fragrantgrasse

At first Milk Moon smells slightly astringent to me - and after reading some of the reviews I wonder if it isn't the minty-ness others are referring to? It softens over time, but there is still an odd background note to it - I Know! Milk Moon reminds me of dinner at our local Indian restaurant, more specifically dessert - the balls made out of garbanzo bean flour and swimming in sweetened evaporated milk.... Also I am getting wiffs of nuts. Buttery nuts. Then as it warms and softens it gets milky and creamy - all those scents are somehow linked in my olfactory brain. I really love the overall warmth and comfort of Milk Moon - because comforting is what it is! I also think it smells like a baby's head - sweet and innocent.

Despite the description my initial impression of Nyarlathotep is one of a surprising quietness and over time it goes almost silent. No "screams of a nightmare" on the back of my hand. The lightensss is a whisper of citrus, maybe lemon or lime but there is something else in this blend that is giving it power. I do detect the ozone and it is almost a top note here, but so far no incense notes - maybe a hint of vetiver? I find I need to keep sliding the wand over my hand to refresh my impressions. As time passes I am also discovering the scent of wet stone, an edginess or almost a foreboding. As others have mentioned this is a scent for you and no one else. Nothing evocative or provocative, no sillage, just the disquieting silence that follows a scream....

Alice is simply lovely! It reminds me a bit of ANTIQUE LACE which I adore! It is little-girl-ish, innocent, gentle and powdery but to me, powdery in a really wonderful way. It is, as another reviewer mentioned, the scent to wear to greet the morning with! It is youthful and comforting and slides me into the day not with a jolt - but with a soft breath. I have had my imp for months now and waited to review it - who knows why - but for some reason I reached for it this morning and have worn it all day. It is faint but still there. For some reason I can really smell it when I am outside and I do keep lifting the back of my hand to get a whiff and I love it. I will definitly get a bottle of Alice.

After reading the other reviews, I can see my impression of this is in the minority...I swiped the wand on my arm and took a sniff Carnations and wintergreen Time has passed but I am not experiencing any other note. Not almonds, musk or that smokey scent others have mentioned. In fact it is not changing at all - it is still sharp and pungent with no sign of the almond on the horizon at all. I like almond scents, especially when Beth is at the helm, for instance I ADORE Queen of Sheba. However, even Beth's genius blending ability can not make me a fan of wintergreen. I even dislike it when I need it medicinally Needless to say, wearing it recreationally is not even remotely possible! Off to the swap-swamp with you! ------------- edited because, try as I might, I can not spell.

I live in Toronto and am never chg'd a customs fee on my BPAL....it just comes right to my address hassle free!

This IS intense. It is also making my throat sore and my head feel like it is full of cotton. Laudanum certainly is starting out smelling very medicinal - sharp & green more like a wintergreen-type-green. Oh of course, sassafrass. Which, aromatherapeutically is supposed to be good for cutting the addiction to nicotine. If cigarettes taste like this smells - it would certainly cure me. It seems to be having an almost narcotic maybe even psycotropic effect on me....I probably shouldn't confess this on a public forum, but we're all friends here, right? Once upon a time many years ago, I had a "drink" called nutmeg coffee. It contained regular old brewed coffee, ground nutmeg (we actually ground the nuts ourselves) and ground poppy seeds, sugar....I have no idea what else we put in it - probably because by the time we finished I had had quite a few mug-fuls taste-testing it and had become non compis mentis A Latin scholar I am not, but you know what I mean Apparently Laudanum also has the effect of being a truth serum....blahblahblah... To wind this up, I am not sure I can wear this but one whiff out of the imp (and on my hand) certainly drove me down memory lane.

Rose......this single note "is" my grandmother's bathroom. Whenever we visited her I would go into her bathroom. It was rose-colored, rose-scented even a bit rose-shaped. This Rose note is exactly what her bath smelled like. It is a sweet, rich and full rose....Not like Red Rose - none of the fresh green top notes of just cut rose. This is a closer, softer scent. It would mix well with many other sinlge notes. I will enjoy my still full, still potent, tarted-up imp!

Silk Road conjures up images of the exotic far east, souks, spices, resins, herbs.....so maybe it is the flowers in the description that didn't work well on my skin. Silk Road went Soap Road pretty quickly on my skin. Silk Road may be good in a candle burner which I plan on trying - I like the sweet top notes I smell right out of the imp and they may translate more harmoniously in a candle than they did on my skin!

Chimera on me: yum! I thought I had reviewed this much earlier because this was one of my first imps & one of my favorite scents. I adore what the notes do on my skin: creamy, rich, sweet, light cinnamon. I get absolutely no irritation from this cinnamon, maybe the honeysuckle or copal softens the effect but it evolves into something so warm and comforting and not at all foody. Chimera is a scent I reach for daily and I have a bottle on order since my imp is almost gone. It also blends well with Bpal perfumes....I like it with Sloth for instance....and especially any blend with vetiver in it.

