starfish327

This is screamingly citrus. There's a very faint floral edge that does tune done the sharper citruses, and the mint is a sensation at the end of the blend more than a scent. Normally rose in any form is a deathnote for me but I'm not getting any of it here. I do like this one, but I do think it's going to fair better when it's not 12 degrees out.

I haven't done this in awhile either, and I feel that my personality has shifted since I did it last. Sign-wise I'm an aries with my moon in gemini and cancer rising. I still have a strong drive towards social science, though it's been years since I finished my masters-though I find my interests drifting towards the 'darker'. I plan on getting my PhD in death studies if I ever go that far. I'm a knitter and a horror blogger. I've been told that I have a fairly dualistic personality-the first impression is that I run on the aggressive/dominant side but I have a healer/comforter streak that's almost as dominant. I'm actually much more tuned into people's emotions than I think people are aware and I'm working on acknowledging that more often. That said I do tend to run towards talkative and impatient. I'm fairly introverted and people keep aligning me with water- I'm very 'autumn' in terms of coloration and I do best at dusk time-wise. I'm most active between 3 pm and midnight. I am fairly nerdy but as I mentioned before most of my fandoms run to dark/horror. I cook, almost obsessively, and I'm a canner. I'm much harder on myself than what people think I am, and I place a lot of weight on earning what you get out of life.

Moody, dusty chocolate. This reminds me a lot of baking chocolate, really expensive good quality baking chocolate. There's something going definitely to 'dust' right away and then it goes a little woody. Something is making this slightly sweeter, so it starts smelling really good, really, really dark chocolate. I didn't think tootsie rolls until I started reading reviews but I can definately see it. Eventually it starts phasing between an incensy type light tonka/patchouli and then goes back very quickly into the dark chocolate. I'm not sure that I would want to smell like this enough to need more than my tester (especially since I have imps in my collection that are years old and are only now at the 3/4 mark) but I seem to like 'moody' lately so I think I'll hang on to it.

Imp: milk chocolate, tea, and lemon wet/dry: if by milk chocolate you mean lemon lifesavers, sure. I actually like the citrusy blends so I'll probably hang on to it, but this is totally not what I was expecting. It morphs so that sometimes it's milky lemon, sometimes it's vanilla lemon, sometimes it's just aggressively lemon. It wants to go to Pledge, but the other notes keep it from becoming too fake.

This is one of the very rare violet scents that work on me (skin test everything. seriously.) I get the holiday sweets (like opening a box of ribbon candy), something that hints at smokey (the chimney dust?) and the sugared violets. I do like this is and it reminds me of a candy that I can't place. I don't see myself reaching for this, ever, but I like it a lot more than I probably should-and it is nice to know that sugared violets don't go to death-stank on my skin. (Also, yes, this is sugar skull and violets.)

chimera sometimes wants to be chai on me, sometimes it wants to be gummy bears. hellfire was the closest to the perfect 'actually spicy' blend on my chem as opposed to spicy but wants to smell like other things-but i was allergic to it. clemence is pretty much straight cinnamon on me though sometimes it wants to pull soapy. also it's been a very, very long time since i've tested it but i feel like plunder has a spice and a tea note.

Nobility and haughtiness befitting the Antichrist: sage, carnation and cedar with lavender, vanilla, white musk and leather. If anything this smells like Sweet Honesty threw a temper tantrum. On my skin it's both very young and very moody. The leather is keeping the white musk from going out of control (or unwashed dirty) but this is very, very perfumy on me. I don't see us getting along. Eventually the ceder and the sage pull a little bit forward-I would love this just for the leather, sage, and cedar if the rest would get along better with my skin.

