myoubi

I was gifted this from the lovely djnevermore I'm not one for fruity scents (at all) but this is actually quite nice. Juicy red fruits, sweet but not oversweet or cloying. People have mentioned amber, and while I don't smell it meself, there's definitely something grounding the pomegranate and keeping it from flying off into the land of fizzy fruity overkill. If you don't like fruity scents, give this one a shot. I will treasure my partial for wear in the summer, and may need to supplement my collection with a full imp.

I like almost none of these notes on their own, so it's a small miracle that the Queen works on me at all. More than that, it actually works well. I actually want more. At first sniff this reminds me of graveyard dirt... but in a good way (not the BPAL, actual graveyard dirt). Then I realise that's the patchouli I'm smelling -- dark and earthy and tempered by the raspberries and pomegranate. I don't get any obvious gardenia, although I'd probably miss it if it wasn't there. The blood accord thankfully stays in the background -- this is the first time ever BPAL's blood accord hasn't smelled unpleasantly biological on me. This is a dark, close-setting fruit- and blood-soaked dirt scent. For all that, though it's actually quite subtle. I came to it after the fuss over it, and it's gorgeous enough to stand on its own merits. ((hunts for a bit more))

I love the scent of this blend. If it weren't an intent blend, I might wear it for scent alone. For the record, it does what it sets out to do wonderfully. I'm always rather tense and highly-strung in busy times, and the stress blocks me and keeps me from working. White light calmed me down enough that I could get stuff done, and I could go to sleep afterwards, without lying awake fruitlessly worrying.

So I placed my first order with Isle of Eden today. I've been wanting to try their stuff for some time, particularly their shampoo/conditioner since theirs get really good reviews. I signed onto the forum and had a good look through some of the review threads and the photos, and while I'm certainly excited about a lot, I'm not sure their stuff will become a staple for me. Little things are important. I appreciate when people pay attention to detail; it shows pride in one's own work, and respect for one's clients. IoE's scrubs are coloured, and in the photos on the website the colour is always bright and pretty and appealing. After a peek through peoples' photos, a lot of scrubs seem to have colour that's really poorly-blended, marbled, or just not very true at all. Also, the same item will be packaged several different ways -- sometimes even in the same order! Three 8oz bottles of shampoo will come in three different containers. But it's the content that counts, right? Well, as far as the colour is concerned, if you're not bothered enough about it to do it right and the content is all that matters anyway, why add colour in the first place? Either blend it well, so that it looks appealing (that's the only purpose the stuff serves after all) or don't put any in at all. And as for the different containers, I just don't get why you wouldn't buy one sort of container and stick to it. If you're changing how you package your product, tell your customers -- it affects how your products are used, especially for slippery hands in the shower. Stuff like this does matter. Compare this to the way the Lab does business -- or even to Villainess soaps. If there's a packaging change, or the thing-to-be-shipped doesn't look like the thing-in-the-picture, Brooke lets us know. If a formula is experimental and subject to change, Brooke lets us know. Everything in your order looks and feels like what you were expecting it to look and feel like. IoE's stuff may work just as well as I'd like it to. But the care that goes into BPAL or Villainess isn't apparent, at least from what I've seen. So I'll enjoy what's coming in the mail, but that's about it.

Does anyone know if the rezzed Midway has the same label as the old Midway? The old Midway label is so *cute*...

This is a gentler Ice Queen, without the white musk or the pine. It has a little bit of sweetness, maybe the berryishness of Skadi -- but mostly, it's a soft, clear, cool snow scent, with just that slight warmth of berry. I like it, but I'm not head-over-heels, so this can go live with the rest of my Cold scents and I won't have to hunt down more.

This is nothing like the listed notes, to my nose. Except for maybe the kodo smoke and the sandalwood. This is creamy without being thick, and gently sweet without being sugary. It is quite light on my skin, and smells slightly of tea and slightly of smoke. It has a vaguely vanilla-y quality to it, but it's /not/ a vanilla blend. It's /very/ light on skin. I don't get much fruit from this one. I like it. I see why people love it.

