Shollin

First sniff: Namaste is very LOUD lemon over a dry wood that makes my nose twitch.

Wearing: Ooh! This is more like it. The lemon is still quite prominent, but it’s stopped screaming, and the wood has morphed into the incredibly smooth golden-brown sandalwood that was so lovely in Tushnamatay. It’s gorgeous when wet, but dries to sharp cedar that doesn’t really suit.

I’ll have to try layering Tush with Yuki-Onna or another strongish lemon to see if I get the same effect without the cedary drydown, 'cause I do love the wet scent!

First sniff: Dry and astringent, and a little bit soapy.

Wearing: Hrm. Soapy lemon over something darker, still very astringent. I’m not sold just yet. Election Night at the paper and I didn’t really have time to notice it throughout the drydown, but by the end of the night, Incantation hadn’t made an impression.

First sniff: Dark and tangy – someone is going to kill me for saying this, but Masabakes smells a bit like prune juice. It’s round and almost-fruity and very dark.

Wearing: I couldn’t shake the prune juice association for most of the night, but I rather liked it once it dried all the way – dark and plummy-fruity without being sweet.

First sniff: It’s very buoyant and fruity, but there’s something holding it back – this isn’t nearly as red as I expected. Compared with something like Bordello, Maenad is downright timid. I think, though, that I’m having the same problem identifying REAL strawberry scent as I always have with REAL cinnamon scent – I’m so used to the crappy syrupy too-sweet fake strawberry scent in everything that I don’t recognise real strawberries when I smell them. This is much closer to the scent of an actual strawberry, the subtle fresh sweetness of the white part inside when you cut it open.

Wearing: Wow! Maenad hits my skin and EXPLODES into strawberries. It’s a lot girlier than I expected – I was looking for blood-red and found pink and fluffy.

First sniff: A grey veil drawn over soft cedar in the morning mist. Goneril isn't overtly floral, but the greyness smooths out the sharpness cedar usually has.

Wearing: The topnote is faintly sweet and very light, and the cedar is still firmly underneath. It took me a while to figure out the geranium – it isn’t a scent I expect to encounter in perfume, but it plays well with the cedar. It’s a softer, paler floral than I generally like, but it’s very pretty and I found myself sniffing and smiling all evening.

First sniff: Pitch-black, claustrophobic and stiflingly warm. Smelling Laudanum is like being in a low cave.

Wearing: Ah – it’s not really black, it’s purple so deep as to be nearly indistinguishable. It’s still very close-darkness, and it’s making me twitchy – I’m more than a little claustrophobic. Once it dries it lightens up quite a bit, and the dry scent is reminiscent of dried yellow grass. It doesn’t quite work on me, I think.

First sniff: *sings soprano* LEMON! Chilly, windy, frozen lemon. I remember reading in a science book about a zillion years ago that farmers would spray their groves with water when frost threatened, to give the fruit a protective coating of ice… that’s what Yuki-Onna smells like, thick ice wrapped around a lemon still on the tree.

Wearing: The lemon in this is more sharply defined than in my lemon-standard Phantasm, but it’s still very much a lemon-tree scent rather than a lemon-Pledge scent. It doesn’t last very long, but lemon usually doesn’t. I like it – it’s colder than Phantasm, but I’m not sure it’s different enough – I’ll wear and compare one of these days.

First sniff: A very soft, pale-blue, aquatic floral cloaked in heavy mist.

Wearing: Beautiful, quiet and feminine and comforting. As Dove's Heart dries it takes on a homey sort of clean-laundry scent overlaid with cool floral, still pale blue. Serene and soothing – I keep thinking there should be ocean-waves relaxation music playing in the background.

First sniff: I’m having trouble getting a handle on Roadhouse. The immediate center is green and weedy, and there’s smoke and neon around the edges. When I opened the vial the second time, the first whiff was beer, and then it settled to the green-weediness of before.

Wearing: The first whiff on my skin is beer too, decidedly fizzy beer – and it sticks for a few minutes. If I sniff my wrists directly it’s weeds again, but the aura is beer. I put it on right before I left for work, and was very relieved when the beer-aura dried quickly to be something bright yellow-green and fizzy. Very unusual, very pleasant, and definitely something I’ll rewear.

