Casablanca

Initially, Ice Age Baton gives me some of the garage-chemical smells that others have also found. Behind the industrial fumes, there floats a dreamy, chalky vanilla and cocoa. So I wait...

...and the ick does settle and fade.

I thought the chalky rubble of the blend would remind me of Klosterruine but, actually, to me it smells closer to the porcelain of Pediophobia. This could be an influence of this lovely vanilla! 

Smooth blend, once you get past the rough.

What a gorgeous fluffy vanilla with delicate sandalwood when first applied. Ah.

But, after a moment, this sweet duet is overtaken by the loud orchestra of a perfumey skin musk. I keep sniffing, trying to recapture the beauty of the initial pairing... and each time get a snoot full of musk. Perfumey, powdery musk. The beauty is obscured behind it. It's a fog of war.

I can't wear this sort of musk or my ampage of it, but I enjoyed this blend's initial life on my skin.

A nice, bright honey mingles with burnt milk. Like, the milk started to burn on the bottom of the pan, and someone scraped it off and mixed it with honey. This is definitely burnt, and not just toasted... and for me it clearly smells like the milk got the scorch, not the honey.

Burnt food smells often repel me, but I'm oddly drawn to this while it's wet on my skin. 

In drydown, though, the story changes. The burn turns chemical, moving toward burnt rubber tires. This bit of nasty still floats over a cozy vibe of warm milk and honey. It's a taunt.

Later, it settles down again into something cozy. I'm on the fence about whether the nasty phase is worth an upgrade.

Beautiful scent... but not quite the expected.

First, it's quite sweet. A light honey and green tea come brewed with potent white sugar and lemon, but a quite airy, vague floral impression... I can't begin to name what the latter might be. This smells like a green tea (or perhaps it's the honey) that's brewed with overt sugar and lemon added, but also has some inherent floral tones, as a wine can have currant or chocolate notes.

Khus? Nowhere to be seen (or sniffed).

I'm really enjoying this, though it is too lemony when I sample it up close. 

This one is simple and lovely. Well-blended, clean blend of salt and pale, light honey, with a soft, nonaggressive lemon. The lemon pulls off being both as tart as a bit of sass, and nearly as sour as a Tom Collins... but it's still mild.

The image that comes is someone wearing a wide-brimmed white hat and matching capris drinking a Tom Collins on the beach. (Except, does anyone drink those?)

I haven't always gotten along with salt perfumes, but this one is really working. Upgrading to a partial.

This perfume doesn't go quite as expected for me.

The first burst of it on my skin is simply a bouquet of nondescript pinkish flowers.

In drydown, I start to get something reddish and fruity, but also something a bit powdery and clean, like laundry sheets. I've enjoyed past wildflower honey blends... the note hasn't gone all dryer sheets on me before. Here, though, alas... something is reading to me like a wildflower-scented dryer sheet. 

Clean, powdery, pinkish, floral. Drop of light honey.

I've tested this blend a few times, and I only ever get a blackened red rose... extraordinarily powdery and a little soapy. I never find any other notes.

I enjoy some roses, but this one is showing emotional incompatibility with me.

This would actually make a fine autumn scent.

On the wand and on my skin, both, it's primarily apple-pulpy. It's like some crazy grovestand apple juice... a really extra one, with loads of pulp and a little sweetening honey and orange. It makes me think of something you might get to drink at the shop of a pick-your-own-apples orchard.

In drydown, I notice a little amber, but it never comes far forward on me. The golden honey does strengthen over time, but it never really obscures the pulp.

This is nearly an ylang ylang single note to start, as others have described. I find a little drop of white/light honey on one of the petals... the amount is comparatively small enough to remind me of a honeysuckle with its miniature yield of nectar.

I'm not a floral scent person, so this doesn't resonate greatly for me, but it could be lovely for someone who can fully appreciate its tropical, blooming fullness.

From the reviews above, there seems to be quite a variety of experiences with this one... which I love. 

For my part, I get a rich black patch as the main player, smoothed with vanilla, made a bit perfumey with musk. There's also something dry and hemp-like coming through for me... combined with the vanilla patch, it does bring Revenant Rhythm to mind. Yet this veers much more musky and sweet (almost sugared) on my skin than RR.

Well-balanced and lovely, though a little too musky-perfumey for me.

Vanilla-creamy toasted oats with a little honey and the beautiful cardamom from Perfectly Normal Childhood/Lights, Camera, Something.

I love how this one opens. I don't really ever get enough of this vanilla and cardamom together, and they are beautiful with the other notes.

As it wears on me, though, I simply amp the beegees out of these oats. Nightingale eventually goes too grainy/oatmealy for my tastes... but it smells like an absolutely amazing winter breakfast. 

This reminds me of a sunflower scent I picked up for soap-making, but more complex.

Golden, musky amber with tones of oranges and lemons over a base that's a little rustic from cedar and a bit grainy from frankincense. I want to say a golden frankincense--but the whole blend is so suffused with gold, it's hard to separate the individual warm contributors.

I also get a little sense of fibrous greenery.

Essentially, this is summer in a vial.

So much ginger ale fizz. So much!

