keileya

[Review from elsewhere, brought here for posterity.] In the bottle: All I can smell, and I mean all I can smell, is the vetiver. Like, all. Yeeeesh, what is everyone talking about with the leather and sexy and stuff? Wet on skin: OH THERE'S THE LEATHER. Um. Helloooooo, newly-tanned brown leather boots with a tiny tiny hint of green growing things underneath. Five minutes later: I smell like a stable, but in the good way. Dirt and leather (leather leather leather) and I think I can even smell the steel of the D-rings on the saddlebags I can smell the musk developing around the edges. I love it on both me and my wife. Four hours later: the leather has already stumbled home drunk and the vetiver has its coat on and is hovering around the door making its excuses. The musk is sitting on the couch with its feet up, having just opened itself another beer and confiscated the controller for another round of Grand Theft Auto IV. I was a bit worried about that -- I have trouble evicting a lot of musks once they've moved in and many of them turn to "exhibition hall fug on the fifth day of a tech convention" on me at the drop of a hat -- but this musk is the rare nerd that actually showers daily at a convention, so I don't mind it. The throw's almost entirely gone, but I catch the occasional waft of it, and sticking my nose right up against my wrist gives me five or six different layers of the musk, all of them incredibly complex. And drinking my beer. ...I may not have gotten enough sleep today. Seven hours: The last remaining dregs of the musk is apparently an exceptionally happy drunk. It's gone all sweet and candy-ish, but a spicy candy from the penny-candy-bins era, like something Steve Rogers (Captain America) desperately misses in his new life.

Help me, Obi-Wan Recommendation Forum, you're my only hope! So, I fell hard for Miller vs California (Leather, cognac, fig, ripe berry, and cream, stuffed into a plain brown paper bag) a while back. I stocked up, so I still have plenty of it, but as it's aged, the "bottom" fell out of it -- both the cognac and the cream have aged out of the blend; one of them has left a slightly sour note behind (not unpleasant, but not what I want out of it) and the oil has lost all its staying power on me. (It used to be a twelve-hour oil on me; now it's a four-hour oil at maximum.) GC recommendations for something similar? Or even LE, as long as it's a more recent LE that I'll have more time with before age changes it. I've tried Bensiabel, figuring the plum and leather might bring the same deep-pitched earthy/sexy sweetness, but it went entirely to wet mossy herbs on me in the finish, and not in a good way. I tried The Black Rider for the leather, and it was great on me (great enough for a full bottle!) but lacked the sweetness. For the fig, I tried Gomorrah (okay enough, but nothing like what I was looking for; my skin chemistry does bad things with patchouli, which would rule it out even if I didn't have a learned aversion to patchouli as a note, and there's definitely patchouli in there), The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (thinking fig + fruit might do the trick, but the grape turned into sour spoiled Bubble Yum on me), and Eden (which turned to coconut macaroons and awful cheap amaretto on me). Dragon's Hide has a lot of the same leathery sexiness to it, and I smell great in it, but I amp dragon's blood to hell and gone and so it takes over the scent profile entirely. (Which is not a bad thing, I mean -- I smell great in dragon's blood -- but it's not an alternative for MvC.) Other things with those notes I've tried and had varying success with: Whip (turns to Body Shop tea-rose and swallows the leather immediately), Dee both fresh and aged (still drastically confused by it and not sure if I love it or if it's old man's aftershave on me), Fighter (on me, brown leather shoes that somebody stepped in elephant poop with and cleaned off insufficiently), Iago (loved it, but it's much sharper and greener than MvC), and Dragon's Heart (loved it, but it too is the All Dragon's Blood All The Time channel). General "my skin chemistry is weird" observations: The lab's honey note goes sour on me in half a minute, I have aforementioned learned aversion to patchouli, most florals go rotten on me in the drydown, I amp rose to hell and gone so any blend with it means rose tends to take over, and I generally don't like foodie scents (which is why I was so surprised to find MvC worked on me so damn well). I prefer more unisex scents to the more classically "feminine", but I'm generally openminded. I'm working my way through various other imps that have similar notes -- I've got the rest of the Ars Draconis scents, Rogue, The White Rider, and The Red Rider all sitting here waiting to be tested -- but if there's a smell-alike (or even a smell-something-close) that I should be pushing higher up the list, let me know. Someone suggested Wanda, which I have on the list for the next order, but what else should I be trying?

