Emma E

Inspired by the opening pages of Circle of Blood. The scent of vice and darkness: flashing neon, oil-tinged petrichor, fading perfume, smeared lipstick, and the faintest touch of gunpowder residue. Got this from a decant circle. Petrichor is right! On my skin this scent is mostly the wonderful, loamy sort of petrichor you find in a well-mulched garden after a drought-breaking rain. There's a slight waxiness which I assume is the lipstick, and what I'm supposing is the gunpowder but smells mostly like asphalt. I was a bit wary about the note of smeared lipstick and I can see that being amped by someone's skin chemistry to become unpleasant (and very worthy of the name), but when the primary note is the petrichor and faint florals it combines well to be very intriguing. It strikes me as a good encapsulation of late-afternoon strolling through a botanic garden in leather jacket and shoes. I'll try this again in summer; it seems to me the kind of scent that would be weather-dependent.

I bought a bottle of this off a fellow forumite because I have been mad with curiosity for Gore-Shock ever since I heard about it. I mean, come on, "Pulpy, scorched, pork-like flesh"? I had to. So I've got a dab of it on my wrist and I can see where all three general sets of reviewers are coming from. 1) Yes, there is a note that is meat-impressionistic. To me that note smells like the afterscent from gamey meat in a butcher's rather than the plain raw meat you get in a supermarket under plastic; there's a fattiness to the note that is very loin-of-lamb-esque. 2) Yes, there is a lot of salt. It is salty, and not an aquatic salt at all, a musk-salt, like salt on flesh. The salt combined with the impressionistic meat can give one hell of a a ham mirage. 3) Yes, it is gorgeous. There's a ton of smoke in here, and the metallic undertone compliments both the blood and the salt. If I focus on the ham mirage I could end up nauseating myself with the fat in the same way that eating drippings out of the pan is a bad idea. If I focus on the salt, I get machinery and smoke and I end up loving it. Fortunately for me the saltiness, which is just a little bit sweet, seems to be dominating more over time. I can reach the fatty-meat note if I want to, but it's very much an accompaniment to the salt rather than fighting it as it did in the early stages and once it reaches the point where they're blended together it is no longer nauseating no matter how much I reach and really quite lovely -- they mute each other a little and let the smokiness and machinery shine. The machinery cuts the fattiness and the smokiness cuts the salt and it becomes a belligerent, salty musk with a hard tang to it, almost like the taste of pistachio shells. (I can't be the only person who gets impatient and tries to crack them with their teeth, can I?) It's dirty, yes, but that makes it work. This is one of those scents that really rewards patience. Striking, unusual, over the top -- rather lovely, and utterly brilliant. Hats off to Beth.

Containing nary a neutron of meaning: rum-quince-cassis with prune and a bit of black ginger. So when I was young the family went on a holiday and we stopped by this tiny little place with a handchalked sign put out by the side of the road. FRUIT LIQUEURS, it said. "That sounds interesting," we said. There was an extremely accommodating bartender, and I can confidently say she was extremely accommodating because it has been years and years and I still remember her generous hand with deep boozy fondness. How she poured, and how we drank, and how good the liquors were. All sorts of fruits, including cassis and quince, and the place had that pleasantly boozy air of plum and brandy pudding. On my skin Alice's Evidence is the exact smell of that cassis liquor I drank in the mid-afternoon on that convivial, convivial, utterly squiffed day. I think of this scent as fondly as I do of that bartender.