muined

Surprise win. Almost melon-smelling...? Cool, stony, almost aquatic, definitely not coniferous, rose geranium-dominated.

Kickass. I've never smelled Dorian as an oil and now I'm wondering if I need to rectify that...but I find it perfect as an HG, and it's probably the only way the vanilla would work on me. My mom says she gets tobacco from it, probably because of the musks? To me it's almost a toffee.

An incensey champaca takes over and takes no prisoners! No rice afternote, as I'd hoped there might be.

Starts out a pleasant, very mildly plastic-tinged Welches Fruit Snack. Definitely a blue/purple, definitely girly, conjures images of...Club Libby Lu, this chain of, like, little kids' makeup stores at malls in the early 2000s? Where you could make your own sparkly bright pink/purple potions. So, for me, an unattainable ideal of wealth/femininity. What was I saying? Oh yeah, I liked that stage of this scent fine but then it faded and I got...jackpot, just the rice milk scent I was looking for! Near-perfect dupe of Dove's Rice Milk & Macadamia body polish, which is da best. And yet it's so low-throw that I don't think I'll be needing a bottle.

Today's the day I admit to myself that the lab's vanilla just doesn't seem to work for me. It always goes pear-shaped. Here it's just a little off, as usual, and overpowers the apricot and wood for most of this scent's lifespan. Eventually the dark musk takes over and fades to the same baby powder that the dark musk in Hecate becomes on me. Here's to consistency! But I gotta track down an apricot scent without vanilla...hmm, March Hare or Aristocratic Couple...?

My bottle just came in the mail. I was hoping for something woody, clean, sweet, and warm (obvs.) I can't wear honey but love very sweet scents, so I was betting on the amber here coming through...but it doesn't so much. It's clean for sure, in a breezy way, and woody, yes, but woody like sage. I'm not getting smoulder. It definitely smells, er, Mediterranean, but not in the way I expected. This is unscientific, but it reminds me of, um, a bougie home goods store, like Williams Sonoma, LOL. I'll try it again, but it looks like I'm gonna swap. (Wink! Feel free to HMU.)

I love black tea, so I wanted to love this so badly (the name, for another thing, is hilarious) but I'm afraid it does the handsoap thing that Corey Shea described on me, too. (EDIT: A month later and it's grown on me immeasurably. I wasn't expecting it to smell as clean and almost aquatic as it does, but now I love the cologney freshness and spiciness, because I know what to expect. Still has poor stay, but I'm okay with that. Keepin' it!)

Swapped for it because I wanted a figgy scent, was not disappointed. I'm not a huge fan of the fir note, but thankfully it dissipates quickly, while the fig and vanilla cling. Weirdly, maybe, it smells to me like the edible moonflesh from Italo Calvino's "The Distance of the Moon" might. Lotus?

Bag o' fruit snacks left out in the sun. Not complaining.

This was the imp from my initial waters-testing order that made me fall in love with BPAL, and I still think of it as my scent. I get very little myrrh or musk from it either in the bottle or on my skin. Just, like, a bearclaw. But last week a girl in my Paleontology class asked if I was the one who smelt like incense (and sniffed my neck; thank you, BPAL!). As it dries it gets a little baby powder-y, but I like that; maybe a colloidal oatmeal lotion from a childhood memory. I put Hecate on after showering, or on cold mornings, but there is an aspect of nighttime to it. I first tried it on while reading Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark, and it reminds me of the (original) ending of that novel: “Everything was as before–dark, velvety dark–and someone’s hands, many hands, grabbed him from all sides.”