White Musk is gorgeous. It is a sheer, powdery, whisper soft scent that blends seamlessly into my skin - no sharp edges or animal quality to it. So, nutz! It has been discontinued - BUT - I would add that any BPAL blends that have this lovely soft oil in it will easliy persuade me to buy a bottle!

Ambergris is warm and ambery - it reminds me of Haunted. It blends with moderates other single notes such as jasmine, sandalwood and rose - the only three I have tried. Lovely & simple it evolves slowly on my wrist into a soft, powdery & soothing scent to wear daily.

When I read the description I thought "oh ho yeah, this is me" heh heh.. Impeccably cultured, check. Fascinatingly worldly, you bet - AND witty...uh huh Oh, not to mention sublimely beautiful and fiercely independent So, I had to smell Hetairae of course. The notes - all except ylang ylang - are my favorites. I love O and Le Petit Mort and so honey works, I adore patchouli , fig and clove sound lovely with everything else in the blend....but there is something about Hetairae doesn't hang together on me. I suspect ylang It is now about an hour and I am getting a distinctive vinegar note. Must be me. I am going to wait a few days and smell this again because the notes are all to wonderful to not work, unless Ylang takes over. In THAT case - my courtesan days are over.

Shroud passes through many different realms on my skin before it finally goes all soapy and what is doing this - to my nose - is the combined presence of (I think) rose and lilly notes. At first Shroud is lovely & gentle - dry, musty, cedar and sandalwoody. Softly Powdery too. But then the dry rose comes out, and with it an image of an old bouquet of roses comes to mind but somehow I am also detecting notes of greeness under it, as if the roses all of a sudden reanimated and came back to life! yikes. All these dusty filmy murky musty impressions come to me within a few minutes of first applying Shroud....the name does affect my impression. I definitely see and smell the dryness of old linen and ancient wood.... Comapared to the sadalwood notes in Tushnamatay (which is lovely on me) Shroud's wood notes move around dragging the roses behind it all the way from here to eternity.... Interesting because it is so very evocative - but not something I would wear.

For Jenny, with love. Crocus with snowdrop and three lilies. Prague is a place I have always wanted to go. Immediately out of the imp I like the scent and I discover as others have mentioned it is a delicate white floral, and I get just a hint of sweet fruitiness in the nanoseconds before Prague becomes white lillies with a hint of herbs. But after about 20 minutes it begins a slow descent towards....Coppertone. No doubt about it Time passes. An hour later Prague is faint and slowly disappearing. This is a gentle and almost aquatic note, on me it does end up in the realm of shadows and water...I will enjoy my imp...

I'll admit I'm a slow learner. It has taken me one year of immersing myself in hundreds of BPAL scents to learn what O was all about. When I first smelled this last year I thought: "honey-ish vinegar" and "not-for-me". TODAY is a different story The LAB - with their infinite wisdom and intuition - kept sending me Imps of O and I kept tossing them aside thinking: "huh, another O?" Finally, slow learner that I am, I picked one up and put some on. Wow. Totally different reaction - it smelled glorious on me. A couple of posts before me - YBNB said it when she said "sexy sweet honey amber" my thoughts exactly. My husband has commented on it too - so on me it most assuredly has a sillage, he calls me BABY when I am wearing this. HA! O warms and evolves on the skin like nothing else. I don't smell jasmine notes at all - but there is an intimate undercurrent that is so lovely and unusual, one I love so thoroughly, that I have consequently ordered a 5ml. Seductive O clearly needs decanting time...put it on and wait. Then, wait some more (but not a whole year!). Once again, there is something so evocative, alchemical and magical about the way Beth crafts & builds her scents, I am always just floored. Never more so then when these fragrances ask to be worn at just the right time and in just the right place. Transformation happens. ETA: punctuation,etc.

Mi-Go Brains.....Fruity. No, flowery....Someone said: Fleshy, yes, oddy enough I am getting that too. I tried Mi-Go yesterday, didn't really like it, could not identify what I was smelling and knew I needed to wait another day! So many bpal scents are like that. If you don't like it today, smell it tomorrow. I love it today - I guess I needed uncork it and let the little guy breathe - like a fine wine - it needed to exhale.....fruit hits me first today...melon, kiwi and I am also smelling juicy berries in there too. After it mellows the flowers peak through but on my skin - just barely...and so far no Pink Pepper and I *love* pink pepper... The longer I wear Mi-Go Brain Cannister the more 'flesh' or pink notes I get - yes, fleshy-pink. It smells like I would imagine brains to smell like - only sweeter! Eventually, Mi-Go Brain Cannister meanders into a remarkably calming, somehow shimmering flowery summer scent. What an amazing olfactory experience this is! And that squishy, very sticky brain is so cute!

