bheansidhe

As is the garden such is the gardener, A man’s nature runs either to herbs or to weeds. – Francis Bacon This Full Moon marks a time for new growth, both within nature and within our spirits. It is a time of fertility and fruitfulness, for sowing seeds to ensure blessings and bounty later in the year. Budding summer squashes and pole beans, tomato leaves, upturned earth, May's wildflowers, and sun-warmed herbs. I hesitated to post this review as a thread-starter because it's not very informative. By the time I got home from Will Call, my arm was a mishmash of scents and I couldn't find this one to sniff while typing a review. However, there seems to be some uneasy speculation about this one, so let me reassure you: it's WONDERFUL. This was the only scent I tested twice, because I was so pleased with it. It was crisp green tomato leaves, thyme, and wildflowers on me, and the dirt note is moist and loamy. I disliked Graveyard Dirt on my skin, and I normally shy away from the all-florals, so if those are dealbreakers for you, don't fear Planting Moon. No obnoxious pollen or shrieking florals. I don't remember any vegetable components, but then my nose was numb from Eau de Will Call.

It's the smoky vanilla, musk, and tobacco that dominate at first - in fact, when applied wet, this is strongly akin to the tobacco-and-caramel combo in Tiresias the Androgyne. Laura could be a coconut-free sibling of Red Lantern. Lavender flickers intermittently in the background, like grain streaks popping up in an old reel-to-reel movie. As it wears, carnation blooms over but does not obscure the gritty smoky vanilla/tobacco. If vetiver is your death note, have no fear: it's just a dark background supporting the other notes. Also, there's zero resemblance to TKO or any of the other lavender-based blends. Overall impression: smoky, warm, musky, somehow gritty and feminine at the same time. The caramel impression never wavers. (I can't wear tobacco, so I'm just posting notes before I pass the bottle to its rightful owner ;-). ETA: Oops, I lied? After two hours of yard work in the hot sun, I'm left with a soft carnation perfume that - as Herb Girl rightly notes- blooms on its inconspicuous vetiver stem. Very creamy and feminine at this point, with none of the gritty tobacco left over. YMMV.

Noooope nope nope nope nope. Interesting to read the reviews above mine & see that nearly everyone got the slight, unsettling wrongness of it. Wet: like breathing in a plastic bag of fake black licorice-flavored licorice whips. While standing in a stinky tobacco shop. That sells menthol cigarettes. With an open styrofoam cup of cheap wine fermenting on a shelf under the counter, because the alcoholic owner tipples between customers. The person standing next to me at Will-Call said she was mostly getting the mint off my skin. I was mostly getting the licorice and nauseating white wine. Like, an amazing trainwreck of wrongness on my skin. The Russian judge was laughing too hard to hold up a scorecard.

This has a solemn, still, cathedral-ish incense vibe. The first wash of resins has a bitter tinge to the edges, which seems appropriate. But the bitterness softens into a dry, woodsy finish over the rich and nutty frankincense. The sandalwood lends a woody sweetness, but never tips over into powder territory. This is gorgeous and subtle and has to be worn to be appreciated, as the notes list is deceptively simple. But if you miss out, there are many stellar incense blends in the Lab arsenal.

White peach, white tea, honey, and neroli. Juicy. Voluptuous. Tender. Late-summer fruit in a bottle, basking in a pool of lemon-neroli sunlight. Honey as a rule plays horribly with my skin chemistry, but this might be worth a scent locket. ETA: Now that I've retested away from the olfactory madhouse of the booth: there is a lot more white tea in here than I thought. However, this blend is like a table with four perfectly balanced legs. It's hard to tell where one note stops and another starts. You get all four in equal measure.

Wet: high, clear, winey apple juice, quickly deepened with the oudh. As it dries, it goes almost pure apple fruit single note on me - something rich, tart, and dark-skinned, like a Winesap or an Arkansas Black. I love apple blends and this one definitely earns a bottle spot.

Christmas in the dungeon at Hogwarts! Lots of beautiful fresh pine and juniper notes enclosed by a kind of gritty dark, wet stone. The berry lends a crisp tang as well.

