modillian

In the bottle: smoke overload. On the skin: Beautiful, perfumey buzz. Slight orchid, slight labdanum bite. Indulgent opium haze. It's strange - the perfume buzz (opoponax or benzoin?) is strong on top, the flowers are weak in the middle, and the bottom opium is as strong as the top. It's a bread-heavy sandwich here. Strong, but it's not overpowering like in the bottle. Gorgeous. Torpid. Wrecked. After an hour it smells completely different. The heavy perfume has faded and let the flowers shine through as tons of orchid and opium accented with a labdanum whine. This is scary, mwahahahaaa! An awesome costume perfume, your favorite witch and her magic potions. Lasts for six hours.

At first it reminded me a lot of Sri Lanka with the sandalwood, cedar, and incense. I can only assume it's the myrtle coming out on me weirdly. Huh, I guess I just found out myrtle by itself doesn't work for me. There is a soft carnation singing in the back, a couple determined ambers, one hard and one powdery...and that's about it. These "golden" notes are completely flat on me. Too bad, too bad. The ambers don't shine at all on my skin, which is a huge surprise since amber usually loves me.

I am not too proud to say this one scared the dickens out of me just to see it as a frimp. I've heard about Fenris Wolf and his maties, Satyr and Wolfsbane. I will not tolerate your male sex freak shenanigans on my skin, mmmkay? *braces self* In the bottle all I smell is red musk. Not good. Mmmmm, sandalwood. Wet on the skin and it's all sandalwood. Weird. Drying, the red musk shows itself. I knew you where there, evil musk. The musk stays in the back and the woods and resin come to play nicely with each other. I can see this as a guy scent, but once again the red musk tips this into "eh, uniform smelliness" as so many other musks do. To the swaps.

In the bottle...celery? No, no, no, but two of the mints are green, one is blue. It's weird how I can smell the differences between them. Ambergris is showing up a few minutes in and delicious. The ambergris doesn't go heavy at all, and the mints aren't deep by any means. It's zesty, leafy...and totally not for me. Huhn. Hadn't seen that one coming. I like the idea of mint so much, but the single-note body spray I have from B&BW doesn't work with me either. I mean, they smell fine, but the just don't work with me somehow. A personality clash somewhere down the line? Tant pis.

This smells evil. Not bad, but there's a light airy sweetness, and the oil is just as runny as harmless Cathode, then WHAM, evil absinthe and whiskey hit the back of your throat three seconds later. I do believe that was an punch! A punch of odors. On the skin it's a seductive wildcard of EVILNESS. What is that seductive sweet smell? I have no idea. And there's another, and another. In the past I've steered away from gardenia scents because actual real gardenias are so strong they give me massive headaches. Gardenia is probably one of the evil sweet smells of seduction. And it's not giving me a headache, what a surprise! First comes the sweet candy gardenia, then a one-two punch of lavender and ambergris to confuse the nose, then it plunges straight down through the florals to the whiskey-wood bottom. Holy crap, it's a friggen roller coaster to hell. I love it. I've had the bottle for a while, and as it's aged the whiskey has become more prominent and the wearlength has increased. I'd consider it perfumey, floral, and woody with notes of booze. ETA November 2010: Aw, nuts. Aging for a total of three years has not helped this scent. It's a mishmash of strong florals to begin, and it only gets to be nicely complex after a couple hours of wear when it no longer has as much throw. What a shame.

This is a frimp. I would never have picked this one because of the "dark musk". I am prone to liking all the other ingredients very much, though, so we'll see how it goes. In the bottle I get leather, musk, and smoke. Wet it's all black leather, which is very nice. Dry at first it's hotly tanned leather with a little smoke. The throw is very minimum, surprisingly. The throw is...disappearing, in fact? Is my skin eating this oil??? There some punchy ambergris coming out with the hot leather and smoke, but it's still departing at about ten minutes in. It's gone! My skin has eaten this oil. All I'm getting is a very faint leather/smoke scent. Well! That was a disappointing show. Half the fun of these oils is smelling how they unfold over the hours. I guess if I want a show tonight I'll just pop on some Kubla Khan to blow my hair back. I already have lovely powerful leather scents, so Hellfire is quite swappable.

I am really surprised by this one. I didn't expect to like it at all, because musk generally doesn't work on me even if white musk sometimes does, and so far everything with coconut I've tried has been overwhelmed by that one note. Right off the top when wet the iris pops and sings loud. There's a little coconut to begin with, but I don't know what the hazelnut is supposed to smell like. Very bright and sparkling clean, barely any musk at all. As it dries the coconut comes out more prominently...very prominently...dominates...tinged with something interesting, maybe the musk at ten minutes...but no, all I get is coconut, which is nice enough but I want other scents along with it so I don't just smell like tropical sunscreen. To the swaps with Black Pearl, for an owner who will let this oil shine in all its glory!

