Laughing Seagull

I don't have anything poetic to say about this one. Buddy, that's orange soda! Doesn't last long, also like orange soda.

Something in this goes unpleasantly bitter and waxy on me for a good while. I could swear that narcissus was here, though it isn't in the note list. Heck, there aren't ANY florals in the note list. I'm baffled. Maybe what everyone else is reading as "clay" I'm interpreting as "wax." The maybe-narcissus does taper off and is replaced with pretty much pure clove after a while, and I do like clove. There are other clove scents I like more though, where I don't have to sit through a waxy nightmare to get to the good stuff.

Not much to say about this one. Yup, that's a candy cane! Lasts longer than expected. Sweet and refreshing. Love it.

I enjoy everything about this except the carnation, which behaves obnoxiously and keeps injecting a bubblegumminess into this that I dislike. Underneath the annoying bubblegumminess, there's a delicate dry grassy smell with a hint of fruity musk that's pretty enjoyable. Especially with the overbearing carnation, though, it's a little too delicate for me. I prefer The Icebergs.

The gingerbread... It's invisible!! I don't get the bready, molasses-y, lasts-forever-y gingerbread that I experienced with Gingerbread Zombie here. Instead, I get a fizzy lemon-ginger concoction. It's a nice smell in its own right, but where the f*** is my gingerbread?

This is beautiful. I wasn't impressed with it in the vial (I smelled lavender and not much else), but putting it on my skin seems to "activate" it. Once it's warmed up on my skin, it reminds me of a professor I used to occasionally pass by when I was in college. I never took any of his classes, but he would stand around outside smoking a pipe with really good smelling tobacco in it. It has a sweet, vanilla-like quality. Overall this is a lot sweeter than I had anticipated. This is a good thing. It keeps the tobacco flower from going off the rails as it so often does. In fact, it strikes me as surprisingly edible-smelling - were it not for the tobacco, I might wonder if I accidentally got a decant of lavender and white chocolate madelines. I want to wallow in a bathtub full of it.

Ranger is all cozy leather, pine sap, and woods to me. Fighter's leather gave a glossy black impression, whereas Ranger is a well-worn suede. It's lazy cuddles on a couch with a granny-square blanket draped over the back of it in a rustic little lake house. I wouldn't have known that patchouli was in this if it wasn't in the note list; I usually find patch "dirty" smelling, but Ranger doesn't strike me as dirty at all. In the last minutes before the scent fades, up-close I detect something vaguely citrusy that reminds me of black musk. I believe that this particular Ranger is more cuddly than deadly, at least to their party members. This is a snuggly, comforting scent. And much like snuggles, I wish it lasted longer.

Straight up cinnamon incense. Woody, smoky, a little spicy, kind of dirty. Amber adds powdery sweetness once it dries. Not entirely unpleasant, but too dirty for my liking.

I received this as a frimp and was afraid of it because I expected it to be exceptionally earthy and gritty - a relative of Burial, I thought, and Burial made me feel physically ill. When I popped open the Nosferatu imp I was delighted with a rich wine scent with an almost cherry-like twang to it. Sweet but not too sweet. Red. It makes me smile. There is an inexplicable coolness to it as well, but in my opinion it's not like "rotting things in a crypt." This vampire lives in a cold cave full of stalactites that drip icy water onto your scalp if you don't watch your step. You adjust to the dim light and you see an array of luxurious velvet pillows and a nice rug that contrast amusingly with the rough stone walls. Something metallic emerges eventually. Maybe you've had so much wine by this point that you've failed to notice that your companion is drinking something suspiciously more viscous. This is a vampire that makes you go, "Eh, it was worth it" as the light leaves your eyes. 10/10, exceeded my expectations in every way. I'm baffled by the wildly different reviews on this.

This isn't exactly a "me" scent because it turns out to be very earthy (I think due to the sage mostly), but it isn't unpleasant. The caramel note is so subtle to my nose that I wouldn't know it was there if it wasn't for the notes list. Minty tobacco is at the forefront - an herbal mint such as the one in Envy, not a candylike mint. It fades away after a while, as mint tends to do. I smell the white musk more than the black musk. Despite containing caramel, it's not really sweet. Overall, white musk and tobacco seem to be the stars of the show here.

