PrinceofcatS

I get grapefruit, white tea and ginger from this when it's first drying, and a faintly soapy floral note that is probably apple blossom. Not complex, or especially me, but clean and pretty. Then the scent vanished pretty much entirely from my skin. I still get a faint soapiness and grapefruit, but I am not impressed. I've wanted to try this a long time so I'm glad I got this as a free sample, though.

Strong vanilla, almost an edible vanilla, that leaned a touch powdery at first, and thankfully didn't tip over the edge into baby powder like I feared it might. Underneath was something that smelled almost like dusty, preventing it from actually being very food-y. As it dried the sandalwood and amber came out quite a bit more, and the oudh started to show up, but very lightly, but vanilla was always a dominant note. Eventually it was just a bit of amber and the darker oudh vying with vanilla, and by now it's faded into vanilla and amber with just a little shadow. It developed a lot, from a light, rather cloying sweetness into a stronger and darker blend, but the sweet strong vanilla note was always there. I find this very fitting for Edith and for the upcoming long winter nights. It just has that sort of feel to it. I've been really impressed with the CP scents! I regret not managing to get a couple of the ones that sold out, but I'm impatient to get more of them before they all disappear. They've all had a lot more complexity and beauty than I was expecting, and only one of them was disappointing on me.

At first all I got was Champagne + Musk, then some rosewood began to come out. I assumed that, like Between Your Heart and Mine, rosewood would overpower the other scents, but it's been on for about an hour and the white rose has really come to the fore in a lovely way. I really don't get much if any vanilla though, and the very light, almost dry champagne note (which at first leaned rather soapy on me) is still fairly strong. The amber in the background adds something bright, and keeps the cool and dry scents from being one-dimensional on me. This is another scent that's weirdly more of a "normal" perfume than anything else I've tried from BPAL. There seem to be a lot in the collection that feel like that. All that said, this is softer and lovelier than most perfumes are, in my experience - it's very light and gentle, but still strong-willed. ETA: The vanilla eventually came forward; the champagne and musk notes never really left, but I'm not sure the white rose is still here. Anyway, an unusual and lovely scent!

The earlier reviewers all got strong rose out of it, and in the bottle it smelled like freshly cut roses and nothing else to me, so I was quite shocked when I put it on and almost solely smelled rosewood! As it dried, notes of rose came out. A little while in I could get hints of vanilla, but it smells like old-books vanillin, not like a creamy, sweet and edible vanilla at all. I'm very surprised with this one. I'll have to think about how I like it, because rose and vanilla with wood in the background sounded lovely, but this is a rather bookish scent - light swirls of wood and poring over old books, with the floral notes pretty firmly wrapped with the wood notes. I think it is very perfectly Edith Cushing with all that in mind, but not the creamy rose I hoped for. Edited, five months later! I wondered if maybe this had aged a little bit (or rather, hoped!) but it really seems to have! I put it on and got all rosewood at first, but then the rose and then the vanilla came out in full force, with the wood underneath them. I'm glad I kept it, because I had been very disappointed and almost got rid of it multiple times.

I'm unbelievably lazy so here is the review I posted on my blog: Immediately on, it smells like an equal blend of clove and leather. This was a relief to me, as my past experience with leather scents has been a very intense leather, which tends to make them too masculine for me. (I feel bad saying this? I don’t think scents should be gendered, but here I am, gendering them. Sigh.) Nonetheless, I really like leather as a scent, and was excited to try this one; clove, another scent you wouldn’t think of as soft or feminine, really does soften up this leather. As with my first sniff of it in the bottle, it’s prominently leather but not the kind of leather that says “genre: western”. This is leather so old and so softened by time and use it doesn’t squeak or shine anymore. It’s barely been on the skin a few minutes when a richly sweet, but still rather light, element comes in, and something that I swear smells green on me. I think this might be the white sandalwood in part, but it comes off creamy, fresh and somehow green. Then as time goes on the leather becomes a bit more straightforward, but still not overpowering or masculine. I swear there’s like a white musk, white flowers note in this, but there’s no such thing in the description! I suppose it could just be the amber, which I always find to be a beautiful scent. This is a clean and fresh scent dirtied by the faint clove and the leather. I hate to be that person, but this scent feels incredibly apt for the moment in the film it’s representative of. I didn’t snag a bottle of Thomas, but I can’t honestly picture any other blend of notes embodying this character this well. This scent is the innocence of someone who fundamentally stopped developing in childhood, the worn leather of clothes he can’t afford to get repaired and the dust and wood of a workshop alive with mad hope - and at the farthest edges, the darkness of what must be done for this dream encroaches. But also it just smells really really good on me so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A lot of people compared this one to velvet, and that honestly sounds like hyperbole when you read it, but somehow it's really fitting. It started off intensely sweet, but not thickly or cloyingly so, not girlish or edible - a blend of rose and plum that was extremely beautiful. That dipped down really fast on me, like a door shut on it, and I could still smell it underneath as other notes came forward - so their "faded roses" description was quite apt. At this point I could detect the lily note, which was so light but still so sweet. Amber is a very beautiful scent on me and grounds scents very well, I find. I don't know how to describe it, but this scent felt, to me, like there was something utterly sweet and beautiful, even sumptuous, behind a room's locked door, but I was in the hallway, where it smelled dusty, though not in a bad way; there are dark edges to this scent that don't drown out the loveliness. Actually, nothing drowns out anything because this scent is VERY gentle. I actually assumed its staying power was very poor because it seemed to vanish so quickly. And yet I could not only continue smelling hints of that dusty-sweet-darkness last night, but this morning at work too I kept getting hints of it! Though deliberately soft and "faded"-smelling, this does have really good lasting power, wow.

This scent is very different on me than in any of the other reviews I've read! My skin seems to only produce warm notes, no matter what you put on it, so while chilly scents and green ones and pure florals all call to me, none of them develops on my skin. It's like the perfume version of being, in fact, a vampire bride, and ending up with that which you love dead in your arms by the end of the night. On me, this scent is soft, gentle incense wafting over green notes - like ivy creeping over a tomb that should house nothing with blood still running beneath the skin, yet somehow does. It's not icy at all on me, but it doesn't become warm either. I was surprised to find that on me this smells almost exactly like Morocco - a scent I had an imp of and used up and never got around to purchasing in its full size - but with an added, complex layer of soft greenery. This is, I suspect, the violet leaf and tea, but I wouldn't expect them to have this sort of scent. Nonetheless, I love it. It's delicate and pretty, yet otherworldly. I actually liked it much more than I expected to!