Fossicking through my basket of imps and I come upon not one but two Phantoms. In the vial they each appear completely different. One is a very pale gold and one is a deep dark almost wine color. Smelling from each of the vials it is hard to discern any particualr scent at all from either one. I apply one to each hand and sniff. No similarities between the two - not at all! In fact I feel as if I have wandered into the Bermuda Triangle of perfume and trying to get a fix on any of the individual notes I begin to feel......lost! Now I am smelling while reading the description of the oils in Phantom and this is creating total and complete chaos between my right & left brain functions! Where am I? Which end is up? The oils: myrrh, dark musk, attar of rose (a combination of sandalwood and rose) and ylang ylang are blended so seamlessly that I can not, for the life of me, pick out any one of them! I am left wondering if either of these are Phantom?

I have received not one but a couple of Snake Oil as freebies in my orders. The first time I tried Snake Oil (last year) I thought "no, this is tooo rich and exotic & waaay over the top for me". Over the course of the past year I would try it to see if my original impression changed. No. However, now...maybe it's the time of year but I tried it again and YES! Something changed....Now I love Snake Oil! It is warm, ambery-vanilla, exotic, sexy....it evolves slowly on my skin and wafts around me like a soft shawl....the longer it wears the better it gets. And the silage....I'm like the pied piper walking down the street... I think it has less to do with weather conditions and more to do with me, my sense of smell and what I wear scent-wise has evolved to include more adventure! Over the past year I have saturated myself with everything Black Phoenix and I think I have adjusted to wearing scent as an expression - and I change daily.....what an adventure! Yum Snake Oil - I also love that is a Black Phoenix classic! So, now that my Imp is gone it's time to add Snake Oil - finally - to my bottle list!

I'm trying but can't find *any* of the fig or cocoa other reviewers have mentioned, must be my chemistry....but I certainly do get the shadowy woodsy, locked-in-a-cedar-closet part of Intrigue! That said - I am discovering that I do really like this scent! Cedar is out in front and I may now be getting just a dusting of the cocoa after about 20 minutes, but Intrigue fades fast on me without developing more beyond the cedar closet stage. But I am going to use my imp up because I am drawn to this scent - and I love slathering in on my arms....

The Red Queen.... Deep mahogany and rich, velvety woods lacquered with sweet, black-red cherries and currant. Here's a scent memory....when I was seven my father gave me a black & red laquered jewlery box and the Red Queen smells exactly like the inside of this box. So I am guessing it is laquer that hits my nose instantly when I swiped this one. I detect absolutely no sweetness, no juicy cherry, no cedar even. Just red and black laquer. Off with her head!

Santa Muerte wasn't even on my radar screen - and then a freebie appeared in my latest order. The first note out of the vial is vetiver and I love vetiver - so deep, dark and rich... along with cool and soothing. Blending with the rose & cactus flowers makes Santa Muerte equisite on & very unexpected! To me there is a common scent thread somehow linking the rose and vetiver - maybe it is simply their opposite natures....one the queen of the garden & fully evolved....and the other primal, marshy, green. I didnot expect to find this one intruiging but it is! There is a soft spiciness coming out on dry down and I am going to buy a bigger bottle of this....

After reading some of the reviews I will cast my lot with those who also went on a sweet pea overload. I applied twice to the back of my hand and as I type I can smell those sweetpeas and they are screaming for attention. I keep smelling and searching for the tonka or musk to moderate the sharpness of the sage & sweetpea. After about a half an hour it has softened a wee bit but not enough for me to be able to wear Aeval. Okay, off tho the compost with you!

Spicy, warm, resinous and most of all.....scorched, as others have mentioned. Not a fragrance I am drawn to want to wear at all. There is a note of something very familiar in one of the top notes that hits me immediatley upon opening this bottle - almost like a body lotion that has gone rancid. I don't pick up any cirtus oils that I can identify, anyway. As I smell it deeper - I do feel its strength. But not enough to ever wear it! Over-all impression: nyet. Not for me.

I love Dance of Death, I was pretty sure I would - being an old The orris and patchouli are prominent on me and makes this combination so unusual that I keep sniffing my wrist. It is certainly the dark green and earthy fragrance that other reviwers have mentioned and as it evolves it changes and warms...To me this blend is a study in contrasts. There is an almost loamy, earthiness to it and yet also an aspect of this combination of notes that are entwined and twisted around a sliver of very dry bone. Murky? Yes. Very. But I love it's uniqueness and disquietude.

On me Spooky is all about Girl Scout Cookies - the mint ones. Only in this incarnation they have been dipped in a coconut cream. Now I love a Girl Scout cookie just as much as the next person, but not as a fragrance to wear, mint just is too, well, minty on me. But as far as a festive yummy room scent goes, now your talking! I put a few drops of Spooky in my candle burner and after an hour or so found myself in my kitchen, standing on a stool, fossicking around (with a flashlight mind you) in the deepest, darkest recesses of my kitchen cupboards looking for something sweet to eat. eta: i have a brand-spanking-new 5ml. bottle of Spooky that is looking for a new home!