Czarina

Decant from a circle. In the imp: yummy vanilla cream. Wet: the dreaded WINTERGREEN cream! ARGHH. Drydown: Milk of magnesia. I am so, so sad. I just love saffron scents. I was sure I was going to buy a bottle of this unsniffed. But I have given this several test runs, and on my skin it is consistent wintergreen. I am so, so sad. ETA 4/24/2008: I had the opportunity last night to do a side-by-side sniff of my decant with a bottle of Love's Philosophy in the possession of the lovely Eleri (see her review, supra). The two are DIFFERENT. Hers does not have the overwhelming wintergreen effect. Mine still does, so it's not an issue of aging the stuff. She could smell the difference as well. Sigh.

I suppose this smells mostly of amber and myrrh to me. I really have no good words to describe this. "Department store perfume" is as good a description as any to me. It smells good, but is not floral, and I can't identify most of the notes.

In the imp: lilac and cedar. What an interesting combination. Wet: lilac and cedar, but the cedar is quiet and in the background. Nice. Drydown: more intensely floral. This is like a cool spring evening. It really is so well-blended it is hard to pick out individual notes. I'm not usually much of a lilac fan but I like this one.

In the decant: lavender. Wet: harsh lavender. Drydown: lavender laundry detergent. Alas! I wanted there to be discerable violet. I was looking forward to figuring out what balsam of Peru actually smells like. No luck. I just get soapy lavender. Swappable, or a nighttime beddy-bye scent when my Nocturne runs out.

In the imp: honey. Wet: honey vanilla. Drydown: ginger honey vanilla. Wonderful scent, but not much throw or wearlength. I'm really having a hard time picking amongst the Lupercalias/Novel Amusements this spring.

In the decant: cedar. Wet: OMFG CEDAR. Drydown: the cedar moderates and up comes the sandalwood, rose, nutmeg. Wish I could pick out the clove and the patchouli. Still, it's very nice once the OMG CEDAR part is past (about 10 minutes).

One might call this a definitive BPAL scent--utterly unlike a department store scent, notes so well-blended that it is impossible to deconstruct without effort--in a word, heavenly. Let me try to be more specific: In the decant: benzoin and jasmine. Wet: the juniper and pine come out more. Drydown: oh, there's the vanilla! This is a wonderful vanilla-juniper-floral blend. Sweet and sensational. Haunting.

Scent: I can pick out lavender, rose, and jasmine in this one. The rose predominates over time. It is kind of a sickly-sweet, overblown, sticky rose scent to me. I would not wear this for its scent (it might also be dangerous to use this stuff while operating heavy machinery). Use: it works. Not like a sleeping pill, but it just seems to smooth out the rough edges of my sleep and helped me to not wake up in the night as much as usual. I have used it for the last several nights and feel unusually refreshed in the mornings. I have not noticed anything unusual in the way of dreams.

This is going to be a strange review, but I hope helpful to someone. I bought decants of as many of the Lupercalias as I could through a circle, and then they took a while to arrive (as decants do). I consequently could not remember what To Helen was "supposed" to smell like, and I tried it without looking at the description. Well. This smells exactly like honeyed cream to me--kind of a cross between Egg Nog and Chanukiyah, although not exactly like either of them. I can't smell the roses at all (for me, this is a plus) although my daughter says she can catch a faint whiff of them. Lovely scent, but puzzling. Where are the roses? And what is an "opaline" scent supposed to be, for Pete's sake?

In the imp: cedar. Yes, I know there's no cedar in it. Wet: balsam and patchouli. Drydown: woody patchouli, musk, balsam, with a sweet overtone (I think the beeswax). Lovely morpher.

In the decant: lilac (I think actually that is heather, but it smelled like lilac to me) Wet: crushed grass. Drydown: heather and ivy. Much more grassy than floral, and kind of a wet grassy. Very pleasant and evocative of the poem. Subtle. Not overpowering.

Sugary pine and snow. I smell no eucalyptus at all. The pine is faint, but persistent. Smells like a cross between The Ice Storm and Snow White. Pleasant but not earthshaking.