First sniff: Midnight is a cool, dark, green floral. Wispy.

Wearing: There’s a lot of greenery in this bouquet, and it grounds the sweetness of the flowers very nicely. After it dries for a few minutes, it weirdly reminds me of all the various floral arrangements that are put behind the altar at my hometown church – specifically, the look of the flowers in that environment, with the polished-wood backdrop behind it. It’s very pretty – reminds me somewhat of Unseelie, but this one is very real and present (best word I could find), while Unseelie is decidedly ethereal and otherworldly.

I don't know if there's actually sandalwood in it, but Tushnamatay smells like sandalwood to me, and it's really glorious.

Along the same lines, in my first order I received a sample of a fairly masculine scent called Savage.  But there's nothing on the main site or this site about it.  Does anyone know anything about it?

Hi Dolly! I got a Savage sample too. If you'd like to post a review of it, you can put it in the Up-and-Coming subforum even if it hasn't been officially announced... I'll do the same when I get around to wearing it (still have a huge pile to get through!)

First sniff: Blood Lotus is magenta-coloured, wet and juicy and a tiny bit candyish.

Wearing: Warm and sweet and still bright fuchsia/pinky-purple. Very briefly on the way to work I could smell something warm and spicy on my wrist that I associate with dragon’s blood, but by the time it dried that part had vanished and it became a fruity-sweet scent. It’s nice, but not quite distinctive enough – I prefer Blood Rose.

First sniff: Hmmm. Out of the bottle, Wilde smells a bit like fabric softener – clean and comforting in a very homey way. There’s a touch of citrus and a whisper of clear water, but mostly it’s laundry.

Wearing: No question about it – on me, this scent is a gentleman. It’s not quiet so much as polite – standing back to let me go first and not drawing attention to itself. Definitely not the rogue I was expecting from some earlier reviews, but I like it all the same – this isn’t pure animal sex, it’s a freshly shaven man who likes to snuggle.

Orange Blossom, from Single Notes.

First sniff: This is quite a bit more subtle, darker and less sweet than I expected. The scent from the vial reminds me quite a bit of Lush’s Therapy massage bar, or the inside of an orange peel.

Wearing: Ooh, yum. It picks up a tiny hint of sweetness and a nice sharp edge on my skin. I need to wear this one and the Honey single note layered together sometime just to see what it does. As with all the single notes I’ve tried, my brain is immediately going “Oh, that’s what that note was in <insert name of blend here>” – in this case it’s Succubus and Masquerade. I don’t think I like it quite enough to wear by itself, but I’ll definitely keep it around for layering purposes.

First sniff: Intrigue is a sharp bright yellow in the vial, and I had trouble pinning it down. I really don’t know why my brain has such trouble identifying fig, but it’s really obvious after I’ve checked the ingredients. Fig it is, then, dark and very earthy, with a base of dark wood.

Wearing: Fig it is, indeed! Vanic will love this. Ah, dammit – there’s incense underneath, or something that acts like incense on me, because I’m getting the sweet-sharp thing again. Beth warned me once that dry woods might go funky on my resin-hating skin, and I’m guessing that’s what this is. I can’t smell it unless I sniff my wrist directly, so I think I’ll just avoid doing that, because the figgy aura is quite nice. As soon as it dries the incensey weirdness is gone – yay! The cocoa blooms very slowly underneath over the course of the evening, but mostly it’s fig, and delicious after it dries. A keeper.

First sniff: A gossamer veil of sweet white flowers topped with a harvest-wreath of sparkling fruit. La Bella Donna Della Mia Mente is an innocent scent without being little-girly.

Wearing: Oh, this is pretty. Very pastel fruity/floral, the rose pops up immediately but doesn’t overwhelm. It got fruitier as it faded, but stayed its pale fizzy self rather than going bright. I really like this.

First sniff: Russet-golden apples, overripe and just about to drop from the trees… the rustle and crunch of brightly colored leaves while walking through the woods… that blessedly welcome chill in the air that comes when summer finally gives up her fight and the night is so clear you can count every star… Samhain could not possibly be any more perfect.

