Dybael

Imp: Holy crap this is strong. I can't tell what it is, I just know it could knock out an elephant. Wet: Ooh, how lovely! I'm picking up a shock of ozone and some clean-smelling herbs. Dry: The longer this is on, the more I smell the leather and the mugwort. The combined effect brings up some bad scent memories for me - I tried acupuncture once and it didn't go very well, and the smell of moxibustion is tied up in those memories. Verdict: I think I would really like this scent on someone else. With me, the leather and mugwort combine into a nasty burning smell, but with someone else's skin chemistry it might keep the ozoney, non-mugwort-herbs part in the forefront longer.

I'm horrible at pinpointing floral notes unless they fail spectacularly on my skin chemistry. All I can really say about Monna Vanna is that it is Very Floral, and not in a skin-chemistry-fail way. Creamy, fresh-petaled pinkish-whitish floral. The flowers don't morph at all on my skin on the drydown - the vanilla gets a bit stronger as it goes, but that's about it. It's very elegant and regal and not something I'd wear every day, but quite nice for a Very Floral scent.

Wet: There's lavender, which is nice... and there's something dark and wet and grungy, which isn't nearly as nice. Soggy tobacco? I'm not very good with notes. I keep huffing my wrist because it's such a new scent category to me - I don't really like it, but it's not oh god must wash off now like Ouija turned out. Dry: I'm getting more of a resin-y scent now. That'd be the copal, right? Now that I'm no longer being inundated with wet tobacco the scent is significantly more tolerable. While this dark, resinous herbal scent is too masculine for me to really see myself wearing often, I'm not ready to wash it off either. Later: The longer this is on, the more the copal comes out to play, and something that might be the musk? The tobacco and lavender have retreated to the background - I can't make them out as individual notes any more, just as vague aspects that temper the dusty gold resin. I never got any vanilla in this at all.

All cucumber, all the time. And man, after skimming this thread, 'cucumber' no longer looks like a real word.

Wet: Sandalwood times a million. I'm new to perfume and still learning my skin chemistry, but this is the third scent I've tried that had sandalwood in it that turned into sneezy nasal assault, so I guess it's a note that refuses to play nice on my skin. (Along with sage, and stargazer lily, and orris root... when do I start finding notes my skin actually likes?) There's something peppery alongside this particular sneezy nasal assault - is that carnation? Dry: Oh, there are the flowers! They're hiding behind a lot of woods, but since I'm no longer sneezing it has to be the evergreens coming out to play? Whatever they are, they make the floral notes very dry. I'm smelling dried rose petals even though rose isn't listed as a note. This is a Good Thing, because the lab's actual 'dried rose' note doesn't like my skin either, and this actually smells really good. Wow. This is a lot nicer after I've given it some time to dry down! I'm glad I didn't wash it off right away.

Thanks for the frimp, Lab, but I'm not wearing this one ever again. Something about dried roses, wood, or the combination thereof takes a wrong turn on my skin straight into Shoe Polish territory. The last order I got from the labs had a frimp of Ouija in it, which turned some sort of stanky wood polish / shoe polish / hospital disinfectant smell. Seance, a frimp out of my latest order, was much the same deal. I'm sure this is wonderful on somebody, but unfortunately, that person is not me.

This. This is perfect. My family has a big vegetable garden - maybe 800 square feet? It used to be double that before the trees grew too tall for the other half to get enough light. It's a lot of work, and from the moment things start getting green outside my mother and grandmother and aunt go into Garden Mode - Are we planting Big Boy tomatoes again this year -- We haven't done potatoes in a while, those funky blue ones were fun -- do you have any idea how hard it is to find kohlrabi seedlings around here? Garden-Smell has been embedded in my brain as "This smell, right here, it is Home, it is Family. It is digging in the dirt wearing battered gloves that haven't been serviceable in thirty years, it is snarking with your siblings as you set up fences and drag out rocks, teaming up with your aunt to persuade your mom to try watermelons one more year even if groundhogs and rabbits ate them all the last five times, dragging heavy bags of fertilizer down the big hill with your dad, carrying pails of blueberries up to the house for your grandmother." My 'everyday' BPAL scent is Squirting Cucumber layered over Graveyard Dirt, because it was the closest thing I could find to Garden-Smell, earthy and wet-and-sunny. It's an awesome combination, it smells great, but it doesn't bring the memories. One vegetable isn't a garden, that's like saying one instrument is an orchestra. But it was the closest thing I could find. Planting Moon is Garden-Smell. One sniff was like a kick to the back of my brain. If you walked straight to center of our garden on a sunny, breezy day, grabbed a handful of string beans and snapped them in half, it would smell like Planting Moon: Sunlight, a thousand different growing stems, nutrient-rich earth, and fresh, juicy vegetables. The dirt smell is strongest in the bottle, and fades very quickly as it dries. I definitely get lots of beans and squash - the tomato leaf and herbs are there, but less tangible. It fades sinfully fast, but that doesn't matter because I am going to obsessively hoard every single bottle of this scent that I can find until I can bathe in it every day. (Or rather, I'm going to scrape and save until I can afford a backup bottle, but shh! Please do not break my beautiful delusion.)