This was a frimp. Just to lay some ground, I'm not crazy about scents that are just woodsy. They're too dry and plain for me usually. Also, not crazy about pine/fir scents, because they all smell the same to me. I spent a lot of time climbing coniferous trees when I was a kid, and although I think it made me love the smell of resin as much as I do, it also wore me out on pine needles - they're just not interesting! In the bottle: Pine needles and bark! On the skin: Oof. Hit with the ozone-y note of "night air", which is interesting, sweet and floral, but strong. And...more florals. And more florals. Oh my, this is actually really pretty! It's not just pine needles, but the whole tree and the creeping parasitic plants on it and the nearby bushes in bloom on a cool dewy night. Reminds me of The Jersey Devil with the cool, fir scent. Drying: The ozone dies back and more of the green scent comes through. I think I actually liked the floral ozone more than the green here. It's pretty but unimpresive, coming across more as a typical packaged "green" potpourri than something worthy of BPAL's complexity. It remains a typical green scent tinged with background ozone florals, which is disappointing, but the initial play was fascinating. If you like fresh green scents this might be right up your alley, but I'm picky about my greens. I think the only one I've liked has been Hemlock, which is more of an acidic jolt to the brain than an actual plant. And I adore Destroying Angel and Death Cap, but those are more spicy soil scents rather than actual greens.

DIVINE RABBITS! THIS IS THE SMELL OF DIVINE RABBITS! YES! In bottle: Something sweet, rum, and a whole lotta alcohol. Wet on skin: Well, yes. Cocoa and rum and wine. I really don't care for wine scents, even as much as I like boozy vanilla and intoxicating sweetness. Ugh, this is too much wine. It's more like alcohol and grape juice. *gag* No blood, just spices from the rum and a bright red wine. Drying: Uuuugh, gross. I can see how some people would like to smell like wine, but I sure don't want to. It's so cool how Beth can make it smell so exactly right, though. Thumbs up to the amazing Lab! It certainly smells like the afterparty where everyone's spilled their drinks and left it to congeal and rot. I wish I had gotten cocoa and chocolate like the others, but all I get is sickeningly boozy grape juice.

I so wanted to get lemon poundcake and jasmine! Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance in hell. In the bottle: chemical-y sweet! Wet on skin: chemically sweet! Rose and chemicals. I am desperately hoping this morphs well. Dry on skin: ...okay then. Overpowering rose, chemicals, and something else heady and headachy. I am not pleased. >:| Why is it all these traditionally "supersexy seductress of dreams!" blends turn out so badly on me? At least it's not lik Maenid which turned into vomit. :[ Okay, after an hour it turns to roses, some lotus, and something spicy, but still way out of my league. Ugh, get it offa meeeee.

I had such high hopes when people were mentionin ginger-peach heavy on a vanilla-y richness. It smells chemically and celery-ish to me in the bottle, not good. On wet it's better, changing to ginger-peach, with something almost milky or malty in the background (could that be a musk?) Ooooh, and something yeasty is going on too? Maybe it's more like ginger beer and peaches? It's almost coming off as ginger-marshmallow(the herb)-peaches. I thought I would like this more, but I definitely do not, as I was hoping for more prominent peaches. I aged it and it's still pretty unmixed and bizarre. Off to swaps.

In the bottle: Dirty dirty dirt and green sap. I've definitely smelled this green sap stuff elsewhere. Not like cutting grass, more like cutting up wet juicy vegetables roots or weeding my garden. ETA: duh, it says fungi notes, and yeah, it smells like tearing up the gills of mushroom that's only very slightly bitter. Wet on skin: Very nice. Dirt, the green sap is the strongest. Gathering a faint spicy green smell now -very much unlike weeding a garden and most distinctly a perfume waft. Mmm, getting much headier as it dries, but not as strong as Death Cap. I've got Death Cap on my other hand for comparison, and it's much more heady spice (almost foody?) with a hint of green and dirt, while DA is earthy sap with a bit of spice and waft. They're both very good. Dry on skin: Oh my god. OH MY GOD. I love Death Cap's wafty hypnotism, but it may be trumped by Destroying Angel. It's morphed into this incredible greenspice perfume, not at all like the initial I've-just-run-through-the-muddy-garden scent. DA is softer than DC, but utterly delicious and, dare I say, softly sophisticated while keeping a fresh edge. It appears to fade from my skin in a couple hours, but spank me with a monkey if it wasn't worth every moment beforehand. I'll age it to see if the lasting power increases. I like my poisonous perfumes, mwahahahahaaa!