Wearing: Apples and woodsmoke, immediately – as if I were sitting by a campfire in the middle of an orchard. Mulling spices dance across the top of the scent and it reminds me of the amazing hot spiced cider they make at the Irish Rover in Louisville when there’s a chill in the air. It’s ever so slightly tipsy, spicy-sweet and just really damn gorgeous. When thoroughly settled it was hinting toward caramel, but never actually turned foody, and it’s still haunting my wrist after a full worknight. I am IN LOVE.

ETA quite a while later: I wore this for Samhain this year and cannot WAIT to get my big bottle. All day long I was catching little whiffs of myself or sniffing my wrist and groaning "GOD, I smell good." Zaiem (smelling deeeeelicious in Golden Priapus... pine is fan-bloody-tastic on that boy) was highly amused - and agreed with me wholeheartedly.

And I inherited Vanic's Bluebeard, so here's the next step on its journey:

First sniff: Lavender CarpetFresh. Sorry.

Wearing: Yeah, lavender CarpetFresh. It’s not unpleasant, for all that, but it’s not something I’d normally think to wear as a fragrance. And now it’s very powdery, about fifteen minutes in. Yeah, not great. Once the powdery overlay fades it’s replaced by something murky green and just plain funky… vetiver, I guess? I’m just not a fan of any of these variants. Off it goes.

Weird... I coulda sworn I posted this a little while ago, but that might have been when my computer crashed.

I second Jolly Roger. It's wetter than Lightning and has a great salt tang to it. Tempest is another lovely sea-scent... it reminds me of watching storms come in over the Chesapeake Bay.

First sniff: Birdsong and bright, sunny flowers by the beach.

Wearing: Bright, sunny and cheery – exactly what I needed today. Pele smells like flowers without being typically floral, somehow – tropical flowers, huge pink hibiscus with bells wide open for the hummingbirds. Hibiscus-pink is just about the right colour, too – nothing pale about this lady. The ginger is tingling along the edges of the scent, not nearly as biting as Siren’s but still making its presence known. About ten hours later it’s still hanging on – faded but still sunny and cheery. Yay.

First sniff: Kali is very rich and solid. I can’t tell whether it’s blood-red or chocolate-brown – I can smell chocolate in this, somewhere at the core, but there’s so much else going on. A generous splash of red wine over rich dark cocoa, with some lighter spices and flower petals sprinkled in, all mashed together with a heavy stone pestle.

Wearing: The wine stands out most when wet, and it’s gorgeous and juicy rather than boozy, somewhat like the wine in Blood Rose. This made me smile all day, and kept its lovely body-heat warmth, the wine and cocoa getting along quite well so neither ever dominated – and though it seems like those two things would smell hideous together, they’re fantastic. Love love love.

First sniff: Torment is sharply, darkly, aggressively incensey, with a lighter aura around the edges that’s almost minty – it makes my nose cold in the same way mint does.

Wearing: Sharp, sweet, spicy, incensey, sigh. Not my thing.

First sniff: Innocence lost, a rose crushed underfoot and a higher, sweeter note poised over it like the sob of a violin – yearning and sad. Wanton is very much not what I was expecting.

Wearing: The scent has grown up a lot… it’s past its initial heartbreak and has settled into a sadder-but-wiser woman who’s just about ready to take risks again. Very soft, still slightly sad roses with a murky undercurrent. Once it’s dried this rose smolders… rose petals crushed in a woman’s hand until they absorb the heat of her skin. Yet another rose scent that’s managed to win me over.

First sniff: Oh, Egyptian Amber is really lovely. Smooth, flowing golden-bronze, with only a hint of spicy sharpness. I really really really hope it behaves on me.

Wearing: So far (thirty seconds), so good… same as in the bottle, with the smokiness kicked up just a wee bit. It’s very smoky by the time I’m going to bed several hours later - more like woodsmoke from an oven than anything else. I’m not entirely sure I like it, but that might just be my mood at the moment - I'll try it on once more before I decide. At least I know this sort of amber isn’t the thing that goes truly funky on my skin in some of the resiny blends.