I completely forgot the notes list when I first put this one, so that may or may not be a good thing for reviewing purposes. in the imp: musky herbaliness. wet: more musky herbaliness. This is a bizarre one because there's a scent I really like lurking underneath a nasty medicinal quality I very much don't like [big surprise there. this is a dragon's blood blend]. dry: short drydown is the same nasty top scent but the longer it's on, I start getting the resinous ambery quality I love so much from Nephilim. I'm still getting whiffs of dragon's blood which is a really hard note for me to wear. If the dragon's blood were fainter or held more in check this is would be a definite keeper. Right now I'm thinking I don't love it enough to keep-not with having a bottle and a half of Nephilim, which works much, much better on my chemistry. I think this one will end up in my friend's enabling box.

gore-shock. it took me a minute to realize what this reminds me of. this is gore-shock minus the heavier 'gore' notes. i actually really like this one, much more than i thought i would. eta: sigh. and then it morphs. in the imp-darker than i thought it would be, and darker than i remember stone notes being. wet-smoky, with the stone accord and a little bit of blood. something is reading as leather as well. this is masculine without being overpowering with my chem. dry-the stone pulls forward and starts to read as florals...and then there's an aquatic note. which rarely works well on my skin and gives me headaches. I keep sniffing at it like I'm hoping it'll pull back towards the wet stage. normally i would give a blend like this another skin test but i do so badly with the lab's water note that i don't dare.

The note list on this is completely different from what I expected. And look, one of the five blends with rose that I can wear. This is Tavern of Hell's just as sexy cousin, just sexy in different ways. This reads as a sort of yellow, lush floral on my skin. I like this one, a lot, and it feels like a very classic perfume blend. It's syrupy. The vetiver is keeping this slow and heavy. If you like Tavern but not the booze note, this is a very close family member.

A venerable voodoo blend, used for purification of the spirit and to amplify positive personal power. the impression I got opening this imp was...Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry era. Don't ask. Scentwise I get the feeling that if Doc Constantine took a bath and put on some Goldbond powder. It doesn't smell bad but I would layer it with something to dirty it up a bit if I wanted to wear it as a skin scent.

...This is amazing. Seriously, this has joined my list of 'must have more' blends. in the imp: very floral and green, bright. This does not feel 'nightmarish' to me, and I don't normally do well with light florals and green-the only real exception is Vampire Tears, so I use that as my comparision point. wet: Very light and still very green. I'm not sure what's keeping this from amping into screaming white floral hell, but this very much behaving itself. I'm starting to get the fruit gums. Dry: Holy crap. This is amazing. I get the florals but as a background, and early dry is Vampire Tears and vanilla. I would love if it just stayed at that point. But then it slowly starts to moprh into vanillas and a much more restrained version of the cherry note from Suck It. I want to roll in this stuff.

Screaming, high whiteness like psych horror was. Layered with a patchuli heavy blend the whiteness is cut down to a dull roar and I can start to get some of the darker notes nibbling at the edges. Definately not a good blend on me.

in the imp-sharp. very sharp. wet-wow. this is not what I was expecting at all. Sugared greenery. This is actually very nice. There doesn't seem to be the white musk that sneaks into a lot of green blends, and little to no florals. Whatever is making this sugary on my skin is also keeping it out of migraine territory. Dry: Warning-this is the first day of my cycle so I want to retest this later and see if this is the problem. It keeps alternating between this gorgeous sugared woods and greenery scent with a hint of berry and bug repellant. It seems like the longer it's on the less bug repellent I'm getting and it's settling into gorgeous. I need to retest this when my hormones aren't at their most unbalanced because I'm going to put money on that being what's amping one of the herbs into Cutter repellant territory.

"One person said she wants to layer it with Gore-Shock as the perfect accent for her zombie chicken Halloween costume." That would be me. I have that particular decant of tilt-a-hurl. I can't believe I've never actually reviewed this decant. I'm sort of infamous for my love of the weirder blends-I like Gore-shock. This was one of the weirdest I've ever skin tested (and I skin test everything). From memory, it started out a blast of vinegar. Which morphed into chocolate. Which turned into...sex. Not skin musk...it reeked like sex. It's definitely one of the Lupe style skin musks.

First it's all cookies, all the time. Which would be fine, it's behaving better than sugar cookie. It's a really realistic sugar cookie scent, not doughy or raw like a lot of the lab's pastry blends go on me. But then I get blasted with...butter. Ultrarealistic, fresh, butter. I don't want to smell like butter. Then it disappears completely, and then returns really faintly like the smell of incense smoke a long time after you burn some. Whatever it morphs into later, as much as I like the cookie smell I don't want to smell like dairy and stale incense smoke.

