Lucchesa

Tissue is such a shunga, and such a beauty. Heady gardenia (one of the only white florals that works on me) floats over pale honey and what smells to me like rice milk. This is one of those creamy sweet florals Beth does so magnificently. It's not my usual sort of scent at all -- it's the kind I bust out on rare spring days when I'm feeling really femme -- but it's gorgeous, even if it only lasts a couple of hours on my skin.

Couple Enjoying a Summer Breeze was not on my radar at all last year. I'm not sure I realized then how much I like labdanum. Testing blind, I got cedar and sparkling labdanum with its cola-like sweetness, which the brown sugar (once I looked at the notes) melds with seamlessly. I never really perceive the patchouli, and while sage can be a problematic note on me, it behaves perfectly here, dry and herbal but warm, a perfect balance for the sweet notes. Anyway, it's fantastic on me, outdoorsy, cozy, deeply satisfying. This goes on my list of things I'd be delighted to have more of.

I really wanted to love Joyous Middle-Aged Couple, but it doesn't work on me. In the imp it's gorgeous, rich mandarin and white tea with a backdrop of woods, but once it hits my skin it's higher pitched than I usually enjoy and quickly goes to soap. Really elegant, fancy, triple-milled French clementine soap maybe, but still soap. I'm not sure which component or combination of components is at fault, but I'm jealous of the skin chemistry of the other reviewers.

The only other Honey Pot I've tried is Sweet Labdanum, which was primarily about the labdanum. Honey, Italian Bergamot and Frankincense is more of a honey-forward scent on me. At first I can mainly pick out warm honey grounded with frankincense, but as it dries down the bergamot becomes more perceptible, adding some brightness. After eight hours or so, the citrus has receded again and left me with a skin scent of honey and frankincense -- this is a sweeter frank, not the super dry one. I don't get much throw (rarely do with my chemistry), but this is really good wear length for me. A beautifully balanced daytime scent I can see wearing all year round.

I am just loving labdanum lately, and it really shines here. It's that sweet, syrupy, cola-like labdanum with a little honey, and it's lovely. I don't get a lot of throw, but I rarely do with my skin chemistry, and as is true for many of the Lab's honey blends, this last a long time. Sweet but not gourmand, sunny, and work-appropriate.

I would never have tried The Jeweled Spider because of the curried goat (vegetarian here), but I was gifted some, and it is surprisingly great. Like a sweet, smoky tropical fruit mocha. The curry is detectable if you really try, like a little cumin & turmeric, maybe, but it's not obtrusive on me. It has a little throw (more than I usually get). I haven't been wearing it long enough to comment on wear length. But this is much more appealing than I would have expected.

I can only comment on BPAL, and baked goods and fruits don't often work on me personally, but I'll try! BPAL has a gourmand imp pack that contains, besides Eat Me, Bliss (chocolate), Blood Kiss (I don't consider this one gourmand but I love it -- ok, it does have cherry and honey and vanilla but it goes in a different direction with the vetiver), Knave of Hearts (blackcurrant tarts and rose), Cockaigne (the baked goods note that doesn't work on me), and Miskatonic University (Irish coffee in a library, love this one too!). There's a fruit imp pack too, and a vanilla one, and a citrus one if you enjoy citrus. Read the notes of the scents in the packs and see what you think. Other GC foodies you might like include Drink Me, Shub-Niggurath (evil gingerbread), Hellcat (hazelnut, buttercream, honey mead, rum and sweet almond), Vice (chocolate, cherry and orange blossom), Halfling (porridge, kukui nuts and pastry), Sudha Segara (milk, honey and ginger), White Rabbit (spicy milky tea and linen)... If rose seems too mature for you, you might like Alice, which is very young at heart: Milk and honey, rose and carnation and bergamot. Maiden is a sister scent: white tea, carnation, rose. Both feel youthful to me. Do you like spices? Booze? Those open up whole new categories. Baron Samedi is a take on bay rum. Port-au-Prince: buttered rum flavored with almond, bay, clove and sassafras. Chimera is likened by many to red-hots. Jack (pumpkin, peach & spices). Plunder (all the spices a pirate's boat might carry). Bengal (honey & spices). Inferno (can't wear this, it burned my skin). Kill-Devil (rum punch). Elegba (coconut, tobacco and sweet, sugared rum). Grog, what it says. Once you start mixing foodie elements with other components, your choices increase dramatically. Al-Shairan: clove, peach and orange with cinnamon, patchouli and dark incense notes. Voodoo: myrrh, patchouli, vetiver, lime, vanilla, pine, almond and clove. Eclipse, Wrath, Antikythera Mechanism, Bastet, Sin, Uruk, O, Dorian, How Doth the Little Crocodile, Tombstone, Good, Paladin, Velvet, Centzon Totochtin, Tezcatlipoca, Intrigue, Belle Epoque, Desire, Fae, Imp, Aglaea, Tamora... Just go to the website and search a component you like, say vanilla. If you try Dragon's Milk, which is dragon's blood & vanilla, you'll find out if you like dragon's blood. If you like apricot and try Depraved, you'll get a pretty good handle on whether you enjoy patchouli. And so on. Unimpables and LEs expand your horizons even more. Just with chocolate, there's Chad, The Other Hot Chocolate, Candy Butcher, Boomslang, Wulric, Gelt, Dia de los Reyes, all the 13s, My best advice, if you're on a budget, would be to buy a lot of $1-2 imps from the sales pages here on the forums to get a better idea of what works on you. Most buyers will include frimps, as does the Lab -- skin test them all, even if you don't think they're your style. You can always wash them off, but you may be pleasantly surprised (Troll...). Then once you have a lot of GC under your belt, you can join a decant circle with more confidence. And for me, I really enjoy not just the end result of the perfect scent, but the learning process and the opportunity to try lots and lots of different things. But I'm a Gemini. Have fun! And check back in with what you like because that will really help people tailor recommendations to you.

