starbrow
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Everything posted by starbrow
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Those who have ever searched out BPAL chocolate recommendations will surely have come across mentions of Lump of Coal in mystical, breathy tones of wonder. It truly was a unicorn, impossible to find in decant form, surely worth more than its weight in gold because of it. I was stunned to see it in the Yule lineup. And it is exactly what is says on the tin. Fudgey, rich brownies, with as much chocolate stuffed in there as your heart could desire. The throw was strong and long-lasting, only dying down after a couple of hours of wear. I am perhaps past the stage where I need to cover myself in unabashed chocolate, but I may need a decant of this for those days where I just want to stuff my face and could appease my cravings by sniffing my arm
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There is something unexpectedly wonderful about this wanderer. A poof of sweetness and a curl of winter flowers seems perfectly in step with the Yule spirit...and then the other side of it, the slow climb through the sooty chimney to get to the sweets waiting at the bottom of it. Kind of the same strange-bedfellows wonderfulness that was She Sauntered Vaguely Downwards with its cotton candy and brimstone. La Befana really is like that unlikely cast of misfit characters who find themselves thrown together and by the end they are working magic somehow. I'm usually not all aboard the violet train but I might have to take a ride just this once. Hoping to snag at least a decant of this!
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Many of the gingerbreads are quite similar, but Candyfloss stands out for all the right reasons. The same delicious cotton candy note we all know and love, tucked away with love into a softly spicy bed of gingerbread cookie. If you adored it in She Sauntered Vaguely Downwards or Vampire Tween, here's your Yule iteration. Run, don't walk to this sweets shop! The only thing that held me back from a full bottle was how soft it seemed at Lunacy, surrounded by so many other scents competing for my attention. I was afraid it would not show up on my skin with any throw or duration during normal wear and tear. A whisper of a treat, but I can't wait to slather with a decant or more in my near future.
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Pomegranate can sometimes be bright and juicy...no, but this one is dark, smooth, rich. The glittering amber is shimmery and resiny, like many of BPAL's shining ambers in their more glassy, "mirrored" scents. I regret not having any room to skin-test the very unassumingly named Pomegranate, and I hope to acquire a decant and maybe more before this sleeping beauty slips away.
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A very good cocoa, and indeed a perfect hot drink to imbibe - or to huff on one's arm. The chocolate is rich and dark, without the powdery Swiss Miss quality that others can have. This is real melting chocolate, with gooey marshmallows floating at the surface. Not the sad little dried out Swiss Miss marshmallows, either; big, fat, jumbo marsheys. The booze is the quietest note to me. This would be a safe office scent, since it is a very discreet belt of whiskey and kahlua. I have lots of chocolate scents by now, and there are in fact other hot cocoas I tend to gravitate towards (El Dia de Los Reyes, in particular), but this is an excellent place to start for someone interested in some delicious hot chocolate goodness.
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Not surprisingly, a very dark and sexy blend. Surprisingly, it's the patch that dominates on my skin: a fierce, earthy patchouli, quite dirty, but sweetened enough by the gingerbread that it's not the scrubber kind. Once that begins to calm down, everything else coexists dreamily. This is exactly as dark and growly as you'd expect it to be from the notes. The gingerbread is spicy, a lot more gingery than last year's offerings, and the leather is giving the patch a harder edge than maybe it would normally have. The first hour is fierce and loud. And then the drydown is exquisite. I can't wait to see what a year of aging does to this beauty.
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A swing and a miss for me. I would absolutely love to get a genuine old books smell from this scent. The smell you get when walking into a used bookshop, with thousands of dusty aging pages crowded together, the slow decay of paper that smells musty and yet good at the same time. With a coffee shop inside, because this is a trendy hipster used bookshop and caffeine is life. Well, Black Coffee and Old Books doesn't smell like that. The coffee is surely black, unsweetened and with strong tannins so it really, erm, wakes you up. "Old books" smells like...how new textbooks or cheaply produced paperbacks can sometimes have an "off" smell? Like the paper has been soaked in something strange or produced with a bargain batch of fibers or something. The word "cucumbers" came up in discussion at Lunacy and while I couldn't say this was a dead ringer for the cucumber in my fridge, it did have a pickly wrongness to it. The book-lover and coffee addict in me is a little devastated right now. But don't worry, there are other coffee scents and cozy scents in this Yule batch to snuggle up with!