Incense and headshop fans: why are you not stocking up on The Demon's School atmo? Does big bad vetiver scare you? It shouldn't. It forms a kind of pugnacious herbal bass note to the nag champa and dragon's blood resin on top - but this is all about the nag champa. It smells exactly, precisely, like you are burning nag champa incense, but without a hint of smoke in the air. If you live somewhere that doesn't allow you to burn incense, or if you have respiratory issues, this is the best thing you could possibly find.

100% agree with Silvertree on, well, all counts.

"A bright jewel-green smell" perfectly describes the opening notes - like a cloisonné box lined with white sandalwood. In fact, at first the white sandalwood dominates this blend, but it finally settles into something pale and low and graceful, like white lotus petals floating on still green water. It smells like the white sandalwood note used in Claircognizance, but where Claircognizance goes flat white and powdery on me, Shining Beak is tempered by a kind of green melon watery-ness, which I think is the musk and lotus. Alas, the orris dries and flattens it out in the end, as it always does on me, but I may still keep the imp. Completely not what what I was expecting. Very feminine and soft.

Gossips sniffed: dark indeed. Tested, my nose reads it as a progression of colors. It starts as gritty blackened woods and black wet soil (without an earth or loam note; just the feel of black soil). It blooms from black into a dark but luminous mahogany, like sunlight through a jar of blackstrap molasses. I get the cedar and a hint of the lime, and lots of black tea leaf, but the other notes are seamless. It's gender-neutral and actually gorgeous. (Skin notes: tea is usually a winner; cedar can be vinegary if it's not tempered as it is here.) Drydown: woods. Also beautiful, but completely different from the wet stage. Verdict: I may slather this one, repeatedly, to gauge how well I like it in all of its stages, because it's a real morpher. Signs point to a permanent slot in the collection, though.

Huge billows of black and carmine stage smoke, filled with lit sparks of pepper whirling like evil fireflies. A hissing rattle of dried coconut sleeting down on a well-worn leather duster. Confused yet? Psychodynamic Discharge is glad to hear it.

I think this is the best foody blend for non-foody-wearing people to try. My skin can take a sugary scent from sweet to a cloying, choking miasma in 5 seconds, and this stays the perfect level of spicy-sweet. Not to mention how well the spices balance; along with Moroccan Snake Pit and Gingerbread Snake Oil, this is probably my favorite Lab gingerbread. After a five-minute gumble over the aquatic and leather - always dicey for me - it settles into this long, low, dry spice that lasts for over a day. The primary charm for me is the dryness. Gingerbread biscotti with sea salt! Gingerbread hardtrack, consumed outdoors in the salty ocean air! Woodsy dried gingerbread! Gingerbread jerky (not in the meaty sense but in the dried, leathery sense)! The bay rum blends beautifully with the allspice and stays truly gender-neutral, never cologne-y. There's just enough aquatic to bind the spices to the salt and woods, and keep them from drying up and blowing away; it never reads as "aquatic" per se. There's no clove-monster tromping over everything; it's all bright, peppery ginger and allspice and a faint dust of cardamom, wearing down to spicy woods. In short, it's unique and I love my bottle.

These new Yules seem to have a lot of incense heavy blends. Haigophobia and Psychodynamic Discharge strike me as very incense-y.

I have been using a spreadsheet since 2006. The only thing I've changed about my method in that time is storing it on Dropbox instead of one computer.

After wearing for a day I realize this is too masculine for me. It's an oakmoss petitgrain cologne, overlaid with a slightly astringent lavender/sage that never quite marries on my skin - they form two discrete layers, one warm and one cool. This wants only the right guy to be an amazing, sophisticated autumnal haze. How on earth do you make a masculine lavender? Like this!

This really is a cold, ethereal scent, with a thin white floral floating over a dry papery note (orris?) and a slight saponin bitterness. (As a former darkroom developer, I can imagine that part is meant to evoke development chemistry). Is the dry note orris? As it develops, it loses the bitter edge and dries into a dusty papery base. I think I get something ghostly like lily-of-the-valley floating on top.

Delicate, girlish, powdery. I second the apple blossom -- possibly apple fruit, and maybe some vanilla orchid and a touch of Victorian rosewood. Like a soft, pink sister to Antique Lace. ETA: zankoku_zen and I had a bit of a bashful "you go first / no, you go first" shoving match over who would occupy the first empty seat in the front row of the Reviews section. I C WHAT U DID THERE. Sheer brilliance.