It may not just be the amber -- on my skin, pine notes, and maybe evergreens in general, tend to soften and sweeten over time. (I happen to like this effect.) I think all three of those are good to try. Yggdrasil has a wintergreen feel that didn't work on me, Thanatopsis starts very foresty and does that softening I mentioned, and it may be that the eucalyptus in Loup Garou keeps it a little sharper. You might also consider The Jersey Devil and Robin Goodfellow, or even Troll if you like dark smokiness with your woods.

These are all great suggestions. Because you like citrus, I would also add Mad Hatter, Villain and Whitechapel, all of which are unisex trending dudely with a citrus component. This recent thread has some other good GC suggestions: https://www.bpal.org/topic/95327-recommendations-for-a-single-man/?tab=comments#comment-2773104 I cannot agree more with the advice to try a lot of GC imps and learn what you like. And it will change. What I thought I liked when I started trying BPAL and what I know I love now overlap but are by no means identical. Enjoy the journey!

I think this may be my favorite of this year's lupers (though I haven't finished testing all my decants). On me, I Die of Love is not a manly leather at all. In fact, as I was sniffing my wrists and making mental notes on the bus today, I decided it was an unusually femme leather. Like mauve driving gloves, maybe. Very soft leather, a haze of lilac which is one of the few florals that work on me, the softest musky bay rum. Cubeb is usually very lemony on me, but here it's just a little bit of zing. This has nice throw, which I rarely get with my skin chemistry. Gorgeous.

When I put Tricuspid Valve on, it was all oudh. Stinky oudh. I couldn't even remember oudh being in the components, but when I looked there it was, in one of its aliases: agarwood. I would guess black oudh, from the way my skin was amping it. In the imp I can smell the patchouli and oakmoss, but it's all oudh on me. It settles down in a couple of hours, but my decant will go to someone who can wear oudh more successfully than I can.

Frankincense! The frank is the dominant note on me here. I had A Woman Practicing Calligraphy on my other wrist, and while that is definitely a rose scent on me, the rose component in Gargoyle Junk is much fainter on my skin. (Plus I'm not really sure what rockrose smells like.) This is a lovely ecclesiastical frank that twines together with a dry patchouli and the cool stone note. I think it captures the medieval architecture feel very well.

I was hoping A Woman Practicing Calligraphy would be mainly an ink and moss scent on me, but of course it's mostly a rose scent. It's a really beautiful one, and the rose stays true, kind of a deep purple rose, or maybe that's red rose plus black ink. At any rate, there's no sourness to it whatsoever. I don't need a bottle because I don't wear rose-forward scents that often, but if rose is your jam, this is unusual and compelling.

So I get gingerbread -- not the heavy, blackstrap molasses kind but a light honey spice cake -- and mead. Cakes and ale. Curiously, it takes about an hour for the roasted nuts note to emerge on me, so it's not almond, which always shows up at the beginning and burns off quickly. Maybe roasted walnuts. Super nice, rich foodie and quite long lasting, too.

Excellent Pancakes reminds me of the phrase "comfort me with apples." BPAL's cooked apple note works better on me than fresh apple, and this is warm comfort food of a scent, caramelized apples and baked goods (a note which is never great on me, but fine here) and maybe berry jam -- when I applied there was a hint of red fruit I wasn't expecting, and I checked the notes and that's my best guess. The spices are really mellow, and I'm not getting a cream note from the mascarpone. Medium wear length on me -- I wish I got doomsday_disco's longevity! Very foodie, very warm and comforting.

