kythryne

How do y'all feel about honey and maple?And different flavored honey, not just the standard kind? I love maple syrup, the darker the better! Strongly flavored honeys are good too. What is your favorite thing to do on a cool fall day? Bake! It's been too hot all summer to bake bread, but I think it's about time to start a sourdough culture again. If you have pets, is there a SPECIFIC toy they like to play with; brand and size? Is there a treat/cookie they eat? What brand and size? Maggie loves any kind of squeezy toy -- big, small, with or without squeakers -- I've ever made her toys by sewing a square of fabric together and stuffing it with polyfill. As noted in my profile, she can't have food treats due to allergies. The cats mostly scorn toys, but like catnip. What's your ringtone? A cuckoo clock. What think you about receiving tea accessories and/or miscellany (like mugs, cups, saucers, strainers/filters, honey, natural sweeteners [like stevia])? Tea is good! I don't use sweeteners in it, though, just straight-up tea. How do you feel about copies of music or dvd's that your witch might have that you might enjoy? Not just mixes, but whole copies? I prefer not to receive entire copies of cds or dvds, especially if it's something by an independent artist. Mix cds are great, though. Tarts? Yes/no? In moderation. I actually have a lot of tarts and scented candles right now. I'm wondering if my witchee would like to try these types of things (like the caramel with sea salts or chocolates with chilis/bacon/salt etc.)? I love love love salt caramels -- I've even made them a few times. Spicy chocolate is tasty too, as long as it doesn't contain peppercorn. Kind of dubious about the bacon chocolate, but I'd be willing to try it once. What's your favorite animal? Cats. What one (or two, if you really must) BPAL bottles are you most longing for? The Illustrated Woman. I've been planning to order it, but the last few lunacies haven't grabbed me, so the order hasn't happened yet. What's your favorite "I know it's bad for me but I can't help myself" treat? Hagen Daaz chocolate ice cream. Very important question: Are you planning on buying anything off your BPAL and/or other wishlists during the round? Maybe. As mentioned above, I'm planning to order a bottle of Illustrated Woman the next time there's an update with something that appeals to me. And I may buy some socks and armwarmers, because it's starting to get chilly here. Do you wear a watch? If so, what kind/style? Nope. I have tattoos on both wrists, and watches look funny over them.

How is it that no one has mentioned Zombi yet? Dirt + roses. I don't personally care for it, but I always get people to sniff it because the reactions are great. Scarecrow is also interesting. Very hot and dry and dusty. Eat Me and Drink Me are worth a sniff, and so is the Highwayman. I'll second the suggestion of Mata Hari, too. Very unusual mix. Miskatonic University is interesting. Wanda isn't all that strange, I don't think, but it's a very complex dark scent -- all wine and musk. Hurricane and New Orleans.

I've been searching for a neroli scent for a while now. Ditto for sandalwood. This doesn't smell overwhelmingly like either to my nose, but it's beautiful. It has the gorgeous sandalwood from Underpants anchoring down this spicy-floral scent that's just lovely together. I'm not sure I've found either my holy grail of neroli or sandalwood, but I HAVE found something really nice.

I'll join the GIN! choir. Mind you, gin is my poison of choice (although I usually drink it with cranberry juice, not in martinis) and I quite like the smell of it. The juniper is very crisp and resinous, which I like. I like strong gins, though. I'm not sure I end up smelling like booze -- it goes more herbal/resinous on my skin after a few minutes. It's a very pretty scent, in my opinion, and I will probably wear it fairly often.

Oh, this is PRETTY. It reminds me of a place I used to live in Florida, about ten years ago; someone in the neighborhood had an enormous night-blooming cactus growing on his fence, and I'd go walking at night with my dog and luxuriate in the smell of the warm summer night air and the cactus blooms and the salt breeze blowing in from the ocean. And orange blossoms, which were usually gone by then but sometimes summer would come early enough that they'd overlap. This is ethereal and beautiful and I'm going to have to buy a bottle. I can't pick out any distinct notes, just a beautiful and very unique scent.

Sniffing from the imp I got so much mint that I set it down and went to make sure it didn't contain pennyroyal before applying it. Very, very sharp mint/herbal/green scent. On my skin, though, it almost disappears! I'm normally not a heavy slatherer, but I think I will make an exception for this one because I really like it and want to be able to smell it. It morphs from the sharp herbal to something very cold and crisp and also soft somehow. It reminds me a little of Pele, which is probably the white ginger and florals -- the same sort of tropical warmth, but tempered by icy herbals. I think this may become a regular summer scent for me, because it feels delightfully cold and fresh without being medicinal.

I had high hopes for this based on my experience with Sleepy Moon, which I love to bits. So when I first sniffed it in the bottle and thought it was going to be too sweet for me, I was sad. But I slathered anyway, and wow, so glad I did. As others have said, this comes across as a very crisp, spicy floral with a sweet undertone. I can pick up a whiff of the honey (which is odd in and of itself, because that's a note that usually goes O HAI THAR on my skin) but mostly I smell the florals. And I think ClaireN is dead on about the surinam cherry -- I ate those as a kid, and this has the same sort of astringent sweetness that those do. How odd, I've been trying for YEARS to remember what those were called, with no success. I'm also getting the green notes that are present in some of the rose blends, and a little bit of spiciness that I can't quite place. It's a very pretty, deceptively simple scent.