I found a bunch of imps shoved in the back of a drawer that I've never tested-a bunch of them were still taped. This was one of them. In the imp: musky rum. My nose is interpreting every musk as 'red' right now, but all I can tell is that it's not a dark musk. Wet: Sweet rum. As in, rum with a little bit of that sweet musk and some vanilla. Honestly, I would like this if it stayed at wet. Dry: Oh man. I'm going to need more of this. It tries to edge into plasticky, but I think that's where I'm in my cycle and the plastic wears off. The spices and the vetiver start coming forward, aggressively, and the rum starts swaggering around a bit. This isn't boozy rum. I need more of this.

Spanked res is my don't f with me blend. Blockbuster is a really effective antianxiety blend on me.

Watermelon Airheads. I used to sneak watermelon airheads when I was growing up during the summer. They sold them at the baseball games down the street for a quarter. Voice is a candy-sugar sweet melon all the way through. Occassionally I amp the woods and -sometimes- get a hint a floral but normally it's just straight up watermelon airheads. Right now I'm amping the woods in everything so it's slightly drier than when I normally wear it. This is completey outside the range of what I normally wear and while I wouldn't want an entire bottle of it, sometimes it's nice to go back to the days I used to drench myself in cucumber melon lotion.

I really wanted to keep this one, but apparently it didn't want to like me as much as I wanted to like it. In the imp: nothing. It hits my blind spot. It might as well be water. Wet: very delicate, very gentle. I was expecting smoke, honestly. This is a very gentle, classic scent that reminds me of something from my past-but I can't put my finger on it. The thought that came to mind was 'important occassion blend'-like a job interview. Dry: The same light, cologny frangrance and I'm starting to get some vanilla out of it. I like it, but it's a complete departure from my normal incense and darkness blends. And...ten minutes later it's ivory soap. Sad face.

I may have reviewed this one already, I'm not sure. In the imp: I'm getting artifical peach and something reading as white musk. On the skin: I swear there is white musk in this one. It's the sour dirtiness of white musk on my skin, the artifical peach, and something else vaguely 'fake' that I can't really place. Dry: I didn't think it was that strong but my boyfriend commented that I was wearing something. It smells like stale peach jolly ranchers, and vaguely stale musk. It's not that bad, and it's a lot better thant the wet stage but it never moves beyond meh. Off to the swaps.

Full confession: I wasn't expecting to like this one. At all. In the imp: sweet (as in fruit sweet) red musk. It does feel very...fresh. I didn't know that red musk could come in fresh. Wet: The strawberry leaf is reading as berries, but actual berries-sometimes the lab's strawberry note reads like hard candy on me. This is actually fruit. It smells like I'm canning. I don't get that much musk out of it, but white musk can do horrible things on my skin and red musk has turned a lot of blends that should have been phenomenal on my skin to meh. "Not much musk" in this case isn't a bad thing. Dry: I do in fact like this one. I like it more and more the more I have it on. The red musk comes forward more but the fruit is keeping it in check. I can sense more than smell the white musk, and I think it's keeping it from being way, way too sweet. I think this one is actually a keeper-which is actually a suprise. My department tends to lean towards fruit-sweet for perfume, and this one would work without being obvious.

In the imp: wine. White wine, actually. A sweet white wine. I guess I'm getting just the grapes. Wet: this is a very bright, sweet blend. I was thinking white musk, the one white musk I can wear, and the florals in Vampire Tears. In fact, wet, this is Vampire Tears without the citrus notes. Dry: The woods and herbs pulls this down from boozy into a light green blend. The Vampire Tears parallel is a lot lessened, which is good-because I want to keep this one but I don't want a box full of twin blends. This is on the strong side in regards to throw on me right now, and I'm not certain this is a 'winter' blend, but I can see liking this one a lot when it warms up and gets humid.

Burned fried rice, on my skin. I couldn't let it go to dry down, the smell was so strong. Oh, and plastic. Burned rice and plastic. I'm guessing this would be great on some people, but there's something with my chemistry that doesn't want to play nice with this one.

what a strange little blend. on skin, and close to skin throw, is singed woods. I like it, it reminds me of a much lighter Erich Zahn. Far throw is very sweet though, very, very sweet. Almost sugar sweet. The musks make this a very rich sugar, and it's very slightly green.