LiberAmoris

Hearth 2005 is really so different from its 2004 counterpart. I feel like I can detect elements from a lot of other blends in this: the butteriness of Shill, the nutty note from Miskatonic University, the creamy sweetness of Jack, and a slight corn note from Trick or Treat. All in all, it's of course its own creature---very much like toffee or pralines (as others have noted) with that pine/cedar element. Hearth would make a great room scent, but on my skin, the combination of the butter and the pine is a bit much to have so close to my person, in such a concentrated amount. I'm going to add this to my oil burner and use it there. I can't imagine a better scent to have in the air during the holidays!

If you like lilies, you've got to try Cobra Lily. It's absolutely, as other reviewers have mentioned, a heady bunch of 'em. It smells like there might be a bit of orange and a bit of dragon's blood in here to me, but the lily is really the star player and the supporting notes are subtle. I'm not so much of a lily fan, but I'm really glad I got to try this. It's one heck of an unabashed floral.

Yew-Trees goes on with a menthol-y eucalyptus-y burst for me, but that edge quickly backs down and I'm left with light pine and a sappy resin that *almost* has a dark coconut or leather vibe to it. It sounds weird, but it's really good. Because this evergreeny blend is tempered by that sap note, this is very wearable for me and much more elegant and unusual than I was expecting. For some reason I keep thinking of the blue spruce, but this is darker and greener than that, and more exotic. I'm really surprised by how much I like Yew-Trees, especially on the dry down. I'll definitely be keeping my imp to wear through the winter season.

Holy sh*t, Dee is good. It smells like a library off the wing of a great estate---vaulted ceilings, mahogany shelving with sliding ladders, an enormous fireplace with a leather wing chair, and a vast wood table piled high with cloth- and leather-bound books. With a touch of water damage or dampness on the pages. The woodsy notes make it seem as through the library has a set of double doors that lead out onto the grounds, where a copse of trees sends fresh green-laden air rifling through the pages of the books open on the table. Yum. If academics had a smell, this would be it. It's like a bookish mating cry. I don't even know if this is something I would wear often, as it is so specific and evocative for me. But I think I'll be getting a little bottle just to have, to sniff and occasionally anoint my BF with.

Lilith has been on wishlist for so long, and the lovely Lab threw in a frimp with my latest order. Straight out of the imp, it reminds me of both Nosferatu and Lady Macbeth. It has that high sweet wine note that smells a bit like nail polish remover. Once the wine note dies down a little though, I get the roses and myrrh. For some reason, this combination is working for me. It's very sexy, very take-no-prisoners. Mmmm, the days of wine of roses. But after about an hour, it's completely gone. I wish this lasted longer, but that's ok, the next time I wear it I'll just slather.

Sed Non Satiata smells like peanut butter and honey to me! I keep checking because it seems so improbable, but that's what I'm getting. There is definitely a sexy gourmand edge to it, and I can see it falling into the same kind of category as O or La Petite Mort, but the peanutty/honey combo is throwing me for a loop. Being a patchouli kind of girl, I'd love to smell more patchouli in this (patchouli haters, take heart---it's incredibly well blended!). I think a lot of people will like this, but on my skin it seems to be going in a strange direction. The drydown is much better, it's musky-sweet and pretty nice. But I don't think I can handle the 'nut phase.'

Malkuth is spicy cinnamon and strawberry on me, and reminds me a great deal of Blood Moon. I love the patchouli and what smells like sandalwood and cedar. I think I even smell a little bit of frankincense. I'll be using the bottle in my oil burner in order to be surrounded by this when I work from home.

Bess was a complete surprise for me. I was expecting a primarily rose/floral blend with rosemary and grape. But on my skin it is strong orange flower/blossom and grape with rosemary. I don't smell any rose, mint, or lemon. This doesn't happen to me very often at all, but something in the combination of these notes on my skin is making me feel...ill. I want to wait for the drydown, but I don't think I can do it. This will be one of the rare blends that I scrub off.

Yep, fresh dry tea leaves and cut lemons! Spirits of the Dead is really refreshing and I love the tartness of it. It changes very little on my skin from the in-bottle scent. Maiden and The Dormouse were kind of uneven on me, so I'm excited to find a tea blend that works with my chemistry. This is another bottle I'm happy to set aside until the spring and summer when it will be perfect.

