patina

Vetiver! But not brown vetiver, this smells black, like charred ivy leaves that crumble to the touch. The vanilla and patchouli smooth things over a bit even in the beginning stages when I can't pick them out. Very cozy on a winter's day. I'm not sure about a bottle but I'm happy to have a decant.

Sniffing: A strong green aquatic and stone. I usually can't pick out stone notes but I can here. On: Incense comes out more than anything else. It's sweet, maybe a little lemony. I have a sense of crystalline amber even though this doesn't do the amber-powder thing at all. Like Stormclouds On the Midway this is sweet and intriguing but faint when not smelled up close.

Sniffing: Gentle white florals and burnt soap? On: Better than that sounds though it does smell like Ivory soap and I'll forever have an association between soap and sandalwood. I think the "burnt" part is more like incense ashes. Must be the resins + sandalwood. This would work well as a Halloweenie scent.

It's a bit like Snow White, but not nearly as much as Cotton Phoenix was like Snow White. I actually compare it more to Peppermint Buttercream Frosted Red Velvet Cupcake or The Waltz of the Snowflakes. The mint does give a slightly watered down effect to the Snake Oil, but Snake Oil is such a warm scent to me that that impression dominates. On drydown, I can understand the "Snake Oil snuggled in Snow White" comparison better. Edit: After some aging this may now rival the old Asp Viper for my favorite Snake Oil version. The mint keeps the Snake Oil from being overwhelming in hot weather and it's just perfect, plus a lot more work safe. It's hard to overstate how much I like this.

Immediately I get a blast of the sweet, mellow, fizzy aquatic citrus from the GC Sundew. As this dries down it gets a bit greener and a bit of rotting wood pokes out. Oddly for a moss scent, the moss doesn't dominate. It's a bayou scent for sure though. I'd also compare this to Adoration of the Mi-Go.

Oh nice. A healthy dose of snake oil and almond with snow white with just a touch of cotton for that "clean sheets" smell. Too good. Too pure. Edit: I think a lot of people will love this, but on me the cotton smells unpleasantly soapy. Boo.

It starts out really sweet, almost a medicinal grape syrup. That soon settles down into something nice and the cologney, leaf-moldy leaves come out, before stepping back. I think I smell mint somehow. On the final drydown, it smells like soft violet candy with the occasional faint whiff of something woody. I've never smelled pastilles in my life but I'm pretty sure this is how they would smell. My only reservation is that this scent goes very faint and close to the skin after only a few hours.

It goes on a bit bubblegummy. Must be the cherry and rose. There's a faint picklejuice note that goes away. I'm weirdly reminded of frankincense here. Maybe that's why some people get a church incense note? Not too spicy, I can pick out all the notes. A bit girly and very nice.

I think dragon's blood would go with those scents, but some people might find it overwhelming and altogether too sharp with the other elements. Scents with other strong resins might work also.

Mutable Water: the essence of faith. This is the scent of belief, be it in oneself, mankind, the gods, our myths, or our potential. This is the willingness to explore the darkness, the push towards the edges of fantasy or delirium. This is the perfume of the Psychopomp and the Mystic, the Saint and the Madman; this is the scent of the lifegiving salt of blood and ocean, and the darkest depths of the sea. Red musk and brine, ships’ planks of thorny acacia, an indescribable abyssophelagic musk, soporific lavender, and a strange, sweet waft of benzoin. I had to try this because I had no idea what the notes would smell like combined. It's BPAL ocean scent combined with red musk. The musk is softened a little by the lavender and benzoin. It's not a strong lavender, I can barely tell it's there. But I can definitely pick out some sweetness from the benzoin. It smells...tender? Sometimes the red musk and wood is the strongest element, sometimes the lavender and benzoin are detectable. But the brine is always there. It's an effect a bit like rolling waves. There may be some inky almost berrylike musk underneath everything, it's hard to tell. Overall, it smells like red musk dryer sheets. It's cozy. On drydown the brine dials back some and the scent doesn't resemble an aquatic any more. I'm even more sure there's a dark blue musk somewhere here.

Light and fresh with sage grounding it, giving it a very slightly smoky earthy tinge. But only slightly. I feel tingly and it isn't scalp allergies. Kind of astringent, energizing. It's funny, I prefer dark perfume oils but the only hair oils I've liked have been fresh and bright.