Queen reminds me of Dragon's Milk but I like it less. It opens with something sharp and unpleasant. I had thought maybe it was labdanum or Bad Honey at first, but the consensus seems to be that it's vetiver. I think this has honey and amber in it and I could swear that I detect heliotrope lingering at the end. I'd rather just have Dragon's Milk, but this will do while the Ars Draconis collection is MIA.

Got this as a frimp with my most recent order. It is definitely not what I expected. This is a Pennsylvania thing, but let me tell you what this smells like initially: someone spilled Frozen Run on a rosewood piece of furniture. To give everyone else a chance to figure out what I'm talking about, the scent is comparable to wintergreen, teaberry, or black birch with a rosewood undercurrent. I recognize that woodsy note from Red Queen. I'm not wild about rosewood but I do like that teaberry smell. Then it dries into an explosion of overwhelming waxy lilac. I'm not a lilac fan.

This was a frimp that I expected to hate because my track record with honey and orange blossom (both individually and together) is horrible and rose and sandalwood are very hit-or-miss notes. The odds were against this one. It's unexpectedly nice, especially when wet. The honey in Jezebel is somehow different from any other honey scent I've tried. Normally I find honey notes unpleasantly sharp, but this isn't the case with Jezebel. My guess is that either it's a different kind of honey, it's uniquely softened by its companion notes, or it's just a smaller quantity than usual. Regardless of why it is the way it is, this honey is fruity and pleasant. Jezebel does get a bit of a funk while it's drying. I don't know what the source of the funk is, since orange blossom, roses, and sandalwood all go funky on me sometimes (but sometimes not!). The funk dissipates after it's completely dried. This may be a locket scent, and it may be the one that gets me to give more honey scents a chance in the future. Much to think about.

This is definitely a cousin of Cheshire Cat, sharing a couple of notes (lavender, black musk) and the two are borderline indistinguishable from each other after several hours. The opener makes all the difference though. Cheshire Cat opens with juicy grapefruit while Mad Hatter is like cracking open a jar of those tiny pillow-shaped butter mints that I go nuts over. The waft is nice butter mint-y goodness, but if I sniff it up close I get a very "drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth" kind of vibe with a hint of "my high school gym bag." To be fair, the Mad Hatter probably would be into drinking orange juice after brushing his teeth. The overlap with Cheshire Cat and the toothpaste-orange-gymbag bit makes me reluctant to want to spring for a full bottle of this, but I'll be keeping an eye out for more pennyroyal scents.

I once saw someone describe La Croix as tasting "like someone yelled the name of a fruit in another room." That's kind of what Machu Picchu is to me - like someone yelled "amber" in another room. I can imagine that there's probably amber in this, but I can only smell a weak, strange latex smell with the vague idea of a specific kind of amber (that I don't like) if I shove my nose right up into it. I was expecting something brighter, sweeter, more floral, fruitier. I guess the "mountain breeze" blew away everything else and I'm left with the sticky, sap-oozing stems of cracked and blown-over plants.

This was a good way to learn that I hate hemlock. Started as a nice crisp, juicy apple scent with a haze of sweet opium smoke and a floral breeze and devolved into an acrid, horrendous green scent that I hate. It suits its name, but at what cost?

Reminiscent of Brisingamen, but with the addition of gummy peach candies. I find myself wishing for a little less amber, though that would drag it dangerously close to "peach single note" territory.

This is initially a giant bowl of maple syrup and vomit with a tiny fragment of French toast floating in it and something vaguely nauseating wafting in the background. I was actually tempted to wash it off because I found the initial smell incredibly overwhelming and unpleasant, but it becomes more bready, spicier, and tolerable once it dries. I wouldn't call it funnel cake though. Not sure what kind of funnel cakes they've got going on in California. EDIT/UPDATE: I retried this in 2023 and it has aged nicely. The "vomit note" is gone and it has evolved into a yummy french toast with syrup or monkey bread scent. It is still VERY STRONG!

