LavenderCoffee

Testing Arachne of Lydia today and had to shout it out here! So simple and so rich. 
Soft brown and Tyrian purple: dusty clove and blackcurrant.

Two BPAL scents I've tried with palo santo/sandalwood both have lavender, but I don't find them sweet or sharp. They're both out of stock but may be available secondhand:

A Look of Peace: white sandalwood, palo santo, rosewood, and lavender (Halloween 2019)

Soft Reboot: copal, white sandalwood, sage, frankincense, elemi, lavender, palo santo, salt, and nutmeg. (December 2020 Lunancy)

My nose brain may be confused today, I put this on and immediately thought to myself I'd goofed and put on black temple burlesque. They have zero notes in common, but the darker resins in this one are working some magic with the amber to make my brain go "musk!"

As it wears the amber opens up and makes things sweeter and fuzzier. It's another stellar bpal cat scent and I'm glad to have it.

Gosh this is lovely. I wasn't sure about the ambergris and coconut components, but I love how this scent comes together. The wear for me is a light vanilla rose. If you don't think you like rose because it's too bold, this may be a good one to try out. The throw is pretty subtle for rose, but still mostly a rose scent.

It's just so good. If it sounds good to you, get it! The mandarin/vanilla kinda reminds me of juicy fruit gum at first, but then the patchouli is right there being awesome and that is definitely not a food smell. It reads as a sweeter patch to me, but obviously it's blended with fruit and vanilla, so who knows. The black vanilla really opens up with wear - not blackened, btw, just kinda deeper in tone. So good!

Plus it does indeed pair delightfully with Erotic Drops of Flower Petals hair gloss from this year's Shungas. Gonna go out and knock people over with all this mandarin patchouli goodness.

A Chocolate Cat (Yule 2021) might be the best option if you can find it secondhand, and The Small Brown Cat would probably be next best. The Cat (Coraline) has got the cat on the label and the wonderful character from the story, but not sure if the scent would appeal to a kiddo.

Huzzah for all the different leather notes from the lab! This one is a stunner: dark and soft, and tantalizingly tangled up with tobacco. I think the agarwood is cozied up in there as well, and who wouldn't be. Oak is present but not dominant at the start, and builds very gradually. I'm not getting aquatic as much as the very realistic impression of just having come in from the rain, which maybe qualifies as ozonic? I think Brianna really nails it tho, this is a perfect leather jacket situation. A good smelling samaritan has insisted that you take this jacket to drape over yourself so you can get out of the rain. Drying down there does seem to be a touch of sweet floral, but you gotta lean in to get a whiff. Maybe that's what I was wearing when I ducked under the dark leather. I feel like I gotta go write a romance novel now. Give this one a sniff, it is quite a composition!

There is something ever so slightly and fleetingly sour happening when I first apply this, and at first I thought it could be the cypress or the rose, but maybe it's those in combination with another note - could well be a lemony aspect of the frankincense. It doesn't stay sour, anyway: it quickly settles into a delicate scent of mourning, with somber resins, dark rose, and gentle cypress. There's a softness to all of it, a spare sweetness from the incense and herbs that is calming and elegant. Low throw, decent staying power.

The marshmallow foam in this is what makes it magical for me. I get the cherry candy at first, but then it's all cherry tinted marshmallow, warm and gooey, like it wants to turn into toasted marshmallows on my skin, but it's still goo. Like leaning in to sniff a cherry meringue pie, except the topping is all sticky marshmallow fluff, gently toasted. Of course there isn't really pie filling or crust happening here, but it is pure comfort food for those of us with a sweet tooth ...of the nose. Thank you, fairy lobster! 

I've really been enjoying this. I can get in close and pick out some notes - the berries and the maple are tied up in the honey for me, and a leaf breezes by in the top range - but the experience of wearing it is a comfy bear hug of honeyed musk. Not too much honey, not too much musk. Perfect amount of personal scent bubble. 

This is stunning. It's definitely not coffee forward, but coffee and vanilla provide the perfect amount of dark and sweet to back up a delicate jasmine. And I do mean delicate - it's neither an indolic nor a big brassy "get ready boys!" kind of jasmine. 

On application, the jasmine is definitely the leading note, but this only lasts for the first 15-30 minutes or so. As it wears on my exposed wrist the vanilla really opens up, and it's a scrumptious rich vanilla flavored with coffee, but the scent stays close to the skin. In the crook of my elbow and under my shirt I get a sultry combo of jasmine and coffee together, and where the oil has gotten on my shirt a bit, the jasmine remains forward.

This seems like the kind of vanilla that might age well, and I really enjoy how it wears right now, so I'm thinking about a bottle.

Can't recall when I last tasted the rainbow, but this scent seems to skew to the fun sugary lemon/lime part of the spectrum on my skin, and it's lighter on the cannabis component than the cookies or the brownie.