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The cream in Poinsetta Gown is extravagant and foamy, the aromatic interpretation of 18th century French court dress trimmings, with yards and yards of frothy lace and ruffles and bows. That's the good news. The bad news...is that creamed jasmine and rose had a battle in my nose, and they both won. Unfortunately, unless you love one or both of these bodacious florals, you are probably going to be a very uncomfortable jousting field for a while. I am an occasional jasmine partaker and an active rose avoider, and this one was far too much for my fainting nostrils.
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Unwrap a butterscotch candy. Stick your nose in it. Give it a good whiff. Now crunch it under your tongue and vague-think about last week's coffee. That's Butterscotch Latte. Tooth-rottingly sweet, with very little coffee and only a hint of milk. Considering that Pumpkin Latte is rich and strong with tons of latte and a big pump of pumpkin syrup, I expected Butterscotch to follow in that vein. Au contraire! Bright and candy-sweet, kind of stunningly accurate to the leftovers from your Halloween haul.
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How atmospheric! A truer recollection of the bitterness of a strong cup of coffee with a gooey sticky cinnamon bun could not be asked for. In less than an hour, the bun has been fully eaten (which, I mean, true to life!) and I'm left with icing-hardened crumbs and some slightly warm black coffee. I don't think I would reach for this to smell it on my skin, so I didn't spring for a bottle, but as an atmo spray? Watch out, I'm coming for it!
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Fizzy cola. I thought I knew what copal smelled like, and this wasn't it. I was expecting something rich, dark, and smooth. The bubbly soda was definitely strange and disappointing. Whole coffee beans, without all the aroma of ground beans released into the air, are lingering somewhere in the background of a big ol cuppa coke. Where are the dark thick resins? Alas!
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With one sniff, I was inundated with honey, and the sharp honey too, not the warm rounded kind. A waft of creamed and sugared coffee sitting in a cup nearby, while shoving a spoonful of fierce honey in your mouth. If Lupers came out with a coffee scent, this would be it. It clearly isn't the one for me, with my precarious relationship with honey, but for a honey lover who wants some coffee, maybe this is the one for you? On the other hand, others weren't getting honey when they sniffed it, so....I don't really know what to think!
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This was a very popular one at Lunacy. For me, I got a very prominent cola smell, the way labdanum sometimes can when it's not in harmony with other notes. In this case, it stomps out everything but the tobacco to my nose. A very strong, syrupy coke, perhaps being drunk in a cigar lounge? Since I did get a nice sweet tobacco, but it wasn't enough to make me want to smell like I'd spilled my soft drink on myself.
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Coffee Bean, Indonesian Vetiver, Black Oud, & Patchouli
starbrow replied to zankoku_zen's topic in Yules
Here's my love/hate relationship with oudh: my favorite BPALs have it, and my least favorite have it. It's either creamy resiny perfection, or it's heavily indolic. For me, Coffee Bean Indonesian et al...was HEAVILY INDOLIC. This is everything I was afraid of, because what beautiful dark notes surround this coffee, it really should be amazing. Alas, this had a feral edge in the bottle and once on the skin, the barnyard indoles hung around for an hour. I hated every minute of it and had to wash it off. Once washed, it is a nice patchouli and vetiver, but those notes you can get elsewhere without paying the price of pooudh and scrubbing your skin raw. A hard pass, sadly. Oudh rating: 💩💩💩💩💩 -
I expected this one to smell like a sweet cider, so I held off on it until I could skin-test. TOTALLY surprised by what I got out of Wassailing: sharp greens to the point where I swore there was pine floating in the notes somewhere that I had missed. My scribbles from the evening: phantom pine 🌲 ...is that the rosemary? barky leather and herbs, that cardamom is extra green, oof. The blend was very in my face with a leather that was masquerading as a strong (like benching hundreds of pounds strong) pine. Yikes. Missing in action is the vanilla, the mulling fruits, most of the clove, and the gingered rum. Strange, eh? I almost wondered if it was a mislabeled bottle because it was just SO different than what I was expecting. In that sense, I'm glad I got to try it beforehand, because this one ended up being way too strong and aggressively green, and I do like green scents. I had the opposite problem as previous reviews; it was all too much, and I couldn't see myself wearing something like this.