This smells freakishly identical to Midnight Kiss on me, minus the dark/dusty vibe from the cocoa. Other than that, they might as well be the exact same perfume. I still haven't made up my mind about Midnight Kiss - I want to say that I hate it, but somehow I keep wearing it anyway - but Hollywood Babylon doesn't have the complexity that keeps me bizarrely gravitating towards Midnight Kiss. I think I'll give my imp to my mom, she grabbed my arm to sniff at my wrist when I first put it on.

Okay, so after I put this on my mom comes into my room, and I ask her whether it smells more like wood polish or shoe polish. She said it smelled rather more like hospital, freshly disinfected hospital. So yeah. I'm beginning to suspect that woods don't play nice with my skin chemistry, maybe. I got no florals from this, just some kind of stanky musty-but-gooey tarlike wood-goop. Some kind of polish, or maybe eau de lung cancer.

Buttermilk pancakes with boysenberry syrup and goat butter! Mmm, pancakes! And here I was thinking I wasn't a foody person, hah. I got a strong, worrisome Bisquick-y funk out of the bottle and when I first put it on, but it dried to a perfect, freakishly realistic, non-bisquicky pancake. And did I mention 'freakishly realistic'? I keep having to remind myself that no, I didn't eat pancakes for lunch and then forget about it. I get more 'syrup' than 'boysenberry' from the syrup - my brain is trying to register it as maple, or maple with some sort of slightly artificial berry hiding behind it. EDIT: Woah! This lasts forever. I woke up this morning still smelling of maple and traces of pancake, and even after I scrubbed it off vigorously to make room for new scents today, there's still a trace of something syrupy on my wrists. It may not have tons of throw, but this definitely has serious staying power.

This is extremely faint on me. I've had my nose practically glued to my wrists since I first put it on, and I can barely sniff out more than a faint hint of.... possibly vanilla? I'm not a slatherer by nature and ended up reapplying this several times in a desperate attempt to get some kind of scent out of it, but no such luck. Note to self: Light Perfume + All-Devouring Skin Chemistry = No Morocco.

Mmm! Fresh and light and tidy and fruity-floral clean, 51 makes me want to lick my wrists. It smells like the juice left at the bottom of the bowl after you just finished eating a fruit salad outside on a warm spring afternoon. I'm new and not so good with notes, but I'm definitely getting lots of honeydew and... I think it's the freesia? And there's a hint of something woody way in the back to tie things together. This definitely has a 'commercial' vibe to it, but without the powdery cloying artificial nastiness that goes straight to the "commercial = bad!" center of the back of my brain.

Oh, I wanted so much to love this! I'm an apple addict, and an autumnal cider scent sounded absolutely divine. But something in this really, really didn't like my skin chemistry - it turned directly to cheap potpourri, an extremely dull and generic scent. It also made me sneeze. A lot. I ended up having to wash it off to stave off the nasal assault.

Fruitcake, while it smelled delicious, did not want to play nice with me. It stung my skin and I couldn't stop sneezing, so I had to wash it off. I tried again a couple weeks later to see if it was a one-time skin chemistry thing, but no. Stinging and sneezing. Which sucks, because it smells like, well, fruitcake, boozy fruit and nuts, heavy and foody. You smell delicious, why are you hurting me? *whimper*

In the imp, this is absolutely delicious honeyed milk with a hint of something green in the background. It's so incredibly sweet I had to fight the urge to drink the imp instead of, you know, wearing it. However, as soon as I put it on, Dana O'Shee went straight to LATEX GLOVES EW, with a hint of baby powder. I hate my skin chemistry so much.