Ahhh nostalgia: it's keebler soft batch (and/or chewy chips ahoy) but with weed. I cannot stop sniffing it, it's great.

I smelled 2021's Brood X before I smelled the previous decade's batch of Cicadas. They're completely different but I prefer this one. I love the earthy sweetness of it underscored by the amber, and I love that I can smell the acorn! What a great note to throw in with hay and corn stalks. Plus it really comes together and smells like something more than rolling around on the ground at the edge of the corn field. Lovely summery goodness.

Ayup. That's the stuff. Marvellously sticky sweet chewy gooey patchouli. Not sweet sweet like on the foodie end of things, but definitely sweet for a patch scent. Plus the floofy marshmallow is so great with the unctuous vanillic benzoin, unf.

I can't help myself with orange blossom/honey combinations, and musky floral is also a genre I love, so I am very pleased to have this one.

I especially appreciate the addition of magnolia and mallow, it's wonderfully balanced and surprisingly light. Such a perfect summer scent!

Oh hell yes clove! A few additional newer clove scents that are amazing: 

And I Wede My Corne Well I-Now for a perfect summery clove

Black Pepper, Amber, and Clove for a fancyy clove

Cacao, Sweet Patchouli, Smoked Clove, and Green Cardamom for unfff stop it

Gingerbread and Leather for even more unff 

Gooped Familiar and now also Cinder Paw for clovey cats

Kobold Barista for clovey coffee

Lavender, White Clove, and Ambrette Seed for a calm clove

Between sawdust and red musk, somehow the sawdust wins. It's a rather clean sawdust, and I would not have guessed sawdust either. I might have guessed plum wine, which is almost correct. Maybe silly to guess at interpretation but this is almost like taste of something delicious in a cheap setting, ie., on a hastily assembled wooden platform - although the backdrop is lovely. It's unique for me in a couple ways: haven't got anything else with sawdust, and my skin doesn't take off with either the red musk or the frankincense. Clean, dark fruits, drop of wine, easy to wear.

A perfect fruity black tea scent. I'm too much of a space cat to brew properly most of the time, so I get something bitter and oversteeped, but! If I got my hands on the perfect blend and I didn't louse it up, I imagine it would smell like this. Plum can go super sour on me sometimes, but here it's well balanced with the other fruits and I can still smell the tea. I love how the mandarin adds a juicy pop at the beginning and then lingers around in the background too.  

Oh my this blackened lavender is exquisite. That and the red labdanum are strongest out of the gate. Lavender recedes as it often does, but the gorgeous floral champaca takes over for the lavender, slowly unfolding and developing through the drydown. Labdanum settles down too and folds in with the other resiny bits. I'm also really enjoying the tobacco backbone of it.

Overall it's murky and moody, but in an elegant way.  

Hmm, yep: there's a bit of spice in the figgy puds. or perhaps the smoke is reading as spicy? Plus the vanilla reads more like a vanilla musk than a gourmand vanilla. A strange combination of the edible and inedible, like the curious anthropomorphized characters on the label. In the end it's mostly smoky spiced figs.

This is a lovely tribute to the lord of dreams. Some of the individual notes pop out when freshly applied - a true herbal lavender, a shot of sophisticated oud - then everything swirls together to transport you somewhere else entirely. The sweet agarwood settles in at the center of this scent, intertwining with warm amber and subdued lavender to tug at your heartstrings, while white musk sparkles around the edges. It seems like it could disintegrate into powder at any moment, but it stays soft and true and skin close.

I ordered a bottle of Death Adder in September 2022 and may have tested it briefly in the weeks after I got it, I don't recall having a strong reaction to it at the time. I think the coconut was most prominent so I set it aside.

Fast forward to today, eight months later. I felt like some Snake Oil, pulled this one out of the drawer, and opened it to sniff: wowwww hello vanilla! What a luscious resiny treat this is. The black coconut adds a deft touch of sweet fruit that is perfectly balanced. The warm grassy vetiver emerges as it dries. But danggg the SO + vanilla + opoponax is knocking me out in the best possible way. I am just gonna be sniffing myself all day now sheesh. 

Basically agree with Beary Strange: this is a yummy pink lotus scent. The dragon's blood acts as a warm backdrop for creamy vanillic lotus. I'm not getting anything bubblegummy and it's very wearable and comforting. 

I was wary of this one based on my experience with Cacao, Black Leather, and Incense from the '22 Lupers. That one was a big ol miss for me. This one is much better, but the leather and nag champa still dominate on my skin. I've had this over a month now and it's settled in really nicely, the black leather is giving a good leather jacket vibe, but I wish I got more sweet patch and clove.

Anyway patchouli is one of the notes that tends to age well, so I will find a nice little cave for this bat to hang out in. Plus the label is so dang cute! In my heart tho, I think a Snooty Bat would really smell like Cacao, Leather, Oakmoss, and Black Oud from the '23 Lupers.