Dreamland is like a perfect bouquet of pink creamy florals on me. Although the tuberose is really strong at first, it backs off and I get an incredibly well-blended floral that's very smooth and soothing. The skin musk makes it subtly sexy. This bottle is getting stashed away for the spring alongside Beltane and Pink Moon.

The Sleeper is a really curious blend. Frist applied, I get loads of rosemary and jasmine. The poppy and lily don't really emerge for me until after 20 minutes, and on the drydown I smell the oakmoss and something musky. And yet, it's really well blended, so only in retrospect did I realize that I was smelling all of them at once. For some reason though, a combination of notes here is smelling like a band-aid on me. It's a plastic, sterilized note that I'm guessing is just my weird skin chemistry acting out. It's a shame, because I love rosemary blends and had such high hopes for this one.

I was so hoping The Evening Star would be like a cross of Vechernyaya and Moon Rose (sans rose), and it is! All those white musks and the moonflower together---it's like moonlight on my skin. The moonflower note has been an acquired taste for me over the last year, but now I absolutely love it. The Evening Star will be one of those blends I reach for when I want something serene, ethereal, and incandescent.

Traditionally, Beaver Moon is named thus for a very obvious reason: during this time of year, beavers are hard at work building their dams and preparing for the onset of winter. Because it was too hard to resist, BPAL’s Beaver Moon is sillier, sleazier, and full of camp. This scent is of cheesecake and cupcakes, more in line with it’s cheekier connotations, and really hasn’t a damn thing to do with Luna at all! Beaver Moon is also one of my favorite Lunacies---right up there with Chaste Moon for me. It definitely is akin to Midway---in that it's a foodie blend but is surprising light, and is not cloying even though it's sweet---but it also has a wonderful graham crust and cream cheese frosting/cheesecake note, as already mentioned. Yum, yum, yum. One of my Beaver Moon bottles cracked in shipment and so there was 'Beaver all over my box' (sorry, had to say it) so I had a great opportunity to test it on my skin last night as I tried to clean everything up. It wears very true to the in-bottle scent on me, like a heavenly mating of Chaste Moon, Chimera, and Midway. Definitely on my top ten LEs ever.

On me, Nuclear Winter has the watery mints of Ice Queen and Cold Moon, with the addition of that grassy underlayer that Macha mentions above. I love mint, and enjoy it here, but if I had to choose just one mint blend, it would be Lick It, my new minty love. Nuclear Winter reminds me of an iceberg or a arctic landscape. It's like a cascade of glacial blues, greens and whites. Like a polar bear swim in a bottle!

I'm not the hugest fan of ylang ylang, but I thought I'd give Stardust a try anyway. It's definitely a bold blend, with strident tuberose and that ever-distinctive ylang ylang on first application. On the drydown, it's a flashback to childhood memories of raucous block parties in the late seventies/early eighties---that smell of hairspray and classic 70s perfume and cigarette smoke. I think the ylang ylang is a little too strong for my taste here, but it perfectly encapsulates the decadence of the decade. And it would definitely be a great perfume for clubbing!

I don't really have that much to add so I'll just concur with the reviewers above who said that Snow Bunny is very reminscent of Skadi. To me, it's Skadi without the 'mulling spice' notes that I get from that blend---clove and cinnamon. Snow Bunny has less 'drop' and depth to me, but is very enjoyable in a girly, lighthearted, wintry kind of way. It reminds me of the smell of walking back into a ski lodge after a morning of hitting the slopes, with the odor of snow and evergreens clinging to my parka, and then pulling off my hat and having that happy, clean, girly scent of shampoo cascade around me as my hair falls to my shoulders. And the bottle art is adorable! It matches the oil perfectly.

Lick It is the biggest surprise of the Yule blends for me so far. I ordered it because I love mint and can't resist the foodie blends. Also because when I was a kid, my brother and I had this incredible felted advent calendar in the shape of a Christmas tree with a little pocket for each day leading up to the holiday. In each pocket, my mother tucked in two miniature candy canes that we would get each night after dinner. So I have many happy memories of candy canes. I was expecting pure candy cane---strong peppermint with sweetness. But as others have described, it dries down to a Black Opal-esque musky vanilla, with just the right amount of mint to make it sparkly and mouth-watering. It's really much more versatile and wearable than I was anticipating. The mintiness makes it so perfectly seasonal and lovely at this time of year---but I think this would be equally good in the summertime because it's so very cooling and refreshing. Yup, I'll be getting another bottle of this one.