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Of all the foodie Weenies treats this year, Pumpkin Mead and Honey Cakes had so much heart behind it, I had to skintest it, and I kept huffing my wrist all Lunacy and ended up going home with a bottle of it. What is this magic, you ask? It's a scent to come home to, a warm and comforting snack and drink by the fire, subtly pumpkin, subtly honey, barely boozy, barely sugary. Everything is in harmony; nothing is out of step; and all is right with the world when you're partaking with a loved one. I get the same feeling from Halfling, actually. It's the same cozy, yeasty, subtly sweet aroma of yummy baked things lingering in the air. Somewhere where you know you're home. There is sort of double honey in this blend from the mead and the cakes, but it is all rounded and glowing rather than sharp and sticky. It's like taking a step back in time. Inhaling, I can picture a medieval feast-hall at night in the middle of autumn, when mead is flowing freely (last year's vintage?) and cakes are passed around after dinner. I will take some for now and some for later. Good thing the scent lingers nicely for hours! Foodie lovers, this one's a keeper.
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His red poudh 🤢 A beautiful list of notes, and all I get is barnyard oudh. Black oudh is being a tricky beast these days; it's either glorious or garish. When it burns off, this turns into something very pretty and only vaguely animalic. However, I always kind of know where it started, you know? For what it's worth, my partner only smelled sweet, strong flowers. Very, very weird.
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Of all the pumpkin patches I got this year, Devil's Night has been earning the most slathers. From a 2005 decant, I knew Devil's Night proper was a win on me. Pumpkin Patch takes all the incantations of the original and adds some extra magic with spices like clove and nutmeg. It's not pumpkin spice, and it's certainly not that thick, syrupy pumpkin spice that was thrown into 2019's crop of hair glosses and some oils. Instead, it's a beautiful unsweetened pumpkin-gourd and fall-spice sprinkling that enhances the sweet black musk of Devil's Night and bring the crispness of the leaves and the swirl of the smoke to life. Just like the original, it's quiet and understated, like secret seances in the privacy of the parlour, letting other mummers carry on their devilry out in the open. This pumpkin patch is well-hidden; dark, foggy; passing into the night after a few hours, but leaving a memory of eeriness in its wake. To me, it's even better than the first Devil's Night, and absolutely worthy of a bottle.
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CEDAR! How is this a cedarbomb when Haunted by itself has so little cedar? It is a mystery that may remain unsolved forever. Perhaps the pumpkin spices are amping whatever cedar notes lurk in the background of Haunted, but just from smelling this blend, I wouldn't guess this had any pumpkin or pumpkin spice in it at all. In a cedar pews and incense mood? This is your jam. It's a pretty resin, and quite wearable. But I don't get fall or even truly Haunted out of this at all. Where is the black musk? The vines? The pumpkin pulp? The golden amber? The notes just aren't adding up in my head!
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An instantly recognizable University, this romp through the pumpkin patch! Those who absolutely love the original cuppa irish cream in the old wooden library and like a thick, heady pumpkin spice will find this a match made in heaven. The booziness is toned down and the sweetness enhanced by the spices, while the richness is cranked up to a heady 11+. In a side-by-side comparison over several hours, Miska U's Pumpkin Patch stayed pumpkiny for an hour or two...and then quietly dried down into plain old Miska U. I wish all those great autumnal notes stuck around longer, but I still might have to get a bottle of this one and enjoy it by the hour.
