(2011 version)
A bottle of Pumpkin Latte was my first experience with BPAL, and I gotta say, the first time I tried it after I got it, I was really disappointed. There was a fleeting whiff of wet coffee grounds mixed with a weird sweet & salty burnt/buttery quality that I guessed was supposed to be pumpkin, then all I could smell was CINNAMON all the way through, like red hots. It didn't smell like pumpkin-spice anything, it was actually pretty bad, so I stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it.
Then I read about aging perfume oils, and I decided to give it another chance. It's almost a year later now, and wow, has it changed. I was a little leery, it definitely had that off-putting buttered-popcorn quality to it in the bottle, but it wears much better, it's SO much smoother now it's ridiculous.
It does still start with a 20-minute blast of pure cinnamon, but it has a slightly more foody cinnamon-stick quality, and it actually mellows out after a period of time, which it didn't before, it was just CINNAMON CINNAMON CINNAMON and then gone. Now, after it dries down a little, it is DELICIOUS. The cinnamon is still present in a gentle way, like cinnamon sugar, but I can actually smell the other spices, I didn't get even a hint of them before. The pumpkin has toned down enough that it actually smells like pumpkin and not mutant zombie caramel. It has a pleasant buttery/creamy quality, with a hint of smokiness to it as it dries down, it's very mellow and stays in the background, complementing the spices perfectly and giving it a rich, warm bakery feel. The coffee is pretty much gone, which is ok with me, it's more like a decadently spiced pumpkin chai than a latte. At the very end, the spices fade off and it's mostly sweet pumpkin and vanilla, with almost a caramel or maple-syrup smell to it.
This is SO cozy and comforting, I keep going back to put more on. I guess I can see why people like BPAL after all.