Someone shook this ginger ale until it exploded. It's mostly fizz on my skin, and on my friend's skin as well, even after a couple weeks of rest.

It's quite fetching as fizz goes... but I'm left craving a honey ginger blend with less buzz.

I'm disappointed that I can't find my decant of this, but I can more or less review by memory.

This was brown sugar-dominant on me, a molasses-toned sugar smoothed over by a gentle cream. The Earl Grey was less potent on my skin, but added some dark dryness and a little airy complexity.

I quite enjoyed this. Misplacing the decant feels like less of a blow, because I'm planning for a bottle.

I've enjoyed so many of the Duets and Menages I've tried, and this, too, is a love.

Sugared red poison. I get white sugar, red currant, and opium in about that order of strength, though they are closely balanced.

I like this as a sleep scent, but it doubles as naughty. This fruit is downtown in the depths of night, wrapped in red dress and sugar gems, looking for a kill.

Delicate, golden apricot cream with hints of coconut and magnolia while wet; more magnolia blooming in drydown. Sweet brown fig is present, but soft.

The delicacy of this reminds me of some rice milk blends, although this is not strongly rice milky.

I really enjoy this one. I was looking for a new creamy spring-fruit blend, so this is on the Luper upgrade short list.

This has rested for a week or two so it’s probably ready for me and…

I… what? Body odor? 
 

Sniffsniffsniffsniff

This is a nice little vial of skin-soft, indolic BO that I have donned freshly showered. On my friend’s skin, much the same. Eventually, we glimpse a little magnolia wallowing in the body vibe.

But, you see, on the wand, it’s more… fresh lemon flowers, cedar, and a breath of mint.  That is the dream of this perfume before it meets our skin.

Row of Trees begins its life on my skin as an herbal lavender salon blowout, but quickly morphs into a much more green herbal blend in the style of Lavender and Lichen.

Well after drydown, I get a whiff of some wayward cologne note peeping from the sideline. Not a fan of that development. I liked this earlier. Buuuuut…

If you like your lavenders green and herbal — even a bit dewy and wild with evergreen — this may just work for you.

My review is an echo of @VetchVesper’s — this is absolutely the enticing blueberry musk of Jinbari. For the first minute. 
 

After that, it slinks to the background, and this is thereafter a gardenia blend on my skin. Clouds of coconut and neroli drift about this garden, but it’s mainly the gardenia in bloom.

Lovely blend in the vein of other sweet vanilla-hay scents. Specifically, it makes me think of the vanilla in Antique Lace added to Hay Moon.

On my skin, the nutmeg mostly vanishes after the first few seconds (unfortunately). There's also a certain floof to the vanilla that smells like a little marshmallow hides in it. And, after drydown, I seem to smell some skin musk in the mix.

I'm trying to tell myself I don't need a bottle of this because I have Antique Lace and Hay Moon. Not sure if I'll convince.

Here's one that smells much as I imagined---it's really an occasion of "It is what it says it is."

Smooth beeswax merges with a deep, rich, balsamic amber. A good deal of warmth suffuses this blend, from the gold of the amber to the honeyed sweetness of beeswax, but the balsamic note adds an acidic sauciness. 

I tend to amp balsam, but for this one, I smell a lot of it on the wand, as well.

Lovely, smooth blend for beeswax and resin lovers.

A lovely herbal lavender mingles with lichen, which adds a dry, greenish woodsiness and even seems to amp the herbal tones of the whole. 

Lavender is certainly the queen here, with lichen her supporting retinue. This court, though, lives not in the halls of civilization, but in the gentle, mossy wooded spaces, attended by the fey of wild herbs and wildflowers.

Governing Dark is a slow opener, creeping into its own like sundown shadows.

Against a background chill of soft, minty eucalyptus, black patchouli and black currant skulk along the earth. Somewhat confusingly, a sweet, warm amber soon joins in, adding shafts of gold in contrast to the cool eucalyptus and dark, earthy fruit.

I want so much of this black patchouli and black currant together---how lovely they would be with woodsmoke in a Menage, ung---but mingling them with the starkly contrasting eucalyptus and amber isn't connecting with me. The mindscape of it is creating some sort of cognitive dissonance.

But this black patchouli and black currant... Mm.

Hm... A curious, caramel chestnut vetiver... wrapped in soft, dry wool.  

Within a minute or so, something sweet and golden warms it up. There's the amber, carrying with it a well-blended, cedary rustic quality. The vetiver---well-mannered and a little smoky---combines with the wool to remind of Two Sheep and Two Goats. But there's a distinctive caramel nuttiness here, and the amber-cedar vibe, to set this one apart.

Despite loving absolutely everything in this, and appreciating them in combination... I'm not sure the blend is suckering me in as completely and immediately as I thought it would. But it's intriguing, and I can imagine sampling it several times before deciding whether to upgrade.

Cozy concoction of soft, spiced, and fruity wine and oven-warmed, smoky bread, along with some oats and honey. 

It's a quiet mix on my skin, soft as if a little diluted by its multitude of notes. The sense of diluted complexity reminds me of some of the Lunacy moon perfumes. It's sweet and detailed up close, and mainly smoky and fruity from further away.

I love it and will probably bottle it if it settles well.