Shollin

First sniff: Arachne is a light, sweet, floaty scent, faintly aquatic and golden.

 

Wearing: Slightly minty at first. It goes through a brief soapy phase, but after it fades, this scent is a very nice faintly sweet golden glow. It doesn’t strike me as particularly herbal or floral; it’s more like amber. Interesting.

First sniff: Whisker-tingling furry almond over deeper musk.

 

Wearing: Bastet is a gorgeous warm scent, lioness-gold, with an overtone of sweet almond. Fantastically beautiful. I got a lot of golden scents in this order; that wasn’t intentional, but the last four I’ve tried (Mantis, Arachne, Delphi and Bastet) give me almost exactly the same scent-colour.

First sniff: Thanks to sihaya09 for the decant! Frost Moon has a fantastic minty chill to it. I can’t for the life of me remember why I didn’t order this.

 

Wearing: Clear and cold, very pale blue. An ice-princess scent. It went oddly floral over the course of the evening, but still beautiful.

First sniff: Strong, confident floral, edged with jasmine. Bathsheba has the same confident purple feeling I always associate with orchid… but here, apparently, it’s plum, and there’s no jasmine in sight. OK, nose, work with me here. It’s fruity-sweet, with a deeper base, but the overview is floral.

 

Wearing: Oh, dear heavenly wow. I am in love. Sweet and soft and round and ripe and damn. My Yule order is kicking ass all around.

First sniff: Delphi is… very hard to parse. (Which, I suppose, is appropriate given the name… maybe I should sit over a steaming volcanic fissure and go into a prophetic fit to figure it out…) From the vial it’s mostly syrupy-sweet, but there’s an odd dry green note at the very center. Like a dried leaf dipped in honey. And after looking at the description… of course, it’s the same honeywine as in Old Athens, with a bay leaf tossed in. OK. That makes more sense.

 

Wearing: Waaaaaaay sweet when first applied. The scent has a thickness to it – not quite gooey, but viscous – and I can taste it in the back of my throat. After drying for a couple of minutes, the wrist-scent develops a smokiness that’s very nice.

First sniff: A high, cool golden scent wrapped in slightly bitter citrus. Mantis has a bit of a mountain-air cleanness to it.

 

Wearing: I wasn’t expecting Mantis to be this fresh, based on the description, but it’s really lovely. The golden note is bittersweet and very intriguing. It’s really growing on me – I can’t stop sniffing myself. By the end of the night it worked itself quite firmly onto my favourites list!

First sniff: Hmm. Deep and dark, faintly chocolatey, and there’s the tiniest hint of cough syrup floating around the outside.

Wearing: Why on earth does Cerberus smell Caribbean to me?! I suppose it’s the rum… but I keep getting flashes of being holed up in a dim hole-in-the-wall bar somewhere in the islands. And again, after I check the ingredients, I recognise fig as the strongest note, but somehow I can never pick it out when I don’t know it’s there. It didn’t grab me immediately, but it’s interesting enough that I need to try it again.

First sniff: Drool! Sugar cookies dusted with spice – it’s a less buttery scent than the drydown of Spooky, but just as warm and delicious.

 

Wearing: Well, this is interesting – when wet on my skin it smells more like spiced oatmeal. While it was drying I didn’t think I liked Sugar Cookie as much as I expected to – it’s one of those odd scents, like Gluttony was on me, that has a delicious aura but the wrist-scent is different and not nearly as good – but by its final stage it’s thoroughly yummy everywhere I sniff.

First sniff: Wow. Glasya is smoldering dark, blood-red, and very powerful. It’s a warm, close darkness bearing the promise of warm, close activities.

 

Wearing: UBERslinky. Purrrrrrrrrr. This is utter sensual confidence, knowing damn well you’re the sexiest thing he’s ever seen and taking your time about walking – no, prowling – back to bed so he can get a good look. Dragon’s blood and red musk – very good on me.

First sniff: Spice is most prominent in the vial, dusted over a red-resin base of dragon’s blood. I’m worried about the vetiver – it usually goes dark-green and funky on me. Here goes… crossing my fingers…

 

Wearing: Well, so far, so good. Serpent’s Kiss reminds me of the Christmas-spiciness of Tintagel, without the leather undertone. And after about half an hour, the vetiver turns swampy. Meh.

First sniff: Holy sugar coma, Batman! Wow. Sugar Skull smells like the best part of Gluttony – that amazing thick, rich, gooey sweet. I quite literally had to wipe my mouth when I put the cap back on the vial.

 

Wearing: Oh yeah. Rich, warm, caramel-gooey. I LOVE this.

I really need to give Katharina another try, because I put her on as I was dashing off to work, after washing with a scented bodywash AND putting a scented lotion on my legs – so she had a lot of competition today.

