Shollin

First sniff: Cocoa and orange! And something deep and furry.

 

Wearing: Bright orange and green herbs, drying down to bright orange and deep red musk. SO good.

First sniff: Breezey, billowy and oh so clean. It reminds me very much of that scene in The Two Towers when Eowyn is standing in front of Meduseld and the wind over Edoras comes whipping past her, catching in her dress and her hair.

 

Wearing: Just like Eowyn in a dress, Euterpe is outwardly feminine and well-behaved… but there’s a fire underneath. Hail the spicy carnation, ye who keep iris powder in check!

First sniff: Bittersweet orange,sharply fruity.

 

Wearing: Oranges, book leather and dark wood. A bowl of fruit in an old library.

First sniff: SPICEpatchoulileather. No, wait, make that LEATHERspicepatchouli. Hang on a second, now it’s PATCHOULIleatherspice. Make up your dang mind, will ya?

Wearing: It’s the spice variety when it hits my skin, but the waft is strongly leather, and occasionally, just to freak me out, it flips back and forth. One of these days I’ll learn that I just can’t wear leather. Well, no, I probably won’t, because I’ll keep trying everything.

First sniff: Peppermint vanilla gorgeous wonderfulness.

 

Wearing: This slowly morphs from Scintillating to Decadence as it dries and the mint wears off. It really does smell like Brooke’s soaps, right down to the faintly-boozey-ness of the vanilla.

First sniff: “Bubbly” is the first word that comes to mind. This is a light, happy, bubbly scent.

 

Wearing: Oh WOW, this is gorgeous. It’s a very gentle lemon, drizzled with melted sugar, turned into a sparkling drink.

First sniff: A lighter Sugar Skull with hints of butterscotch.

 

Wearing: It’s quieter than I expected, which is good… because this strikes me as a cozy cold-weather scent and my WeatherBug informs me that it’s 91 degrees outside.

First sniff: Yup… brownie batter. Not straight chocolate like Bliss, or baked goods like Gluttony, but thick, gooey brownie batter.

 

Wearing: Dangit, now I’m hungry again.

First sniff: Fresh, juicy, bright green honeydew melon, with a smidgen of vanilla teasing around the edges.

 

Wearing: It’s so incredibly honeydew, with a glorious vanilla base that just gets deeper and more pronounced as it dries.

First sniff: Soft pale floral with a teeny bit of water.

 

Wearing: Oh, this is very nice. It’s smoothed out into a very round, creamy floral. By the final drydown, it is – at least to my nose – exactly what you’d get if you removed the vanilla from Antique Lace. It’s stunningly gorgeous and I’m wondering why the freep I didn’t buy a bottle… but I’m very grateful to dpoulsen21 for my imp.

First sniff: Of the four Patches I’ve tried so far (#3 is still in the review pile), this one is by far the strangest, the most unexpected. If I didn’t know this was pumpkin, I might not be able to figure it out. It’s green and wet and low ivy-twined walls of flat stones encircling a field of crops in the rain.

 

Wearing: It’s so very green! Ivy and mossy and green green green. I keep looking for the pumpkin and I can’t find it.

First sniff: Sandalwood and orris are both rather hit-or-miss on me, so I was afraid of woody powdery pumpkin, but this is just pumpkin. It’s a deep scent, no hint of sweetness.

 

Wearing: The moment it hits my wrist, it develops an undercurrent of spices that lighten the scent considerably, both in weight and in color. Every so often I catch a whiff that reminds me vividly of walking into a Cracker Barrel, all light brown wood and cosy warmth and tchotchkes from floor to ceiling.

First sniff: This will come as a shock to no one, but the Peacock Queen is, of course, All About Rose. She’s a little more haughty, a little less velvety – and a little more powdery – than Rose Red. There’s a bit of greenness to her too.

Wearing: I’m fortunate to have two Holy Grail rose scents – Rose Red and Two, Five and Seven. I don’t often feel the need to smell like a rose, so I suspect those two are all I’ll ever need. The Peacock Queen is a bit too cold for my taste.

First sniff: I got a big waft of cocoa powder right when I opened the imp. At a deliberate sniff, it’s cocoa and sweet, airy flowers. Despite the flowers-and-chocolate thing (which makes it sound rather like Valentine’s Day), it’s quite dark and… growly.