Hey - I found Invidiana's review of this blend from 2012! (Reported for merging, so the link may move) http://www.bpal.org/topic/78895-seance-ectoplasm/?p=2223055 Early on I realized that as much as I like lemongrass and lemon verbena, BPAL blends with those notes make me faintly queasy. (Phobos broke my heart.) Because Ectoplasm has the same faintly queasy miasma on me (I wrote "evil lemongrass vapor" after testing at Will-Call), I assume those are components. Please take my review with a grain of salt! Sniffed wet, I get lemongrass, a mouth-puckering type of lemon candy note, and vapor or ozone. Like Invidiana, I get that lime-ish chartreuse-ish yellow-green impression. Applied, it adds on a slight mintiness and some ozone. I think there's also a light masculine musk at the base, because as it dries, it becomes less vapor-ish and develops the woodsy-spicy quality I associate with a fougere, still overlaid with that pith-like yellow citrus. Scent families: Cathode, Phobos, Y'ha-nthlei (wet); Spider-ish (dry).

Eusapia's a hard one to pin down. On the cool-to-warm spectrum, she's warm; on the heavy-to-light spectrum, she's light; on the fruity-to-floral spectrum, she's all over the place. Sniffed in the vial, I definitely get a pulpy, watery fruitiness - like bamboo? or I can see lychee - and warm but indistinct florals. When I apply to the skin, I definitely get notes of stock or carnation, or a similarly spicy, old-fashioned flower, dusted with stargazer lily pollen. I think there's a resin component, but it's something light like white sandalwood or a pale frankincense. I think I get a hint of beeswax candles, but it's not the typical Lab honey note, because it's not going sour on my skin. The longer this wears, the drier and more powdery it goes. In the Wikipedia entry I read that Eusapia Palladino (by all accounts a screaming fake) would conjure "spirit flowers" in her act, so if Beth's intent was a seemingly live bouquet that fades and becomes ghostly as it wears, she's got that in spades. The scent also keeps that somewhat unsettling warmth - like sitting down in an empty chair but feeling the ghostly imprint of someone else's body heat there. I'll be really interested to compare with the released blend and the notes. ETA: Wears down to a slightly cloying dusting powder on me. Not a chemistry match.

Right, so, basically, this is an olfactory interpretive dance of Theda Bara's eye makeup in Salomé: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Salome%2C_1918_-_Poster.jpg Right there, with the smoulder and blowsy and beautiful and dark and probably a tiny bit evil. Also almost every note that hates me ever, so that's as useful as my review can get.

All I wrote was "coconut macaroons and rum ice cream." None of that flips my switches (although I'm sure it's lovely for the right person), so I didn't skin test -- just wanted to second tativa's coconut cake impression.

This one is... odd? But good? It's an intensely sweet, earthy musk when wet - heavy on the sugarcane, but without a specifically boozy rum note. Tons of sweet pipe tobacco in here too. I'd love to see a side-by-side compare with the tobacco SN, but tobacco hates me, so please look for someone else's review. It smells like the same tobacco that's in The Antikythera Mechanism. Another great for-the-guy blend, but also gender-neutral. I get some caramel on the back end, but as a warm toasted nuttiness and not as a pastry.

What would crème brûlée smell like if it were made with peaches and jasmine instead of egg and sugar? This, this. The first wet dollop is unbelievably plush and creamy. If you're curious about the jasmine, it's a dead ringer for the sampuigita single note. If you found that one too woody-harsh (I did), here it's rounded by the other notes. Jasmine and peach dominate and the rest sing chorus. Nothing I would wear, but should go over really well with jasmine fans. Never goes soapy or shrill.

Peach VI is all about the sandalwood on me. Wet, this is dominated by bitter-sharp blackcurrant and spicy resins, with peach in the background. On the skin it wears into a woodsy, sinewy resin with dried fruits. I amp the sandalwood, but this is a very rounded and ripe sandalwood, bolstered by peach and patchouli, with the bite of blackcurrant on top. This would be a great masculine peach blend. Sadly, blackcurrant always turns to sweat on me, so I'm not the best skin tester. On drydown, it develops the resinous sweetness of dried fruits and incense. In sum: It's like hiking with a pleasantly sweaty hipster man in a dry, high-altitude forest (probably in a state with less than 2 inches of rainfall a year), smelling the woodsy air and munching dried peaches.