antimony

Woah. Fruity and peppery, and *wonderful*. I got it as a gift imp from the lab, and wow, they clearly knew something I didn't. I generally don't like florals, but carnation is the exception, it's so spicy and womanly. The plum gives it a sweetness so the carnations aren't all funeral-like, and the musk holds it all together and draws out the dry down into fruity spicy skin-ness.

I can't pin down if t's violets or lilac (I'm leaning towards lilac) but I am not a purple flowers kind of girl. This is a very smooth, herby, almost fruity floral. Very, very pretty, just not very me. Totally not what I would expect from a blend called Bat's Blood.

I think I like this one better than Embalming fluid, which was my hot weather scent of choice up to now. But it's only hot for like 2 weeks a year here. It's citrusy, light, and the grapefruit has a nice crispness to it.

It smells exactly like that powdery, concentratedly sad smell of dried roses.... only 1000 times stronger, I spent all day in a *cloud* of roses. (dirt? what dirt? I smell no dirt.) It's pretty but it's just too much rose for me.

It's a little bit of cherry and vanilla... wrapped around a solid brick of vetivert. It changed around a lot in the fist hour or so, but it was like the vetivert stayed the same, and the other components just moved around it.

Supercritical CO2 extraction is the coolest thing *ever*. I did work on CO2 extraction as a potential mining method for the surface of Mars while I was in college. The same technology is being used to extract essential oils and because CO2 can be pushed into the supercritical region at just 31.1 degC, so just over room temperature, it can be used to extract substances that are heat-sensitive. Because the only reagent you need is CO2, which is obviously quite cheap, and the extraction equipment is getting more common (the same technique is growing in popularity as a method to decaffinate coffee beans!) I doubt CO2 extracted EO's are much more expensive than their steam-distilled countrparts. I suspect the book you guys are referring to was right a couple of years ago, but may now be out-of-date. *updated the link to a better, more informative one

Why did I wait so long to try this???!?!! Yummy peachy, spicy, buttery, cake batter-y goodness. I am in love, I don't care that it's strong, I slather ike there's no tommorrow (and that's not usually my style) I just do it earlier, so the scent has some time to die down before I leave the house. It's like a peachy instead of chocolatey version of Gluttony, I don't think it smells like Samhain at all.

I never thought I liked rose scents, I've come across a few BPAL's I liked that had rose as an ingredient, but I tend to avoid ROSEroseROSE scents. Wow, Lucy is lovely. The spice comes out beautifully on me. There's a little carnation in the mix, maybe? Anyway, she smells great on my skin, and makes a spectacularly seductive hair scent.

I'm with everyone who said it smells like luscious, butterscotchy goodness. It smells like cream liquers feel in your mouth. Like cream mixed with butterscotch scnapps maybe. (and there's a little mint in there somewhere? My nose is saying there's an undercurrent of wintergreen?) Anyway, I'm not usually a slather-er, but when I wear this, I find myself really pouring it on.

It's spicy cedar on my skin. Everyone is right, it's extremely complex, I don't think I like it. It's too violet, too pepper, too everything. On the other hand, I have friends who are more woodsy kind of people than me, and I could totally see them wearing it. It's definately a scent with a strong personality to it.

Heavy cherry-almond scent. It's pretty, but it's too cough-syrupy when wet. The fist wet notes are strong, but they evaporate quickly. The scent dissapears for a while, then after half an hour, it starts to come back. That 2nd round is not almondy, but it's heavy on the amber and super-sweet.

I usually like masculine scents on myself, except I can't do woodsy. It smells like masculine sex in a bottle though. I'm going to sneak up on my boyfriend with it, I bet it will be amazing on him. This is a scent for pouncing. If I was single, and pet a guy at a party that smelled like this, I'd be asking for his number in *minutes*.

I don't like orange blossom, so I didn't care for this one too much. It slithered too much. I agree with the creamsicle description, it was like a sex-crazed creamsicle. The vanilla makes it feel like it it's sitting in a poofy layer over the skin. I'd totally recommend it to anyone who likes orange blossom, though.

It's like getting hit in the head with a sock full of almonds. And rocks. It hits *hard* and it's all almonds all the time. It drops off fairly suddenly though. It's so strong at first, and it's gone in half an hour.

