I took 4 small vials with me for my 5 months crewing a tall ship: Jabberwocky and Delphi for being brave and tough, and Coyote and Aglaea for being sexy and feminine. I never wore the second two -- there just weren't a lot of occasions where I wanted to feel girly. (I also never wore the one set of dress-up clothes I took.) I only wore scent on really hot days and on my days off, both to mask the smell of my own sweat (Delphi does this really well for me) and to add an extra "yay!" to my day. Both hot days and days off were few and far between, so I didn't go through a lot of oils.When we went to Tacoma, C. came down to the boat to visit, and she brought the BPAL samples she'd ordered. The only one she wasn't delighted with was Laudanum, which she described thus: "it reminds me of foul bandages (taken off a bloody cut after a week of being blood and water soaked)! and it has a moldy eucalyptus tinge. bleuck...!" So of course I was terribly curious about it. Turns out Laudanum smells great on me -- no blood or mold, just warm spicy goodness. Even C. admitted it was nice on my skin. She gave it to me, and it became the scent I wore most often on my days off.Here are our notes on a couple of other scents she let me try:Rose Cross: purest rose with sacred frankincense.C: the scent is like dried roses left on stone (a grave?)...not an overbearing rose smell but light and mossy. lovely!L: very rosy, perhaps a little too reminiscent of cheap incense sticksDesire: bittersweet neroli, black patchouli and black musk, gilded by apple, bergamot, blood red rose, teak, and vanilla.C: it is very woodsy but not pine...like ferns and bark and sunshine. yummy.L: absolutely gorgeous.Oh yeah, I also took my bottle of TKO aboard, for which I was glad many, many times. Sometimes a reassuring smell is just what a body needs to relax.When I settled in back at home, I opened up my BPAL box and basked in the smell. Now I leave it open all the time so I can catch a whiff as I pass by. I haven't bought anything new (yet), but I revisited some scents I've had for a while:Nephilim: I love how it starts out with a lot of fig and patchouli, very complex and delicious; but as that fades, the church-incense smell gets stronger until it's just... whoa. Nostril-jabbing. I think that's frankincense I'm smelling, in which case my take on Wise Man gifts is that myrrh smells awesome, frankincense stinks, and gold is shiny.Osun: I rated this as "not too bad" on first try-on, but it's not too good either. I think I only like it when it's really, really faint; the late-phase honey smell I liked on first test seems sickly-sweet in any significant quantity. To be fair, since I got the sample used, there's always a possibility that it may have been contaminated and that's not what it's supposed to smell like at all.Wrath: makes me feel like I could kick some ass, but I need to remember to go easy on the application -- this is a strong scent in more senses than one.