I'm posting a review despite the fact that I haven't personally been able to test this yet. My partner saw the imp when I opened my package in the car after retrieving it from the post office, demanded that I apply some to her, and immediately appropriated it the imp. And then I walked around Home Depot for a while, ostensibly trying to decide on new flooring for my office, but mostly going weak in the knees and occasionally grabbing her wrist to sniff it. It started out as a lovely mellow root beer (and I don't even like root beer) and then mellowed out to a spicy warm vanilla-wood-sassafras thing. And did I mention the weak in the knees part? Because yeah. This is an amazing scent. At some point I will have to wrestle the imp away from her (probably by presenting her with a bottle) and try it myself, but yowza. ETA: Finally tried it myself, and it went to cheap root beer on my skin. We have radically different skin chemistry, though, so I wasn't surprised. I may try it in a scent locket, but it's easier to sniff it on her.

I get sweet citrus out of this, with the very slightest undertone of mint. A very light, fun scent. It's a lovely cool spring/summer scent, and I think I'll be wearing it a lot more frequently now that the weather is warming up. I'm pretty sure I want a bottle. One of my cats came up while I was putting this on today, and insisted on investigating the imp. I think a bit got on his nose, because he gave me a filthy look and started flying around the house as if pixies were pulling his tail. Of course, he does that pretty much every morning, but it was a little more pronounced than usual today.

This smells like rose geranium to me, with a hint of other sharp herbals -- lavender, maybe? -- somewhere in the mix. It's a very clean, herbal scent, not something I'd wear for perfume, but I happen to love rose geranium and I've always found it calming. As for its intended use... it works. I have rather horrendous PMS, and it works wonders for calming me down and restoring sanity. Definitely a keeper.

This is one of the few LEs for which I've sought out multiple bottles, which tells you something right there. The night I got my first bottle, I had a raging headache, and I'd been working all day and running into problems at every turn. My partner got home from work late and wanted to go out to dinner, and although I didn't feel up to it, I grabbed my purse and dabbed a bit of Sleepy Moon on my wrists and went. On the two block walk to the restaurant, my head cleared, my fatigue lifted, and I started feeling pleasantly calm and a little sleepy. Let's just say that my wrist stayed glued to my nose for most of the rest of that evening. It smells pretty much the same in the bottle and on my skin: clean, herbal, and green/purple. I can pick out individual notes if I try -- lavender, bamboo, chamomile, poppy -- but it all blends together into a gorgeous, calming whole. I don't wear this much during the day, because it does tend to make me feel a bit drowsy, but it's a perfect bedtime scent.

The first time I tried this, all I got was plum. Fruity scents aren't my thing, so I put the bottle in my BPAL box and promptly forgot about it, figuring I'd either try it again at some point or swap it away. A few nights ago I was bored with my usual scents, so I decided to give this one another try. Now I honestly have no idea why I didn't like it. Maybe it just needed to age for a few months in order to work on me? The plum is still there, but it's mellowed to a light sweetness in the background, with the peony and reeds coming out to play. I don't get much of an aquatic note, but there's a hint of it deep in the mix, rounding things out nicely. It smells rather pink to me, but not a bright pink, more of a deep, rich pink. It's very summery, but not overwhelming -- a good day or evening scent, feminine and strong and slightly quirky.

Severin is lovely. Tea and leather and lemon. I second the suggestion of Embalming Fluid, as it's a nice light citrusy scent. The older version of 13 smells very orange-ish, at least to my nose. It's also chocolately, and I know it has vanilla but I can't smell that at all. Maybe as a compromise between foody and citrus?

The first few times I tried this, my impression was "meh." It was nice enough, but it went kind of sweet and craft-store-ish on my skin. Not bad, just not something I wanted to smell like. Tonight, I decided to try it one last time before I put it in my swap pile. I'm very glad I did, because it blossomed out into a gorgeous, gorgeous spicy carnation scent. It's still just slightly fruity, but not overpoweringly sweet like it was the first few times I tried it. I can really smell the carnations, and it actually reminds me very strongly of Lush's Red Ruby Slippers. This is a good thing, as that's one of my favorite scents ever. I don't think I'll buy a bottle of this just yet, but I'll keep an imp or two around. Hopefully it's not just hormones making my skin chemistry go weird, because I really like what it's doing tonight. ADDED 10/26/07: I just described this elsewhere as "...a spicy carnation/musk/plum scent that smells slightly like fall at a craft store, only not so twee." This is a really gorgeous scent for early fall, since it's warm and spicy and slightly sweet without being cloying. It reminds me a lot of the Lion in feel, though not so much in scent -- they both have this lovely warmth.

I use this one quite a bit, especially when things are stressful. I have a three-branched candelabra on my altar that I bought in New Orleans this spring, and I usually keep red, yellow, and orange candles in it, annointed with this oil. I always feel calmer and more grounded when I'm burning those. My cats seem to like it too. Especially my little girl cat, who is firmly of the opinion that she is Queen of the Universe. The scent? Fruity, sweet, and warm. It's a comforting scent.