The Lab has a bottle of Purple Phoenix up for sale on eBay right now, in fact.

In the bottle: creamy fruity floral. Wet: coconut, cardamom. Drydown: out of nowhere comes a strong men's aftershave note. WTF? Would this be the red sandalwood and cedar? Man, that's one rapidly morphing scent. I thought this would smell like suntan lotion, and instead it smells like lifeguard.

In the bottle: rum and oakwood (which has a faintly herbal scent to my nose). Wet: molasses and honey and a touch of white sugar (that would be the sugar cane). Drydown: Sugar and oak. If you like Sugar Skull (as I do), you will also like this, although the sweetness is drier.

Sugar Skulls. Boomslang. Oh, and Midway makes me smile every time I smell it! It is just so crazy that a perfume can really, truly smell like a carnival midway.

I took a brief sniff of this when it first arrived and found it a little offputting. In the bottle: men's cologne, by which I mean ozone, bay rum, and maybe lime. Wet: the same men's cologne, only the ozone is fading. Drydown: there's the motor oil. Wow. And the metal. This makes me think of Socialist Realist art--How The Steel Was Tempered and all that. Despite my initial reaction when it first arrived, this so works on me. This is definitely a scent that the Czar would wear without protest also.

In the imp: almond. Wet: very assertive almond with a hint of jasmine. Drydown: the almond disappears almost completely, and up come musk and sandalwood and something that smells a bit like teak.

I'm reluctant to comment in any detail on the scent of this oil because I do not use it for its scent qualities. Fortunately, it does have a innocuous (although to my mind bland) scent: white florals, citrus, and perhaps the tiniest hint of eucalytus. I use this on my chakra points (root to crown) almost every morning, quickly but with focussed intent, and it is my suit of armor. On the occasional days when I have used it in the evening, I notice that I sleep very well. I haven't combined it with explicit white light visualizations yet, but I suspect that the two practices would boost one another. ETA: Noticed something last night that was a little unusual. We were watching a movie at home that was considerably more violent than any of the family had expected (3:10 to Yuma, FWIW). Ordinarily I find myself shrinking from such movies when I end up being exposed to them, feeling like I am being assaulted. Apparently due to the White Light I felt adequately shielded from the movie, and could just leave the room without being upset. ETA 4/18/2008: The cumulative effects of White Light appear to be more powerful than one-time use.

In the imp this smells strongly of freshly mown grass. Wet: grass. Drydown: now I am smelling the dried rose petals. It is a faint, dusty scent. Mostly it smells like straw. Below-average throw and wearlength.

Hah. I had no idea what this was for before I put it on. In the imp: hyacinth or jasmine? Certainly floral. Wet: yeah, floral. Hyacinth and jasmine. Drydown: still floral, tending towards a green quality. Hyacinth-jasmine-narcissus, maybe all three mixed. I can't smell any cinnamon, although I was expecting it. We'll see if it makes the Czar frisky.

In the bottle: nectar and sap. Wet: Berries, sap, a very faint rose scent. Drydown: Greenery. Grass. More berries. Sweet herbal note. The same sap note that is in Roadhouse (prolly dandelions). To me this smells like plants more than flowers, and is quite evocative of a neglected and decaying garden. I must say that when I was a little girl I lived in a house that had oleanders and I don't remember them as having a particularly noticeable scent at all. So I wish I could but I can't for the life of me identify an oleander in this one.

In the imp: aquatic. Wet: salt, ozone, wood. Drydown: the wood is starting to smell more specifically like cedar. I can catch a hint of the bay rum. Overall, however, the aquatic/salt note predominates. Arrr. This be a pirate scent indeed! I will have to do a side-by-side comparison to see how it differs from Mary Read and Anne Bonny, because my scent memory is not refined enough.

In the imp: dandelion juice. Wet: grass. Drydown: straw.

In the bottle: cheap aftershave. Wet: Ivy! Wow. Drydown: oak, ivy and moss. Very very green and woody. As time passes I get a faint aquatic note. I almost didn't try it from smelling it in the bottle. I'm glad I persevered.