Dee changed a lot as it aged for me -- I got a fresh-from-Lab imp in mid-January, for instance, and hated the way it smelled on me but suspected that it would age well. Six weeks later, it was a noticeably different scent. (One I liked!) On me, the first attempt was definitely powder within half an hour, and after aging the powder was gone, so I suspect your bottle does just need aging. Store it somewhere cool and dry for six months and then try again! It might take longer, because bottles are amber while imps are clear, and the clear glass lets more light through -- it ages the oil faster. (It also makes the oil break down faster, so it's a double-edged sword.) If six months go by and you're still getting powder from it, maybe try decanting a small amount into the imp you already have and letting that age faster.

In the imp: A very organic resin, like the way tree sap smells. Golden and green. Wet on skin: I had to go and look at the Lab description and then come read these reviews to see if I was imagining it or not, but: Wet on me, this smells like a very single-note licorice root. Not "licorice candy": the actual woody root of Glycyrrhiza glabra, precisely the way it smells when you've peeled back the bark and are chewing on the root itself. I swear I even smell it damp with spit. Twenty minutes of licorice root and it finally fades to resiny incense, green herbs, and leather. The leather's faint, but holds the whole thing together. Strikes me as masculine-leaning but not exclusively masculine, more of a clean outdoorsy kind of scent than anything else -- but really, Antony? Licorice root? NOTHING IN YOU SHOULD SMELL LIKE CHEWED-ON LICORICE ROOT AND YET YOU DO. To see if it was just me and my wacky skin chemistry, I tried it on my wife, and she got the damp licorice root stage, too. I'm really baffled.

I'd definitely suggest Iago, then. (Leather, vetiver, and black musk.) I know a lot of people describe it as masculine, but my wife and I both adore it -- I'm female-bodied-and-identified-though-exceptionally-butch-presenting and she is female-bodied-and-identified-and-more-femme-than-me-but-still-not-total-femme, but neither of us think it comes across as a very *masculine* scent so much as a very earthy and physical scent, which many people read as masculine but is not inherently so. When I first tried it on, my first impulse was a stableyard without any associated horse smells: on me it's all dirt and leather and I could almost smell the steel of the D-rings on the saddlebags. I'd call it a powerful and challenging scent, but not necessarily outside the realm of a very confident woman who's not wedded to the feminine end of the gender presentation scale. (On me the leather note was not long lasting -- it went musk and vetiver in the finish -- and on her it stayed all leather and woodsy, but that's body chemistry for you.) Dee on me is more the rosewood and vanillin from the "old parchment" than the leather, and when my imp of it was Lab-fresh, it was sharp and awful and powdery on me after half an hour. I let it age for nearly two months and tried again, and now I'm getting the leather a bit more, and the sharp and powdery is completely gone. So if your body chemistry is at all like mine, and you hate it right out of the imp and think "there's no leather in that!", age it a bit and see. I likewise did not think Black Rider was masculine (our next order from the Lab includes full bottles of both it and Iago!) but I can see where people might. Still, on me it's more resinous and outdoorsy, and again, not *masculine* so much as very physical and a bit dangerous. I think that's colored by the fact that it finished as amber on me, though. I liked Antony ("the green hills and grasses of the battlefields, the resinous incense from the prayers to his Gods, and a touch of the musky leather of his armor. Ambergris and frankincense with sage, and basil") on me, but it went funky on my wife. The leather and the resin combined really nicely, and were the notes that really lept out from it. One caveat: it went through 15 minutes on first application of smelling *solely* like damp licorice root. Like, the way actual licorice root, not licorice candy, smells like when you've been chewing on it and it's wet with spit. I thought I'd have to wash it off until the licorice burned off and the frankincense and leather bloomed! It's a several-years-old-discontinued-LE, but if you can get your hands on a bottle or decant of "413 US 15 / Miller vs California" ("Leather, cognac, fig, ripe berry, and cream, stuffed into a plain brown paper bag") you should give it a try. It's probably my favorite BPAL scent ever, and it's a very unisex one: the leather and cognac and brown paper bag lean it more masculine, while the berry and cream are more delicate and feminine, and the fig holds it all together. (And it really is stuffed into a brown paper bag. I can smell the bag opening over the first 20 minutes of the scent!)