The grapefruit and lavender overwealm the rest of the components. It's a strange combo, grapefruit to me is a morning scent, and lavender is an evening scent. The musk smoothes out the underpinnings and mixes the two very well. It's pretty, but it gives me this scratchy feeling in the back of my throat when I sniff it. And it's just too confusing.

This is an odd one... it's like dark cocoa, and agave syrup. The boozyness makes it have a tequilla-ness to it, but it's fresher than that. It's sweet and dusty and really evokes the desert at night. Anyway, I love it. Purrr.

If you've ever made a marbled Polish yeast cake, this smells exactly like the batter for the chocolate part. It's cocoa and bready cakey goodness. I'm not sure if I want to wear it as perfume, but this would make a *spectacular* sugar scrub, and a great lotion. Actually, it would be the crazy-coolest conditioner scent, to be able to move your hair and be surrounded by a cloud of chocolate....

What the hell is it with AOL's filters? I was ordering henna from Everyday Mehndi, and they use an AOL account for their primary e-mail. They asked me a question about my order, and I wrote back. AOL did not accept the message for a bizzare reason: they don't accept mail from servers with residential IP addresses, even if they are static IP's. (It's not a hijacked server, a friend of mine runs his own mail server. This is not particularly uncommon. He has a static IP, and I think he technically has "small business" DSL service.) But wait, that's not the best part. Their servers didn't send the message back bounced, or anything, so I didn't know it hadn't gone through until a week later, qmail on my friend's server came back with an error message telling me what error message it got from AOL's server, and that it had been unable to connect. Really, is a bounce too much to ask for? --- Note: the people at Everyday Mehendi had no idea I had tried to e-mail them, they just thought I had never written back. After I got the error, I wrote them from my Gmail account, and they got the email just fine.

This is the scent that inspired my yule LE aging project in the first place. On my skin, it's almost gingerbread cookies, but it's just too damn sharp. It's almost green, like fresh ginger. I liked it, but I felt like it was all pointy where it should be more rounded. It's now sitting in a nice dark box, and I'll let you all know around march how the pointiness is going. Oh, and it lasts all. day. long.

Rich, creamy, boozy yummy goodness. I love the nutmeg note, and it's just so *creamy*. It makes me feel slipery. I put it on in the afternoon, and it was starting to fade by the end of the night.

This was a headscratcher for me. The first time I tried it, it wasn't sweet at all... in fact, it was almost burnt, like djinn. then the second time I tried it, it was all sweet cherries and wood, and, again, I just wasn't really into it. I rolled the bottle both imes, and neither try was durring my period. I dunno. Anyway, Hearth really just wasn't for me. Though I'm going to keep it around for a few months to add it to my great yule-LE-aging-experiment. If it smells better/different in a few months, I'll update.

I don't usually do fruity scents, but this is so rich. The only word I can use to describe it is "ripe". It's sweet and wet and sexy - It's definately not a teenage fruit scent at all. I think there's a champagne note in it somewhere that gives it that headyness. On my wrists it lasted at least 6 hours.

I don't really have much to add, since on me it smelled exacty like the smell that wafts from the oven while you're baking snickerdoodles. I'm still a little undecided how ok I am with smelling like that, since it's not very perfume-y. But I like it, i's cool. It lasts about half a day on my skin. This one, like Gingerbread Poppet, I think would really benefit from aging a couple of months, so the scent has a chance to warm and deepen.

My favorite perfume before BPAL was O de Lancome, which is kind of an oddball, since it's a women's perfume with chypre, which is quite uncommon. Anyway, just reading the descriptions of the King and Queen of Diamonds had me *swooning* that between the two together, I would finally have my citrusy chypre-y fabulousness again. And I do, kinda. There's just one thing that makes me so sad about the King... He's gone in half an hour. Just nothing. poof. But he smells sooo good at first!

I think Fallow Deer is right about the Aureus. Amber changes a *lot* over time. In the course of even a few months, it gets a lot sweeter, syrupier, and richer to my nose. Fresh amber to me smells a little thin and faint. And after a year, even kept in the dark, it really degrades to a scent that I can't stand. I also have no idea about The Star.