Midway

...I've worn it two days in a row, and it smells /amazing/. I can't think how I didn't like it the first time around. I've been out of the comm for a while, so coming back and seeing how scents are valued differently than they were when I left is very strange. When I first got into BPAL, Mitzvah was the second-least-sought-after NN inquisition scent, and Snowblind imps were going for $20 apiece; I really don't think they would sell if you tried to do that now, because Snowblind Mania has passed. Spooky Mania also seems to have subsided, because nobody really pays it much mind anymore; Snake Charmer is still going pretty strong, Underpants went through an upswing, and Midway rose in value again and then fell (again!). Except for a few things like Storyville, Underpants and VQ (bottle prices for those are setting records) people seem less willing to pay a lot for their scent. $15 decants aren't really selling anymore, and $10 decants -- well, people have to think about it, they don't go like hot cakes. To my mind, that's a good thing.

My hoarded, standards, best-beloved and kept-in-stock products LUSH Snowcake soap *** Lip Lite lip balm Butterball bath bomb Villainess Scintillating smooch! Scintillating whipped! Tval Frosty Pop skin smoothie (custom blend) Frosty Pop bath treat

astringent. Boozy scents are not my friend

On me this is all nutmeggy-cinnamony-sugar at first. It's got quite good throw. I can smell something graham-crackery and cheesecakey in tone, but the PUMPKIN! isn't jumping out and mauling me like it usually does. Very strange. I don't need any more, but I'll keep my quarter-of-an-imp. The waft is much nicer than what I can smell when I huff my wrist. The waft is warm and sweetly spicy and grahamy; the at-wrist bit smells like plastic-sweet cinnamon hearts over pumpkin pie. Go figure.

very, very sharp apple. Some caramel in there somewhere, and caramel never behaves on my skin. I have to wash this off. Dammit! ((shakes fist)) oh well, one less thing I have to single-mindedly go after and collect...

This vanilla is not soft at all! It's not the cookie-dough-ish vanilla I'm used to smelling (I have a friend who /smothers/ herself in vanilla oil, and while it's not too bad from seven feet away, up close it's smothering). THis vanilla is actually rather sharp -- sharper than sniffing vanilla extract. Smoky it certainly is, and almost flowery as well, there is something distinctly orchid-y about it. It does have throw. It was taped shut and in a little baggie when I received it, and as soon as I opened the baggie the scent hit me. I'm actually not a huge vanilla fan -- so I can't say I'm surprised that this doesn't love me. Oh well, I'm grateful I got a chance to try it

Feh. Dusty dry-sweet patchouli-dragon'sblood-musk. Everyone seems wild about this one -- not so much. I could care less if it works, frankly -- I can't bear the scent. And MAN is it strong. I put a dab in my cleavage and one on the back of my neck and it's overpowering everything. And normally I have difficulty smelling my perfume when it's applied to my pulse points, cleavage, and hairline. ((goes to wash it off))

A soft, sweet herbally scent, not a biting green herbal. I quite like it. It's light and soft and subtle. ...and works ::

Couldn't sleep until 2AM last night, worrying and feeling crappy. Woke up at 6:30 instead of 5:30 because of it. Woke up feeling horrible. Worst weekend, aside from the weekend my Uncle Jim died, in my memory. I'm just clinging to the hope that somehow this will all be over soon.

Squeeee! Thanks to the ass-saving generosity of my dear beloved father whom I love and adore, I have a Thunder Moon order! Thunder Moon Cancer (I've been looking forward to this for SO. LONG.) Selkie (yaaaay! my therianthropic is /awesome/!) Other outstanding order: Blue Moon 2007 Brisingamen Oh, hearts and flowers, hearts and flowers I'm sooo excited for the Cancer blend. I was expecting it to be a rose/chamomile scent because those are the plants most often associated with Cancer, and I wouldn't have been at all unhappy with that -- but wild lettuce? that sounds yummy, gentle, cool and vaguely sweet. I promised myself that no matter what (unless it was, like, black musk and ambergris and red wine or something) I'd order my birth-month moon and therianthropic. I'm hopeful for Selkie, although I'm shaky on Thunder Moon -- it sounds lovely but a little too masculine/aquatic for me. I'll try it, and persevere, and persevere, and God Dammit my force of will shall prevail. squeeeee!

I called the Superintendent of Pfoho, and /finally/ got ahold of him He said he's going to mail out all my packages to me today! YAAAAAAY!!! I really hope he does! Oh that's so good, i really want my goodsmellies.