Snakes Slithering doesn't smell swampy to me but more like a meadow in April. It's very green in feel -- the GC I'm reminded of, though I haven't sniffed it in quite a while, is The Apothecary. I can barely make out the Snake Oil at first. This is a fresh springtime snake, slithering through that almost violent green first growth of grass. Because it's fresh and gently outdoorsy, it's work appropriate. If sweet greenness that eventually mellows into pale green, very soft SO appeals to you, this is your snake.

I don't know if I'm getting any intercession from Cito. I am definitely getting honey, slightly floral honey with warm, mellow spices. And the red musk is being such a team player here! I can smell it now that I know it's there (tested without looking at notes), but it's definitely in the background. I would not have picked it out, nor the ginger specifically. I don't get the huge throw everyone else is mentioning, but I never do. Sigh. Rich warm honey, though. Very nice.

I received some Smoke and Lace in a swap with a super generous forumite, and I might have put a little bit too much on this morning. Wet, it's strong. I don't usually get much throw from any scent, but I felt like I was walking in a cloud of smoky, leathery cologne for the first 45 minutes or so. Then it dialed back to low throw and eventually my usual skin scent, but I bet a lot of you would get terrific throw from this. It lasts really well, too. Scent-wise, smoke and leather are the dominant notes. The leather reminds me very much of Pleasures of the Imagination II, which is also described as white leather. With the opium smoke, it's also reminding me of Marquis de Carabas. I'm not getting much in the way of clove or, thankfully, fruit, and the vanilla is quiet but more and more discernible the longer it wears. This is pretty fantastic, but if you can't get your hands on any, Marquis de Carabas scratches a similar itch, and it's GC.

Queen Butterfly is golden orange blossom honey on me, warm with amber. The patch is almost nonexistent, and the wild plum is tarter and less purple than the cultivated variety's note. It reminds me somewhat of A Wonderful Light (Three radiant ambers with honey, linden blossom, bourbon vanilla, and orange zest). Like many of the Lab's honey blends, this has good staying power on me, and it stays pretty true to the initial impression.

Pericardium is really gentle on me. Sweet vanilla rice milk and pale sandalwood dominate when wet, and then a very low-key frankincense comes out with the clove. Both of those can be quite prominent on me, but they are not loud here. The amber is quiet, laying down a warm background. I like this a lot but it is really a skin scent. I wonder if aging will make it a little stronger?

I had to try Perspective. First of all, I'm an art historian and occasionally try to teach perspective. Secondly, I had a very similar experience taking my own kids to Europe and having to explain basic Christianity in museum settings. But I didn't think it would work for me. Red wine almost never does. Perspective was a pleasant surprise, though. It doesn't go into grape juice territory as the red wine note often does on me. The cherry isn't overly sweet, either. And there's something else there that is the vermillion note. There's a little grit to this on me, it's definitely unisex, and I'll definitely be keeping my decant because it's an interesting scent that I don't feel like I have a handle on with just one testing.

Snakes in the Lemon Tree went on as a bright, realistic lemon, something I love but which has been elusive for me in BPAL And still is, because that fresh lemon smell did not last long. First the Snake Oil came out and then the vetiver, and the lemon receded to the background. So full drydown on me was a really beautiful vetiver over a slightly lemony Snake Oil. Even more lemon would be amazing, but this is pretty great as it is.

Cedary amaretto soda sounded excellent to me, so I got a partial of A Boar and a Goat. The label is charming, by the way. Wet, this is all almond, not bitter but sweet, with that cola-like labdanum underneath it and a sting of cedar. After a few minutes the frankincense comes into play, and after half an hour the initial blast of almond has receded greatly, allowing the fig and mandarin to be appreciated, so it's as if Carnal has come to the party. And it is a festive sort of scent. It doesn't last super long on me, but I'm happy to reapply.

I haven't actually tried any of those, but the description of Waiting made me think of Phoenix in Summer (which I had at one point and passed along): Nepalese amber, galangal, red musk, saffron, ozone, and the scent of hot rain striking pavement. I don't wear aquatics at all either, but totally adore a lunacy one I got frimped a tester of: Aegir. Languid lavender pacifying a tumultuous wave of salt water, guiac wood, and cedar. It's amazing.

"Zonked in Paris" is not really what I want to tell people I'm wearing as perfume. Nevertheless, I suspect I will have to because I expect to get compliments on this at some point. It's really good. Rich sweet dark coffee is almost all I smell in the imp, and the creamy vanilla emerges on my skin. Jiaolong did not work for me -- I got musky root beer instead of coffee -- but Zonked reminds me of the Guatemalan Coffee Bean SN and stays a much truer coffee note on my skin. I get a little throw and good wear length, though the balance tilts towards the vanilla the longer it's on. Delicious!