fig, with perhaps a dash of walnut, a dash of dark chocolate and the sweetness of the rum.

It gets sweeter as it dries down, but stays warm and very comforting.

Iago: sinuous black musk, wet leather and vetiver.

This struck me as very similar to Sloth, but with the myrrh in that replaced by musk.

Mostly all I got was musk over vetiver. Very nice and warm and commanding, a hair away from being too masculine for me.

After several hours, the leather starts to come out and play, and wrestles with the musk over who gets to hang out with the vetiver. They never do figure it out, and it's a constant switch between musk/vetiver and leather/vetiver.

Nice, but I think I like Sloth better...I'll probably use up the imp but not buy a bottle.

Tum in the bottle is like opening a new bottle of grape juice, where that grape scent just comes out and hits you right in the face.

Wearing for a while, I get the same thing, as if I'd put on grape perfume.

However!

After some time of wearing it (maybe half an hour? less?) it fades down to this *beautiful* warm, golden spiced honey scent. Honey, spices and maybe some resins. It's lovely, rich and round.

While it definitely screams purple to me, that doesn't make me think of the sunset...here in new mexico, the sunset is all tangerine and pink and bright gold, with the mountains behind you turning lovely warm shades of red and pink.

Khephra, oh my beloved Khephra...

I loved Ra so much that I bought all of the other Stations of the Sun unsniffed. I'm glad I did, for I adore all of them, for different reasons.

Khephra is warm, sweet and spicy. It hardly changes at all from the bottle to dry down to hours later. It's always that warm, sweet glow. Similar to the Lion, yet utterly different. I don't get any of the floral or fruity notes that others have mentioned, just lots of resins and spices.

The colors this makes me think of are a deep, rich burgundy, edged in gold.

In the bottle and drying down, I got a good dose of the opium, sweetened by the honeysuckle. No vetivert at all.

As it dries, though, it morphs into....some sort of bathroom cleaner. Not the standard cherry almond bathroom cleaner that I hate so, but bathroom cleaner none the less.

It lasts, though. It took me four scrubbings to get it off my skin! That I lay at the feet of the vetivert.

Bathsheba: carnation, sensual plum, and Arabian musk.

While I am a big fan of both plum and musk, I'm indifferent when it comes to carnation. I decided to give this one a try just to see what would happen.

It didn't really strike me in the vial or drying down as anything other than "pretty", nothing bad but nothing really spectacular.

After that, though, I really can't say. Less than ten minutes later, every last drop of scent was gone. I even had Caitfish smell to make sure I wasn't on crack, but no, she couldn't smell any, either.

I have the monster pretty-floral-eating-skin.

Loralei: Neroli, sandalwood, ylang ylang.

At first sniff, this smells floral, but not just the flower part, also the green sap as if you'd just plucked the flower.

On skin, it's a nice, light scent, with the sandalwood keeping it from getting too sweet or floraly.

Sadly, it falls into the catagory of florals that I actually like but last only a short time on my skin. Sigh!

I'd just gotten this in a swap, and I'd really been looking forward to it, so when I took the first sniff of the vial, I was a bit shocked. It was stinky! All orange and mint and something dark, perhaps the tobacco.

I tried it on anyway, for posterity, you know?

I'm sooo glad I did! As soon as it dries, it completely changes on me. All the orange and mint go away, and the tobacco just warms it a bit. Mainly it becomes very woodsy, all that fir, with the bitter clove. A very spicy wood. Very yummy.

The throw isn't outstanding, but I could still sniff spicy woods on the back of my hand for hours afterwards. I want to bathe in this stuff!

I gave severin a try because I do love both tea and leather scents. Sadly, it wasn't really much of either on me.

In the vial it was vaugely tea, but it was very, very lemon.

Mostly that's all I got, lemon lemon lemon. Rather than an Earl Grey, I got a cup of strong herbal lemon tea.

Finally, it was too strongly lemon for me and I ended up washing it off.

Oh so good!

This is such a beautiful blend. In the bottle, it smells like a big cup of tea with milk and sugar, being handed to you by a sexy Victorian man in a pale suit.

It's so subtle and awesome. It's not really feminine, but it's not masculine, either. I can see it being beautiful on either sex, especially on those that toe the line between.

For the first few hours that I wore it, I got tea with milk and lots of sugar. No lemons at all, as others have mentioned.

Subtly, slowly, the tea fades and is replaced by hints of the musks and what must be the fougere. Very sophisticated, yet still covered in sugar. The tea has been finished, and it's time to move on to other things...

All in all, so happy I bought a bottle of this one unsniffed!!

Oh, yum....

I totally agree with Penance. This is like Skadi's younger, androgynous cousin.

It's got the same chill, beautiful pine as in Skadi, but it's not as spicy, and while sweet, it doesn't have the berry sweetness.

In the vial, it's all sweet pine, with a very chill aquatic note.

Once on the skin, it does warm up a bit, but still stays very nice and piney.

The throw only lasted about an hour on me, but six hours later I can still smell it on my wrists.

A winner, for sure!