Generally I refrain from commenting on BPAL-related issues because the community is kind of touchy, and if you get a bad name from your opinions that'll likely be reflectected in who will buy, sell, or swap with you. To two community members, I've done the same thing myself; and I've gotten caught up in the fandom's crazy-sensitivity before, and it took a reality check for me to get my head out of my butt. Against my better judgment I weighed in on the issue of pricing/who to sell to and how. I've gotten really good deals on some bottles I wanted to try, and I've made money when I re-sold those bottles after careful thought and found that they totally failed on me, no matter how much I wanted to like them. I have Snow White 2004 in mind here. I've also lost a lot of money in my obsession, by eating shipping costs, reselling bottles at significantly lower prices than I bought for, and in some cases selling underpriced bottles because I wanted to. On balance, I'm still hugely in the red as far as my obsession goes. The concept of 'profit' is utterly alien. For me, the cost is worth it for the delight of sniffing so many scents -- but that doesn't change the fact that it's money I'll never recoup. I don't think I (or anyone else) should be criticised for trying to decrease our losses as much as we can. There are people who try to squeeze every last dime that they can out of their BPAL -- I'm not one of them, nor I believe are most people who sell at higher than they bought. There are other ways to give back to the community, like offering special discounts for n00bs, or selling them things that you'd otherwise only swap away. I've done the latter, and I've seen and applauded people doing the former. You're also not obliged to sell to just whoever comes your way -- if someone pings you and says "I really really really want this bottle" you can take them at their word and offer it to them, even for a discount if it's what you think is fair. On the subject of ebay, stop bellyaching about letting the market decide what to pay for things. If you don't want to pay $100 for a bottle of perfume, then don't! It's just perfume! If it matters that much more to someone else, then let them have it and keep quiet. Either shell out the money and lose the exact same amount of options they do*, or realise that if you lose the auction, you'll live. In my own swapping, I tend to favour first people I've dealt with before. There are a couple of people (Chrisann comes to mind) who are just a joy to deal with, and a few more that I've dealt with so many times that I give them preference because of how good they've always been to me. After that, I tend to deal with people who have a good reputation in the community and n00bs. If I find someone who /really/ wants a scent, I like to give it to them if I reasonably can -- I sold an imp of Beaver Moon that I wanted to save for swaps, because the gal was a newbie and I know how hard it is to break into the market and what you usually have to shell out to do so. But the BPAL community /isn't/ a free market -- it's a heavily controlled market, both by price caps in most selling venues and the politics of the fandom. That's good and bad. The good part is, it limits pure profiteering, and ensures that by and large the emphasis is on enjoying scented art instead of narrowly reducing each purchase to a risk/benefit analysis. The bad part is, the politics of opinion are fierce and a little paranoid, and if you're a rare collector building strong relationships is much more important than it should be. The field of people who hold real rares is small, and the people willing to swap those rares is even smaller. It's a microcosm of the world, impacted more intensely. I'm out of rare-collecting, mostly; I sold off most of my rares a while ago, and those that I've kept are for the purposes of briefly testing, then dangling out as bait for the few scents I collect heavily. --- *I tend to think of money in terms of how many options you give up when you lose it or give it away. Money is worth different things to different people, some people have more or less, and some people have to work much harder than others to scrape together much less. But it's much easier to compare how much freedom or what kind of options a sum of money gives you, since those are much closer between different groups of people.

NOTE: My bottle, which has a very oilstained label, reads "Limited [i'm assuming it's Limited because nothing else makes sense] Oblation Blend". Maybe my label is weird? It's not the 2003 version, because it's in a newer cobalt bottle, not one of the squat ones. The first time I tried this one, I hated it. I had a bottle and an imp, and they both were just NOT my friends. A blast of peppermint, and then coconut city, and I had to wash them off They both got swapped away. But then I decided to try it again (as a result of switching medications, a lot of scents I used to hate now love my skin chemistry) and lo, it was yummy! for the first five minutes I get an initial haze of peppermint, but it's nowhere near as overpowering as it was before; then the coconut/butter rum combination comes into play, and the buttery alcohol cuts the sweet coconut so it's not sickening. I usually /hate/ coconut, but here it's nice. It dries down to a buttery, delicately foody scent with hints of cocoa and vanilla. I don't smell like a bakery, but I do smell yummy. My skin eats this one in about six hours. I've got about an imp and a half, and I won't need more, but I'm so glad to have tried it again!