This reminds me of a Hoya plant that I took care of in the college greenhouse when I was in school. It had great umbels of perfect star-shaped flowers that dripped copious amounts of nectar all over the floor at all times. This is to say that the gardenia and something green and succulent are strongly at the forefront on me for the first several minutes. It's humid and tropical-feeling. The vanilla is smooth, lightly sweet, and subtle, and I'm guessing is being enhanced by the amber and/or ambergris. Vanilla frequently turns into a strange, gritty, plastic-like scent on me, but this remains very smooth. I mostly "feel" it in the back of my nose as a calmer gardenia and something cool and ozone-like (probably the chrome) hangs in the foreground. I'm not super familiar with commercial perfumes but I can see how someone might get that impression, especially when comparing this to BPAL's heavier scents with incense and dark fruits and things. This is a light, white scent. Torture Queen was a blind bottle that I picked up because she suits my aesthetic - I have more piercings than brain cells. This is my first blind bottle purchase that has actually worked for me. It also came with a beautiful card that I want to display in some way or another.

Despite how simple the description is, this one's a real morpher. As a big fan of cold things I had pretty high expectations for something called "Cold Moon" and this oil really hit it out of the park. It begins with the tiniest hit of chocolate and a frigid blast of frozen conifers. When I say a frigid blast of frozen conifers, I'm talking "it's raining liquid nitrogen on a Christmas tree farm." This is the kind of cold that I was hoping for from the peppermint and pine duet. As time passes it gets more chocolaty. 8 hours later (it lasts quite a long time) I'm pretty much left with exclusively chocolate. Cold Moon is pleasing to me and I find it decidedly Christmasy somehow.

Definitely more pine than peppermint. I had expected (and kinda hoped) that this would be an aggressively camphorous, ultra icy scent but it really isn't. It's fresh, clean, and surprisingly subtle. It's not bad but I prefer Jersey Devil, which strikes me as colder somehow.

Y'ALL. I pulled the decant of this out of the bag it came in and sniffed the outside of the container and immediately had to put some on like an impatient gremlin. My god. Holy shit. This is SO GOOD. Front and center is the brilliant gingerbread note, which I hadn't tried before and need more of in my life immediately. Secondary to that is a chilly blast of sinus-clearing peppermint which hangs in the background for a surprisingly long time, mainly sticking close to the skin; I "feel" it in my nose more than I smell it, if that makes sense. The choco chips are subtle - like there are two to make the zombie's eyes or something, rather than the cookie having an excess of them. I feel like this scent could net me a ton of compliments. Gingerbread remains the star of the show, and what a star it is!! It truly is recognizable as GingerBREAD and not just baking spices. I'll be death (undeath?) matching this against GB Invisible Man to see which one I want to bottle. Additional notes from a few hours later: The gingerbread note lasts for a good long time, remaining long after every other note has checked out. It wafts pretty well. If I put my nose right on it, it smells a lot like Shub-Niggurath, but the waft is distinctly more cookie-like.

This was a generous frimp from VV. Transeo strikes me as a lighter, less rich counterpart to Blood Rose, which is not what I was expecting from it at all. It's not necessarily a bad thing. It pops off with a crackle of orange and something I can't put my finger on (might be the orange blossom), which immediately vanishes into the ether and is replaced by wine and roses. Unlike Blood Rose, this lacks the thick sweetness (and oil color) I would expect from something containing dragon's blood. When you think about it as "a vampire trying to blend into human society" it does kind of make sense for it to smell like "not quite blood rose" or "blood rose covered up with something else." That said, I already have and love Blood Rose - but I would recommend this to anyone who found Blood Rose too rich or sweet but otherwise enjoys it.

When the oil is fresh outta the vial, I definitely get something acrid that could be construed as volcanic. Within a few minutes, Isles of Demons then strikes me as about 60% black musk, 30% juicy tropical flowers, and 10% smoke. I've never met a black musk scent that I didn't like, and Isles of Demons isn't the scent that breaks that streak. That initial burble of magma or whatever isn't the most pleasant thing, but it only lasts for like two minutes. As usual, black musk has a lemony quality to it that I'm extremely fond of. The isles are light and breezy but still noticeable, which I like in a scent. I'll be deathmatching it with Pele and Machu Picchu in the near future since I'm on a tropical scent kick.

Delicious lemon Bundt cake and... Something else. I'm having trouble figuring out what the Something Else is. Patchouli? Vanilla going weird? It reminds me of a component that I didn't like in Snake Oil, so I figure it must be one of those two things. It's SO close to being highly enjoyable, but that "Something Else" is really bugging me.