The peculiar-looking man was of average height, but of an odd shape: Shadow had heard of men who were barrel-chested before, but had no image to accompany the metaphor. This man was barrel-chested, and he had legs like, yes, like tree trunks, and hands like, exactly, ham hocks. He wore a black parka with a hood, several sweaters, thick dungarees, and, incongruously, in the winter and with those clothes, a pair of white tennis shoes, which were the same size and shape as shoeboxes. His fingers resembled sausages, with flat, squared-off fingertips. "That's some hum you got," said Shadow from the driver's seat. "Sorry," said the peculiar young man, in a deep, deep voice, embarrassed. He stopped humming. "No, I enjoyed it," said Shadow. "Don't stop." The peculiar young man hesitated, then commenced to hum once more, his voice as deep and reverberant as before. This time there were words interspersed in the humming. "Down down down," he sang, so deeply that the windows rattled. "Down down down, down down, down down." Thick, tangled, and strong: ash and oak, elm and pine, reaching down, down, and deeper down into earth. In decant: Root beer? It smells like there's birch in this. On: Ooh, that's a nice deep resin scent. The pine is not overwhelming everything else, nor does it smell like pine sol. It's more of a dried Christmas tree note, but well balanced with the other woods. I can't tell whether "earth" means a dirt note but this is spicy to my nose. If dirt's there it's vetiver based like the one in Badger from The Wind and the Willows scents. I've smelled a men's cologne a little like this before. Dior's original Fahrenheit maybe. Or maybe not that one. Light in strength and little throw, I'm afraid this one may disappear altogether in a few hours. Edit: Better strength than I'd thought. Far over the misty mountains cold, through dungeons deep and caverns old we must away before break of day...I don't mind smelling like a dwarf king.

Chaotic, Good, and Lawful?

As someone who is a dark resin lover, I think this is awesome. Myrrh and labdanum happen to be my two favorite scents so there you go. Only drawback is that the poplar pitch can be a little close to pine tar and very very slightly like gasoline. It makes the scent less sweet than it would otherwise be. If you liked Schwarzer Mond, Streets of Detroit, or Schlaflos Frage Und Antwort you probably would like this. I think I prefer those scents, but this is still a good evocation of darkness with a pale corona of light.

Close to The Forest at Sundown. or whatever that one was that had pink amber. A very nice amber and pink rose with enough spice to prevent it from turning too soapy.

I get the red amber and leather with dark musk. It's not spicy, just red. There's an oily and animalistic sense to this, like leather smoked with incense and rubbed with some slightly odd smelling grease. Plus amber.

This is my favorite of the eclipse scents I've tried. The golden chypre and clove along with the tobacco give it an early autumn feeling. In fact, I'd say this would fit right in with the Weenies fall collection. Similar to In the Time of Plague (if that was the one with the clove tobacco and roses.) This is smoother if I remember correctly. Edit: after testing: I do get amping rose, tobacco, clove from both. My skin must be doing that. However, Mabel is perfumy and smooth while In the Time of Plague has big nasty rough dark wooden teeth. They do have a very similar edge to the throw though.

Full floral realistic honeysuckle with loads of powdery yellow pollen. Though mostly realistic, it's also not unlike a honeysuckle candle I had once. If anyone had the Pat the Bunny book as a child, this flower smells like that book. Medium to light throw, becomes light but still present after four or five hours.

Alternately brown sugar and herbal lemon at first. Resolves into spices, herbs (not especially lemony), pumpkin and wine. Like VioletChaos said, very autumn without being pure pumpkin spice

Do not smirk as a hearse goes by, For you may be the next to die. They wrap you up in a big white sheet And throw you down six feet deep. They put you in a big black box, And cover you up with dirt and rocks. All goes well for a week or two, Then things start changing; all is new. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, The worms play pinochle on your snout. A big green worm with rolling eyes, Crawls in your stomach and out your eyes. Til your blood turns mossy green And oozes out like Devonshire cream. Worm Moon marks the season of rains, when the worms scuttle forth, aerating the earth with their movements and enriching the soil by digesting waste in organic material, which creates organic fertilizer. Pink and wriggling globs of grapefruit syrup clotted with congealed moss-green blood, rotting coffin wood spattered with soil, decomposing organic matter, and a gruesome burst of overripe blackberries. In the bottle grapefruit, moss and dirt. On, this is a fruity moss scent. I expect the moss to get stronger with aging. I can't tell what the "green blood" is though the moss smells green and my throat gets slightly scratchy when I smell it too closely. The blackberry backs up the grapefruit wonderfully, adding depth. On the whole the scent is slightly sour but not unpleasantly so.