Right out of the bottle, The Peacock Queen is definitely a mature rose, more guarded and less vulnerable than Rose Red. On my skin I smell the same 'kind' of rose that I get from RR, but with a darker underpinning of oakmoss that makes the rose feel both less accessible and more refined. After about an hour, The Peacock Queen goes a little bit 'soapy' on me. It won't replace RR as my favorite rose----even so, I have to admire the skill in creating a blend that absolutely telegraphs a rarefied rose. I might try wearing a bit of this in my hair to see if works better off my skin.

When I was living in New Orleans I used to buy this incense that came in a little box with an image of the Virgin Mary on the front. It looked like peat moss and it would smolder for hours, making my apartment smell like a church at Easter. Since I left, I've been searching for this incense, or a decent replacement, to no avail. But Midnight Mass is pretty close! I definitely feel like I can pick out the traditional 'churchy' resins: frankincense and myrrh. Past that, I feel like there's perhaps a very muted rose note that's just on the periphery. On the drydown I'm picking up cedar, maybe a little sandalwood, and galbanum. It does bear a resemblance to Cathedral, although Cathedral (at least with my skin chemistry) is heavier on the wood notes and Midnight Mass is more resiny. One thing that did surprise me was that I was expecting Midnight Mass to have a 'smoky' note, like in Gyspy Queen or Hexennacht or Devil's Night. But on me it's smokeless incense, like entering a room in which incense has been burned for many years and the scent has worked its way into the walls and curtains and furniture (or pews)---so it's all around one like incense, without the smoke. I think I might have to get another bottle of this just to use in my oil burner. Between this and Jacob's Ladder I am in resin heaven.

Mmmmm, Jacob's Ladder on me is all amber and musk. It definitely is a 'lighter' scent and has very little sillage on me, but it does not disappear---it just stays very close to the skin. I love amber and here it is shown to advantage. This reminds me less of Snake Charmer and more of The Lion, which is one of my faves. Although Jacob's Ladder is not a complicated blend on my skin, it's very enjoyable, and I'm glad I have 2 bottles so I can slather away.

I went through my imps today and yeah, found an imp of Cheshire Cat that I forgot about. There's a note in this that is definitely acrid on me at first, even though it smooths out eventually. Grapefruit is always so effervescent on me, and sparkling, even though as a citrus oil it evaporates so quickly from the skin. The lavender and red currant stretch the blend in other dimensions, making it deeper and darker. The chamomile adds an herbal twist that I always find surprising. It's a tough blend to describe because it's really just so unique. Hopefully the grapefruit season will be better next year and this one can come back!

I love the idea of the graces in perfume! They remind me of a poem I love by Robert Hass called "Against Botticelli." Euphrosyne is so strong on me, though, and the jasmine and gardenia (both notes that are often overpowering enough on their own) together here create a one-two knockout floral punch. I actually don't even smell tea rose or much vanilla---it's just gardenia and jasmine. I might try this one in the oil burner. I think the combination of notes will be more nuanced when not applied to my skin.

Dirty sounded like a fun scent, but nothing up my alley. I don't really enjoy the 'clean' scents. But this smells like honeysuckle and cucumber on me, so I'm enjoying it more than I thought I would. It reminds me a little of White Rabbit and the white tea note in other blends. It's not one that I'll probably wear again, but I'm really glad I got to try it.

I was very surprised by Whip. I was expecting to be overwhelmed by the leather, but it's so subtle here that it's just at the very edges of this blend. It actually seems to make the rose seem 'fresher' or 'crisper' in some way, more defined, like outlining red in a thin line of black. It's very wearable, and I think this would even make a great work scent. Oh, I almost forgot the obligatory:

Lust smells like the love child of Urd and Blood Moon! All that wonderful red musk and patchouli with a layer of glorious myrrh---so good. I can hardly detect the ylang ylang at all. It's very dark and sensual and animalistic. This is lust, not love! Very primal.