Soupy Twist

General categories to try: Apple Chocolate Tea Caramel/Burnt Sugar Honey

Green tea, juniper leaf, and honeyed green apple. Green apple and juniper in the bottle. Goes on as a lovely apple with an eyewateringly sour juniper. I love juniper and I love apple but man, these two are fighting like chocolate and pickles. The drydown continues into the sour, dusty juniper leaf. No honey, no tea.

I find aquatics, citrus, mint, pine, and snow to be pretty non-gendered. Things which smell masculine to me are herbs, woods, "cologne" (that generic aftershave kind of smell), and maybe tobacco. My notes say Protoplasmic Ooze "would probably be amazing on a guy," and Odin is "masculine."

Chamomile and cypress in the bottle, which turn to pine and rose. The wood makes a brief return, but then both pine and wood depart for rose, which is where I get off this train.

2006 version: A lovely, uncomplicated fresh apple juice — the juice you get while eating the apple, not bottled juice. No cranberries or spices. 2010 version: Apple and spices in the bottle. Goes on as fresh apple juice with cinnamon, like freshly pressed cider. There’s more sweet fresh apple juice as it dries, and then the soft spices come back in. This is really nice — a definite keeper now. Still no cranberry but this is beautiful.

opens as a promising juniper with hints of cedar, like a spicy Christmas potpourri, but the cedar soon drowns the whole forest in pencil shavings.

LIME! in the bottle. This becomes Lime! aftershave, which soon sours. The Ripper would totally have worn this.

Musk all over the place. Musk in the bottle. Goes as orris? Iris? iris root? There’s a sort of dry, not-hairy coconut husk note as it dries (yes, Beth could make sure we smelled the hair if she wanted us to). It’s definitely “pearlescent.” Finishes as a musky floral.

an uncomfortable plasticky cherry blossom. there are a few flickers of honey in the beginning, but mostly it’s just a fake floral.

grass in the bottle and on application, with maybe a flash of cucumber, which adds a succulent note as it dries. very green, all right.

Clean milk in the bottle. Goes on as clean sweet skin, like a baby’s head. This is pretty! …while it’s wet. Then the baby talcum comes in, and it’s definitely “talc.” Stale talc, in fact. Well, it was pretty while it lasted.

A gorgeous spicy black tea in the bottle and on application — the tea from Plunder. This lasts for a good hour, but eventually fades into something vaguely sweet and creamy. If it lasted longer this would be a bottle for sure.

Just a pure, thick honey note — not the "perfumy honey" from Honeyed Apple, but more of a beeswax note. Not identical to Democrat, but a close relative. No absinthe at all. I like this a lot.

The ginger tries, really really hard, but this is mostly lemon Lysol on me. It’s my skin, which has decided it hates lemon verbena. 😭

White tea in the bottle and on application. This morphs into a stemmy note — maybe the osmanthus? — and then the bergamot comes in, harsh and astringent. After about 10 minutes it calms down into a thick lily, but that only lasts briefly before the bergamot returns.