Mmm, let's see, what's kush? According to Wikipedia: Kush refers to a subset of strains of indica cannabis. The origins of Kush cannabis are from a landrace plant in Afghanistan and Northern India, with the name coming from the Hindu Kush valleys. "Hindu Kush" strains of cannabis were brought to the United States in the mid to late 1970s and continue to be available to the present day. Kush strains were among those cultivated by the British firm GW Pharmaceuticals for its legally licensed commercial trial of medicinal cannabis. So! Kush is latent marijuana and British medicine. Niiice! I lovelovelove grapefruit. I am on a mission to try at least all the GC BPAL grapefruit scents. Mmm, grapefruit and leather in the bottle. On wet, grapefruit, lemon, mint. Very yummy so far. Oh yes, something delicious is coming up around five minutes, could it be amber or orchid? I think it's both, actually, the orchid coming up as the grapefruit dies down from the high note, warm amber as the anchor. Not getting any leather or woods at this point. It's got a heady perfume quality too. Very sophisticated so far. Mmmhmm, at ten minutes the sweet florals die back some as the woody notes come out, mostly white tea and a little kush. Still very pretty. And it keeps getting yummier at thirty minutes, with lots of orchid, amber and kush with dollops of grapefruit and mint. This stays a pretty solid kush/orchid/amber scent for a few more hours. I wish the other scents had come out more, as I loved it to begin with. I am ambivalent on Manhattan, but I'll age it just to see if more scents pop out in time.

A mild yellow in the imp case, like many other BPAL oils. Smells high and grating in the bottle, a little like the thin zest of celery or dandelion juice. Holy moly, this is amazing. Metal, sweat, some kind of biting lubricant oil, a little spice. Bright, very bright and high in the nose. No musk. This is so, so gorgeous. The incense or the metals is bringing up some utterly delicious sense-memory, but I can't for the life of me define what. Maybe it's like smelling the hot grease on my bike chain on a summer day, my grandparent's old rickety wooden garage housing their boat they'd take to Wisconsin but left mouldering otherwise, the strange cleaning-preservation-scent when I step into a different section of a museum (or Epcot) or a section of a planetarium. Guh guh guh. The best way ever to smell like Mal or Kaylee from Serenity. With Snake Oil on one hand and Phoenix Steamworks in the other, I can detect a similar spicy voluptuousness, very pleasurable. Mildly sneeze-provoking, but I can suffer that for luxurious sage. Becomes brighter, almost lemony as it wears on. After two hours it softens and becomes slightly powdery in the best way. Eighteen hours later -yes, way overnight- it's close to the skin, no sage, and has morphed more to a dulled metallic musk. (Which, since there's no actual musk in here, works well and doesn't become oversweet with me.) Phenomenal.

In the imp it's a bright ruddy amber, almost full to the top. Immediately on the skin I get the woods -oddly distinct- and a faint sweetness. Oak-tobacco on top of teak, no vanilla other than the down-low sweetness. Somewhat similar to Kathmandu at this stage. Oh my. Oh my goodness. It's -it's heating up. Jesus, it's heating up and getting stronger and spicier as it goes. Nnnnnnrgh. The vanilla is toasting up the woods and howling as they burn. And -and it's getting heady. Heady, as in vaguely alcoholic, like the best kinds of vanilla do on me, and smooth smooth smooth. Oh, this is heart-stopping. Who would have thought a mess of woods livened up with vanilla would be so affecting? This is everything I'd hoped Sapphics would be and wasn't. The oak keeps the other scents from being too weighed-down as the vanilla and tobacco throw a party and pop open the whiskey. The Antikythera Mechanism is a transforming oil, going from plain woods to a living machine I could not even have imagined. Medium throw, gains an almost nutty quality as it sweetens and wears on. The teak holds strong, only morphed and amazing after a few hours. And get this - eighteen hours later it's still strong! It's way mellowed and almost musky on me, the black vanilla and tobacco having morphed the other woods incredibly. Five million thumbs up!

Oh, now this is a freebie, but I know I won't like this. Dragon's blood, yuuuck. In bottle: DB and...cherries? Wet on skin: opium! Opium and DB. Sligh floral something. Florals coming out! Smells astringent like lillies and possibly roses. Ewww, roses. *looks at description* Ha! I'm getting better at this sniffing by nose. Oh god, choking on lillies and powdery-cloaking-lilac, which I what I mistook for opium. Dry on skin: Good god, somehow the lilac has choked out and overpowered even the dreaded dragon's blood...then, fifteen minutes later the lilac clears, lightens up, and turns pretty. Just lilac thought, nothing else. Swappage is imminent.