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OG Antikythera has had something unpleasant and jarring in it for me since the beginning, something that persists over time even as my tastes develop. But the Pumpkin Spice version came in a decant set, so I'm here to bravely try it! The note that is unpleasant in OG is nicely subdued in PS. There's a lovely hit of spices upon application, along with a lot of cedar. As it dries down, Antikythera comes out more and more, and it gets less and less pleasing to my nose. However, it continues to remain sweeter and gentler than the original, which is definitely a plus to me. Lovers of Antikythera will probably find this a good fall twist on their beloved. The pumpkin spices (I don't smell much pumpkin itself) blend nicely with the base and fade gradually over the first hour. I won't be upgrading to a bottle (no surprise there), but I might just keep the decant.
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To begin this scent adventure, I smelled an aged imp of Blood Kiss, which was part cherries but mostly resins, quite doable for this cherry-shy girl. It is surprisingly beautiful. Then on to the Pumpkin Spice version... Oh dear. Cherry-bomb lips kiss thick syrup and cinnamon spice, and it's all so so much. Too much. How are these pumpkin spices amping the cherry so much? How are they burying all the wonderful resins? Would this age to the same glory as the original does, or would it always be the over-the-top cherry drama queening for all her might? These are questions that my decant may someday answer. For now, a hard pass on anything more than a decant.
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Disclaimer: I've never smelled the original Sugar Skull! Initially, this is a sparkly pumpkin with lots of sweetness. Ultimately, it dries down to exactly like Pumpkin Sugar HG: thick and syrupy, like pumpkin infused into maple syrup. Most BPAL has low throw on me, but this hangs particularly close to the skin, with almost zero throw and I have to shove my nose against my wrist to smell it. Pumpkin Sugar HG, on the other hand, has crazy-good throw, almost too much. So if you're looking for something a little quieter, go for SS PP. It is quite nice, but not particularly unique in my collection.
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Of all the pumpkin patches, this was probably the least pumpkiny of them all. It's very pretty. But I get a lot of pencil shavings, which is not my normal response to cedar or other resins. It's not a complex incense or a lovely book scent to me, just slightly perfumey pencil shavings. No fear for pumpkin spice here! Just a faint twist of pumpkin to the normal Lurid Library, which I traded away because it never did smell like books on me. If Lurid Library didn't work on you, this is a soft and slightly more incensey pile of pencils and pumpkins. If it did, I'd give it a try for sure!
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I get lots of leaves and black tea, and more and more mandrake root as it settles. There's something quite unexpectedly floral-perfumey about this blend that keeps it from being foody at all to my nose. It's a little strange, to be expecting cake and instead getting herby, heady flowers. I don't get any of the currant cake yet, and I hope it peeks its head out eventually with age. The leaf note is distinct from the dead leaves note, which has a 'cologney' overtone. This one is lighter and brighter, fresher. But I was hoping for some pretty smoke, and I can only detect the faintest whiff of it so far. Alas! Overall, it's a very wearable blend, but it doesn't scream fall to me. I could wear this almost any time of year if I'm in that more floral tea kind of me. In that respect, it reminds me a lot of the Carnival Diaboliques. But for a Weenie, I really want it to smell like a Weenie, you know? 2022 update: Reacquired! The leaf note is not too dead-leafy to me after three years! There is a mild, mild whiff of it that doesn't go headachey (yay!) yet has gotten a touch smokier over the years (yay!!); the cake is gone completely (boo). Overall, I get the impression of darkened dried potpourri of petals, leaves, and herbs, accompanied by a perfumey black tea. This DOES feel autumnal to me now, with kind of an elegant burgundy scent profile. Adding it into my fall rotation again!