 

First sniff: Juicy sticky fruit is definitely the forefront, but the orange blossom is a sharpness just behind.

 

Wearing: I really, really liked this scent in its wet incarnation – bright orange fruit (though not oranges) with enough sharpness to be interesting. It went a bit weird as it dried, but I suspect that’s more a factor of clashing with all the other stuff I had on.

First sniff: Bubblegum-sweet and wet – yup, there’s lotus in this all right. I’m not getting gardenia at all, but there’s a hint of minty chill hanging around the edges.

 

Wearing: It’s similar enough to Black Lotus (which I prefer) that I think I'll pass it along to someone who didn't get to try it before it went away.

First sniff: Clear and breezy, but with a deep shadow underneath.

 

Wearing: There’s a deep green spice note under the freshness… unexpected. It turns weird very quickly. I’ve discovered vetiver isn’t something I really get along with.

First sniff: Very wet. Light, floaty, aquatic and sweet.

 

Wearing: I simply love that this perfume bears the name of the most expensive Magic card ever printed. And, happily, I enjoy Black Lotus beyond its Magic connection – it’s dreamy and ethereal, not quite solid, and still very watery-sweet.

First sniff: Juicy and red! I have a pomegranate soap and Persephone is almost the same scent. The roses are very much an afterthought in the vial – I can just barely make them out underneath.

Wearing: The rose takes more control as it hits my skin – rose and pomegranate are more evenly balanced now. I really enjoyed the juicy tartness under the flowers, but it faded quickly to just rose, and even that didn’t last too long. There are other rose scents I like better, so Persephone will be swapped.

First sniff: Yup – I can see this being a wolf scent. It’s deep and musky, with a tiny hint of sweetness. I’m guessing there’s dragon’s blood in here because of the colour.

 

Wearing: I’ve always had an affinity for wolves (and dragons), and I’m very glad this scent seems to work on me. It’s dark, spicy, makes my nose itch a bit – but wonderfully straightforwardly warm, nothing sensual about it, the warmth of den and fur.

First sniff: Hmmm. I didn’t know it was possible for a scent to be woody and bright at the same time.

 

Wearing: Lily of the valley pops out immediately, bright white flowers over the wooden base. It was nice enough – more floral than I expected – but didn’t really leave much of an impression, and there are so many scents I’m madly in love with that this one is going up for swap.

First sniff: Oh, this is pretty. Tall graceful flowers rippling in the late-afternoon sun.

 

Wearing: Lily-sweet and soft honey with just a tiny hint of powder. This scent made me smile several times during a hellish night at work. Must have.

First sniff: Morgause is a deep floral, very slightly powdery. Hope it behaves on my skin.

 

Wearing: There’s an immediate powdery sweetness, like dried jasmine. I’ll have to try this one again.

The first installment in the saga of the Travels of the Pumpkin King:

 

It’s orange! How perfect! I don’t remember ever seeing a Lab oil that was seriously orange before… green, red and yellow, yes, but no orange. Love it.

 

First sniff: Oh, very interesting. I expected Pumpkin King to be a playful scent – both because of the image the name conjures and because Jack is so much fun – but this guy is staid and serious. Straight pumpkin pie spice, quiet and very slightly dark. Heavy on the nutmeg.

 

Wearing: It sweetens on my skin immediately, but it’s a sweetness of spice rather than the caramel-sweet of Jack. The aura is beautifully subtle, a candle-warmth that hangs close to my skin.

 

Thanks for the opportunity to try this, QS.

First sniff: Hunter Moon is deep, rust-brown, slightly sweet and very rich.

 

Wearing: This scent has the same autumnal richness as Harvest Moon – they’re similar, to my nose, but Hunter is a bit redder, and there’s definitely a tinge of something feral around the edges, prowling around the firelight. I fell asleep on the couch while wearing this and woke up to a lovely burst of sweet grape, though the scent on my wrists isn’t even remotely grapey. Interesting.

First sniff: Salt tears falling on dark wood. Penthus is a bit unsettling in the vial.

 

Wearing: It’s much lighter on my skin, a fresh burst of … citrus? Very pale citrus. I like this scent quite a bit more than I expected to… so far the rose is a no-show (which is good because rose isn’t my favourite and my skin always amplifies it) and the incense hasn’t gone funky.

First sniff: A storm-on-the-air scent with a hint of R’lyeh’s grapefruit.

 

Wearing: Nyarlathotep is fresh but dark. Definitely a stormy sea, with low purple-grey clouds threatening more rain to come.

First sniff: Uranus, oddly enough, smells like a craft store. Cinnamon brooms and potpourri.

 

Wearing: Immediately I get the impression that this is one of those “nice enough, but not something I want to smell like” scents. It’s a bright cinnamon, almost Red Hots-ish rather than the pure stick scent.