Shollin

Butterfly Effect D: The oil is pale blue, a color I haven’t seen very often.

 

First sniff: It’s lavender, pure herbal lavender.

 

Wearing: And on me it’s not even remotely lavender. Yay for weird chemistry! It’s more of a sweet soft floral… and it dries to a faint something-fruity that might be peach? It sounds gorgeous, and it was, but for a sadly brief period of time.

 

Last reviewed by cranberry.

First sniff: Deep, dark, fruity-resiny.

 

Wearing: I have no idea why it took me so long to try this scent. Amber and apple? SO up my alley. And this is lovely – it’s strange, in a nice way, to smell such a dark apple. Apple seems to be one of those scents that’s bright and crisp no matter what it’s paired with, but this one is different, shadowed and powerful.

First sniff: A very subtle, earthy sweetness. Quiet and subdued.

Wearing: This? Is GORGEOUS. It’s dark, deep, rich and creamy, and I swear there’s vanilla in here. It’s wonderfully close-clinging and mysterious and I am in love.

First sniff: Okaaaaay… I think this is bubblegum rolled in chili powder. The afterscent smells like chipotle!

 

Wearing: Like chewing bubblegum at a Mexican restaurant. This is just funny. Once it dries a bit, the individual fruits come out a bit more – I’m definitely getting some pineapple and banana, but it’s hard to concentrate on them because the chili immediately takes over my nose.

First sniff: Hmmmm. This is dark, very dark, and though it doesn’t quite smell smoky, it reminds me of smoke. I suspect it won’t work very well on me.

Wearing: It goes from dark and smoky to light and soapy. It doesn’t work very well on me, but not for the reasons I expected...

First sniff: Soft fruit soaked in amaretto, heavy and dripping with the liqueur. Rich, heady and a little dangerous.

 

Wearing: Strongly almondy with deep rich fruit. It dried to an oddly herbal-wood scent, much darker than it started.

First sniff: Oh. Honey. Warm, thick, slow-flowing honey with flecks of green.

 

Wearing: Glorious herbal honey – it’s much greener and less sweet than the other Lab honey scents I’m familiar with, and though I adore the sticky-sweet-smoky honey blends, this one is a really nice change.

First sniff: Powerfully masculine. This is a scent with hair on its chest. It’s more resinous than herbal, with a wooden background.

 

Wearing: Sweeter than I expected, a resinous sort of sweet like honeyed incense.

I was a half-elven ranger for years in an online RPG, so Ochosi caught my eye immediately.

 

First sniff: Spiced wood and smooth greenness. I think this is what our guildhall in the Great Oak of Thelbane Forest smelled like.

 

Wearing: I smell like a dryad. The green wears off as the scent dries, leaving a fantastic smooth warm woodiness.

First sniff: Fresh, bright and wet. A little mint, a little fruit, a lot of green.

 

Wearing: The mint jumps out immediately, a bright white Mad Hatter-ish mint, and then settles back among the green-fruit bubble bath.

First sniff: The World’s Most Amazing Coconut. It’s just a little sweet, very firm, pure white coconut meat. No rum, no seawater, no suntan lotion, just the very essence of coconut.

Wearing: If I had a soap that smelled like this, I might be persuaded to forsake all others. (Except for blackrayne’s Meadowsweet, of course, my Holy Grail of soap.) It’s sheer smooth coconut perfection with no exfoliatey flakes.

First sniff: Can you make apple cider with plums? ‘Cause that’s what this smells like. Mulled plum cider.

 

Wearing: Spicyfruity and oh so good.

First sniff: Very earthy – and yes, somehow, a little mushroomy. The mushroom part is bright white – imagine the very best white mushrooms you can get at the grocery store, and that’s what this smells like.

 

Wearing: Almost nonexistent. I have to concentrate to smell anything.

First sniff: Yup, that’s candy corn. It smells like the taste of candy corn, and that weird texture candy corn has. Bright orange, almost buttery, and too sweet. It actually reminds me a bit of Midway – it has the same sweet rich buttery thing going on.

 

Wearing: All the foody girls need to try this. On my skin it instantly develops an awesome spice note that was completely absent from the bottle. So now it’s rich and sweet and just a little bit spicy and all-around AWESOME.

First sniff: Sweet almond and dirt. How very odd! It’s the dry, dusty earth note from Penny Dreadful, not the potting-soil scent of Graveyard Dirt. Dust puffing up around the sweetness.

 

Wearing: There’s a very dry leather note that develops as it dries, but it also gets fruitier. This guy is a try-again; I adored his lady and I’d like him to work with me.

First sniff: The description is all flowers, but what I’m getting is lemon tea. Very strong lemon tea.

 

Wearing: And when it first hits my skin, it’s very much lemon tea. I’m entirely confused. The lemon tea does fade after a bit, leaving a very faint impression of sweet flowers.

First sniff: Red fruit and spices. Sweet plum, a dusting of spice, and that very specific almond-cherry smell that I always feel like I can taste right at the back of my throat. (Which, according to the description, isn’t in here. I blame my weird nose.)

 

Wearing: It really does have an almondy sweetness… it reminds me of a spicier Bordello.

First sniff: Dust. Fur. Twitching whiskers and glowing eyes. And an oddly comforting warmth reminiscent of Coyote.

 

Wearing: About half a second after I put this on, it seems to have melded with my skin, leaving a subtle impression of dry warmth. The description scared me off, but I’m liking the effect.

First sniff: Jasmania!

 

Wearing: Jasmine jasmine jasmine. Sweet and white and just too much.

First sniff: I’m getting mostly lime and mint from this, with a little bit of sugar. It’s very refreshing and chilly. I like!

 

Wearing: How odd… it goes from smelling rather like a mojito (no rum, though) to a sweeter Antique Lace. It’s simply glorious.

First sniff: I was somehow expecting this scent to be darker. It’s quite musky, and one of those musks is doing the funky animal thing, but there’s a lightness to it. Citrus, maybe?

 

Wearing: It’s surprisingly subtle! I just put a dab on my wrists because I was a little afraid of the funk, but what’s happening is nice, if a bit less warm than I generally expect from a musky scent.

First sniff: Very green, with something light and fluttery on top.

 

Wearing: Dark green and astringent, and a little bit floral. This is very nice.

First sniff: The base is impossibly dark. The citrus topnote is impossibly bright. It’s a tiny, tiny candleflame shrieking “NOTICE ME!” at the top of its lungs in the middle of a vast dark theater.

 

Wearing: I can’t quite wrap my brain around this scent. It’s dark, it’s bright, it’s still, it’s strident, it’s crazy-making.

Someone, PLEASE tell me what can go with Silky Underwear/All That Jas.

 

Try The Perfumed Garden (a Valentine LE)... it's very jasminey, but dried down to more of a Silky Underwear jasmine than a Flying Fox jasmine. If you can get your hands on that one, it's the closest I've found.

First sniff: Leather! I wasn’t expecting that. (Clearly I wasn't paying attention to previous reviews. ) Leather and darkness.

 

Wearing: Well, it’s leather, and there are very few leather scents I can wear. It just smells wrong on me.