Lin Swanson

This is all sunshine and happiness. It's the smell of running through the sprinklers barefoot and eating warm berries by the handful straight off the vine and coffee cups of fresh-squeezed citrus juice that's room temperature and gloriously just a little sour and it only came off the tree in the back yard this morning. Yes, I grew up in California 🙂 It doesn't last very long on me, in the way of citrus-heavy perfumes, , but I just don't care. For 10 minutes, or 30, or an hour, I'm living the highlight moments of being 10 and staying at my grandparents' house for the week and eating my body weight in fruit at every meal. ETA: I realize this is an awfully innocent review for a scent with an enormous phallus on the label, but here we are.

Wet, this is golden and warm - not specifically citrussy or orange blossom-y. It reminds me of an autumn afternoon, still warm but before the leaves start to turn. Dry, the saffron and bergamot show up as a slightly bitter, herbal edge to what is still a very cozy scent. Very nice.

I don't know what ambergris smells like, but based on this scent I'm gonna say magic. I love orange blossom like any California native, and this is the kind of patchouli that makes my eyes roll back in my head, but there is something Extra going on with this that I just cannot put my finger on and I deduce that ambergris must be it. This is a scent for when you do not intend to explain yourself to anybody. I'm not mad that I get that Phantom of the Opera song stuck in my head every time I wear it, either.

This is a beautifully contradictory scent. Sweet with honey, bitter with saffron, sexy with musk and a little threatening with smoke - this is the kind of story where you meet a beautiful woman fleeing a terrible fire that has consumed the village, and you go on a quest to save her and help her avenge her family and home, and then a chapter before the end you discover she set the fire herself, deliberately. I am not sure what it says about me that this is one of my all-time favorite BPAL scents. Big throw, long wear. It stains my skin and clothes golden saffron yellow (easy enough to avoid by wearing black, or tie dye, or, I suppose a scent locket) Slightly dangerous sex appeal. Wear with your eyes open.

This smells, to me, exactly like the fancy Amarena cherries Trader Joe's gets around the holidays, that I hoard for making fancy cocktails. I only get a tiny whiff of oud - and I do love some nice stanky oud, so that's not a deterrent! I made DH smell the bottle side-by-side with the fancy cherries, to check my assessment, and he agreed. Juicy sweet syrupy fancy cocktail cherries, with a soupçon of oud undercurrent. Honestly I was hoping for more indoles after the previous reviews, lol - now I wonder if the people who are getting more poo than cherry on themselves, or in the bottle, would smell it that way on me? Skin chemistry is amazing and weird. But I do love this more than I would have expected out of a mainly cherry scent, and will definitely wear it.

Musky wood, sweetened by apricot. On me this is lightly sexy, warm, sweet, and just a little fruity. It is a snuggly comforting kind of scent and I have found myself reaching for it frequently over the last month - including I had to rub it on my knitting project so I could get little wafts of it as I moved the yarn.

I am so glad I took a chance on this! Clove makes me nervous - I like it, but it tends to take over everything on me. This is a cloud of lilac like the ones under my bedroom window, with something green underneath that I can't quite figure out from the notes. The darker notes are just gentle support in the background, keeping Ms. Lilac grounded in her garden bed. Less drugstore perfume of the 80s and more a walk around the back yard in mid-May. It feels very spring-y to me and I look forward to wearing it as the weather starts to finally turn.

The lemon in this is delightfully sweet-tart, but sadly doesn't last very long on me. What it leaves behind, though, is a lovely herbal honey that stays close to the skin. It's light and comforting.

I like this, I really like this. It smells like walking down the hall of a Northern CA dorm or apartment in the 70s. There are psychedelic tapestries and black light posters everywhere. Somebody is burning incense and chanting. Somebody is eating Thai takeout. Somebody is having loud sex. Somebody is brewing some kind of herbal medicine they'll be passing out next month to really clear out your chakras. Somebody hasn't cleaned their room, like, ever. Or else they've got an indoor garden operation going on. Maybe both. In slightly more specific terms, I can pick out ginger and patchouli and mushroom if I am thinking about it, but mostly it's blended into one big swirly rainbow kaleidoscope of earthy spicy goodness. If you like to smell like blossoms or baked goods, this will probably not be for you.

In the bottle this smells sharp - and even I am not sure what I mean by that, that's just the adjective that comes to mind. Wet, it's spicy and patchouli. Dry, it smells really masculine, which also surprised me as I don't usually think of scents as being gendered, but this one smells like hot action heros to me. Indiana Jones smells like this when he's cleaned up. Young Sean Connery smelled like this as James Bond. Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. It's delicious and unexpected. Wear is fairly long - I keep catching whiffs as if Idris Elba is standing quietly behind me. Sadly, it's just me and my own wrists.