I am very pleased with myself. I managed to find a tea set that I like and that didn't toally break the bank. Between Mom (for my birthday present) and I, I have a teapot, two teacups, three mugs (which don't quite match but whatever), a cream and sugar set, and a tea caddy. Yaaay materialism!

Am I the only one that this happens to? Sometimes when I wake up, I can't move. Or I can move imperfectly. I'll be awake and conscious inside my head, screaming at my body to forget getting up, just move my fingers properly, and they just won't. Sometimes I can't move at all, oftentimes I can kind of flop around -- like I'll be able to shift my arm a little bit, but forget fine motor control, and moving anything major is out of the question. Oftentimes I have some degree of control over my head -- I can turn my neck, but occasionally I have imperfect control over parts of my face, so I either can't open my eyes properly or it's a struggle to close my mouth. It doesn't happen often, but although it's been happening since I was about nine it still creeps me out every time. It lasts anywhere from ten or fifteen seconds to, on one memorable occasion, about a minute and a half. Usually what happens is I have to focus on the part of the body I can move, and make it move as much as I can, which will often increase slightly with time -- and then all of a sudden I'll manage to jerk it particularly far, and my control will come flooding back again all at once. I wonder what this is?

Wheeee! I have Christmas presents for seven people on my list already! Next year's roommates' gifts are already wrapped, as are the gifts for my four older-than-me Toronto friends. I have a good idea what I'm getting my mother and my Godmother, and I have a present for Janet, my Spiritual Advisor (in heavy quotation marks). I also know what I'm getting one of my grandmothers, and I have half of the gift for my beloved girlfriend in the hand and the other half planned out. The following are the gifts I still need to organise: DONE: Allison(vanilla), Kirsten(jasmine), Care(orange), Tory(pink sugar), Janet(gardenia), Haiwen(honeysuckle), Lisa(mint and black tea), Eleanor(vanilla sugar), Mom(sugar pear and earrings), Nanny Greene(apricot freesia), my Godmother(cocoa sandalwood), Amy (she reads this journal so she doesn't get to know yet!) TO FIND: Hannah -- this has to be special Jenny -- ditto Daddy -- will probably be a CD Nanny Rowe -- looking for something in Rome Caitlin -- something small but appropriate and shiny. must be shiny. Isaac W -- almost certainly a book Ian -- not sure if I'm getting him anything. Only if I see something. TO FIND FOR MY MOTHER TO GIVE TO PEOPLE: Brenda, Joan, Mary -- I have gifts in mind for these three, from Tval! Gary -- he's a challenge to buy for, and I'm better at gifts than mother. Jane and Stewart -- if Mom won't find them anything nice I will take it upon myself to correct her rudeness. Luffluffluff buying presents for people I have 100 Euros for my 10 days in Rome (not nearly enough, but Mom will probably be willing to lend me another 25 or so). I'm looking for a gift for Nanny, with a budget of 35; something small for Caitlin, with a budget of 12; something for Jenny, with a tentative budget of 13 (if I find something she'll love, though, I won't pay any attention to that); and something for Amy, but I've no idea what it will be so I suppose we'll have to see. Ah well.

Tval. Go now, to the nicey smelly body stuff and drool. Based out of St. John's Newfoundland (which is where I am right now) they also sell through www.thesoapboxco.com -- another place I drop huge wads of cash. I am trying to rein in my body product obsession and restrict myself to a few favourites, and so far it's working, but the Tval tub treats are really too templting to resist -- and at $3 apiece, are much less expensive than Lush's monstrosities. They also don't smell as strongly, which may be a negative for some but in my view is a plus as I do not like things clashing with my perfume (this is why I don't buy Lush hair products anymore -- apart from being stupidly expensive, they also smell to the high heavens. /Days/ after washing my hair and I still can't get rid of the smell of American Cream.) I just had a bath with a Frosty Pop treat, and my skin is soooo soooooft, and with just the barest you-really-have-to-look-for-it sniff of vanilla pine. Yumm. They also make a line of products scented like Green Tea Ice Cream. Luff at first delicately-scented sniff. My Staples Villainess Scintillating Smooch Villainess Scintillating Soap Tval Green Tea Ice Cream Skin Smoothie Tval Green Tea Ice Cream Soap for summer -- Heaven and Earth Essentials Voodoo Punani Whipped Body Souffle for summer -- Heaven and Earth Essentials Voodoo Punani Bath Bombs Almost every girl on my Xmas list is getting /some/thing from Tval this year. You have been warned.