 

Wearing: Oh, hey. Leather explosion. Bottle: flowers and chocolate. Skin: leather and patchouli. Chemistry works in mysterious ways. I usually can’t wear leather, but this is pretty nice… but it falls under the category of “interesting but wouldn’t wear much,” and I have so many scents I adore that Tez just doesn’t make the cut.

First sniff: Bright pine, fresh air, and cold. You know how sometimes you can smell snow on the air if the wind is right? That’s the cold scent I’m getting from Snow Bunny. And it’s a happy pine, not foreboding like some of the dark forest scents. It’s a Christmas-tree pine.

 

Wearing: There’s a chilly sweetness above the pine, but the evergreen scent is definitely predominant.

First sniff: Er. Pungent. Quite pungent. And looking at the notes, it seems sweetpea has struck again, because the rest of it looks lovely. But something in here gives the whole blend a sharp soapy weirdness.

 

Wearing: Well, on my skin it’s soft soapy rather than sharp soapy, but it’s still soapy. Stupid soapy. The rest of it is a soft, peaceful floral, and quite lovely, but that soap note just won’t bugger off, and I can’t ignore it.

Brian (Corinthian) has been known to post "shipped through" notifications in the Lab's Announcements subforum... but it's been a while since it was updated (January, I believe).

 

Your best bet, as themerrybaker mentioned, is to keep an eye on the "I got my order" pinned topic in BPAL Chatter.

First sniff: Dragon’s blood, meet Big Red. Big Red, meet dragon’s blood. Hope y’all get along.

 

Wearing: This is more sweet than spicy, which is rather unexpected. It’s very cinnamon-candy-like.

First sniff: For some reason I was expecting Niflheim to be way green, like Yggdrasil. Looking at the description, I have no idea where I got that impression. And it was way off, because Nif is really all about pale flowers and misty darkness.

 

Wearing: Tiny white flowers and flowing water. Beautiful and misty and mysterious.

First sniff: Darkdarkdark and spicy.

 

Wearing: Spicy patchouli with a decidedly red overtone, which was nice... but it faded very quickly and didn’t make much of an impression.

First sniff: Aquatic. And… that’s all I got.

 

Wearing: Fresh air, ozone and seaspray. It’s subtle (no in-your-face ozone here) and really nice.

First sniff: The ghost of a bride-to-be, still wearing her moonlight-white wedding gown and clutching her faded bouquet. Outwardly elegant but nervous underneath… she’s still expecting her groom to arrive at any moment. She doesn’t realise.

 

Wearing: It’s not just her… the entire banquet hall is a ghost. Formal place-settings and floral centerpieces all frozen, awaiting a celebration that will never come. Perhaps when she understands, she’ll become the sinister presence of the poem, wooing in death the lover she never knew in life, but for now… she doesn’t know, and that innocence is breathlessly sad.

First sniff: My concept of incense clearly doesn’t extend to Kyphi. I’ve never smelled anything quite like this, and I definitely wouldn’t have classified it as incense. It doesn’t even smell resinous – it’s dark, liquid-smooth and sweet, almost candylike.

 

Wearing: Smooth, sweet, dark and mysterious. Goes sweeter and more syrupy as it dries… but the dry scent is somehow reminiscent of… coconut?

First sniff: Evergreen evergreen evergreen. Cold and snowy and piney. I’m not getting even a hint of anything else.

 

Wearing: ...Until I put it on my skin, and then there’s a truly bizarre nutty undertone. It’s still piney piney piney, but the nut thing is really strange and distracting. Once it dried completely, it was simply glorious. Warm, nutty, woody, with the evergreen as a soft afterthought. I never expected to fall in love with this scent – I actually picked it up for my guy, who smells great in pine. I might have to get an extra imp for him, ‘cause I’m keeping this one.

First sniff: So light I almost can’t smell it. What I can make out smells very specifically like lime zest. Not lime-flavoured anything, or even lime juice, but the green confetti you get with a microplane grater.

 

Wearing: A sudden flurry of pale purple flower petals, settling into a truly gorgeous nonpowdery floral aura with a hint of white musk. And the wrist-scent is all that plus lime, though the lime doesn’t waft at all. I wonder if my guy would consent to guinea-pig this one for me, just to see what it does…