Milky coffee at first and nothing but that. Then there's some chocolate syrup and banana. Not a lot of banana but it's there. There may be some papaya or something and there's definitely tobacco. Is that rum? Probably not because otherwise it would be taking over. But it may be sweet coconut. I don't get a whole lot of fruit but it's there lending a sugary feel. I don't get curry, just a ton of rich chocolate syrup. Medium to light throw.

Where Hinzelmann had been standing stood a male child, no more than five years old. His hair was dark brown, and long. He was perfectly naked, save for a worn leather band around his neck. He was pierced with two swords, one of them going through his chest, the other entering at his shoulder, with the point coming out beneath the rib-cage. Blood flowed through the wounds without stopping and ran down the child's body to pool and puddle on the floor. The swords looked unimaginably old. The little boy stared up at Shadow with eyes that held only pain. And Shadow thought to himself, of course. That's as good a way as any other of making a tribal god. He did not have to be told. He knew. You take a baby and you bring it up in the darkness, letting it see no one, touch no one, and you feed it well as the years pass, feed it better than any of the village's other children, and then, five winters on, when the night is at its longest, you drag the terrified child out of its hut and into the circle of bonfires, and you pierce it with blades of iron and of bronze. Then you smoke the small body over charcoal fires until it is properly dried, and you wrap it in furs and carry it with you from encampment to encampment, deep in the Black Forest, sacrificing animals and children to it, making it the luck of the tribe. When, eventually, the thing falls apart from age, you place its fragile bones in a box, and you worship the box; until one day the bones are scattered and forgotten, and the tribes who worshipped the child-god of the box are long gone; and the child-god, the luck of the village, will be barely remembered, save as a ghost or a brownie: a kobold. Shadow wondered which of the people who had come to northern Wisconsin 150 years ago, a woodcutter, perhaps, or a mapmaker, had crossed the Atlantic with Hinzelmann living in his head. And then the bloody child was gone, and the blood, and there was only an old man with a fluff of white hair and a goblin smile, his sweater-sleeves still soaked from putting Shadow into the bath that had saved his life. The luck of the tribe: black pine pitch and gouts of blood, darkness and bonfires that cast long shadows. In the vial this is a Big Woods smell, smoky and mysterious. On it becomes more simple: pine and smoke. I keep thinking I smell juniper too. The pine isn't super sharp but it's undoubtedly pine. I don't get blood, or maybe that's what makes me think there's juniper here. I'm reminded that pine resin and juniper were both used for mummification. Both pine and smoke are well balanced but I wish the scent was a little more complicated. Layering this with a chocolate scent is very good, by the way.

Ginger ale with lime and plastic. Not burning plastic, just plastic. The lime is sweet rather than sour.

After applying: Refreshing. Cucumber with bright lemon. There's a hint of dill maybe or even salt, which is a little worrying but it soon morphs into a green aquatic cologne. The green fougere with lemon reminds me of Virgo 2016. Like that scent, LORDY is also bright and uplifting, but it's aquatic rather than earthy. Not as lemony either. I was a little worried about the leather and coffee notes, but somehow they don't clash horribly. Maybe because I barely notice them. The coffee/ paper is like Misketonic U on me. Only a tiny bit of coffee. The leather provides a base note, coffee provides faint spice. (Disclaimer: My skin eats leather.) One word: Spiffy. I like it but I may not be neat and stylish enough to wear it.

That's definitely some vetiver there. It's not chemical on me, but it's fairly smoky. I also get the deep, thrumming, resonant, almost resinous dirt from Alviss. There could be opoponax here? That could be what smells like asphalt but almost grapey. At times the vetiver can be a little overwhelming, but I love the parts where it steps back a little and allows other elements to appear. It can be almost suffocating at times, comforting at other times. Just like being under the earth. Edit: Soapy undertones eventually.