In bottle: *drooooling* Myrrrrrhhh and cyprus and slight tang of metallicness that I assume is the blood accord. Wet on skin: Holy cripes. Marry me, Valentine. The woods are distinguishing themselves from the myrrh, which is only a good thing. The blood accord is not something I thought I'd ever like, but geez, I really do paired up with the drier scents. Dry on skin: What a rollercoaster. It's deep and mysterious and amazing. I haven't been crazy about cyprus before, but it sure works here. Eventually the cyprus, alas, is following its tendency of amping crazily and nasally on me, but we'll see how it cycles through the month before I toss or keep it. Because seriously, until then it's incredible. ETA: Through a more neutral hormone cycle the cypress is kept in check and it's all gorgeous myrrh and incense and coppery blood tang. I can't say I'd wear this all the time, but for costuming or certain moods it's amazing.

In the bottle: Ooooh, all candy charcoal! Too strong. Cloying pastry stink to high heaven. Wet on the skin: *siiiigh* This is why you should never, ever go by the smell in the bottle alone. On the skin it morphs almost immediately to a delicious candy smell and strong pastry-smell akin to the one in Channiukya. Dry on skin:...the syrupy-sugared pastry smell may be a biiit too strong actually. After an hour it becomes thinner, sweeter, and the candy comes back in. Very delish. I'll have to try it on a different hormone cycle to get the full effect. I don't know about the other smells in the oil, but I'm definitely getting the charcoal and holiday sweets. ETA: Once more, this is a really interesting combination of scents, but too weird for me. What a peculiar knockout, but definitely to the swaps.

2008 Version In the bottle: Caramel! Some smoke. On skin: At first I get the caramel, incense, opium, and something very like butter popcorn - these spices sure are interesting. Then the woods come through smoothly and it's delicious for an hour. Alas, afterwards it all goes up in smoke as hedonistic opium claims the stage and doesn't let it go. On me I've found opium acts similarly to patchouli, thus much like patchouli, opium sometimes works but mostly doesn't. Pity. It's a nice foody smokey scent (and mmmm, amber) besides the opium blast, but I'll trade it out for something better on my skin.

When I first started with BPAL I wanted something similar to my then-favorite perfume, Lucky You, which is described as "Ruby red grapefruit, crushed green leaves, blue poppy, star jasmine, amber, sandalwood, musk." I tried Megaera ("Orris, black amber, bergamot, plum and grapefruit") in the Excolo line right off the bat, and in my opinion it is still the BETTER version of Lucky You. Megaera is creamier and fruitier, and the black amber has punch, but those are only a good things in my book. Megaera has been my signature scent ever since.

Yes, I too wish there was little more going on. It's basically a less impressive Polyhymnia on me, and I too must blame the grey amber. I usually love amber, but this form pretty much let me down, since all I got was powder and astringent lily. Pity. I'll keep it to see if it ages better, but if not it's off to the swaps.

Eat Me: Nnnnnnguh. Eat Me smells like rich, dark, buttery vanilla, sugar, and toffee, so decadent it's reading as alcoholic and smokey to my nose. It's like Snake Oil, but less potentially overwhelming/nauseating in throw and density. It lasts and lasts and lasts. The smokey baking smell is topped with a sweet waft, which must be the rich currants. Currants work really well on me, as evidence by Megaera and Cheshire Cat. This is in the same family as the 2007 LE Chanukkiyah, but more fruity goodness, less sensual skin-licking. This is the PG-13 counterpoint Chanukkiyah's R rating.

I can't believe I didn't review this yet! I have a full bottle on the way, so I'll finally say why I adore this so. At first, it came off all smokey flowers. Then the fresh carnations and dusky tonka swerved in and made me fall in love. After a couple hours the ambergris/balsam swings in to deepen everything, with prominent woody roses, smoke, and murky ambergris to the end. The mutability is a treat and a nod to the element of the crazy. Not sensual or seductive. It could be romantic, but in a not-quite-right way. An uneasy (insane?) kind of amorous pursuit, like the person may love you but also would love to eat your brains. Zombie love. Dr. Hannibal Lector's brand of love in pursuit of Clarice. It's totally my kind of perfume.

Olive oil, beeswax, glowing amber, sweet sufganiyot, pomegranate, and fig. Gnnnnnnuh. Why did I purchase this? Because I looked up sufganiyot, and it's basically a sweet fried Jewish holiday pastry. It's a Jewish jelly donut. I had to have it. I get the familiar so-rich-it's-smokey pastry smell. On top of that is a fresh waft of clearing air, must be the beeswax and olive oil. I know the creamy amber must be amping up the buttery smell. I can smell the rich fruits stuck in the middle, between the pastry and the beeswax smell, but I can't tell the individual notes. Once again, nnnnnnnnnnnnggguuh. This is the equivalent of sex on a flour-dusted table in the middle of pie-baking, elbow in the butter dish, oil-smeared hands, and fruit scattered on the floor (not very kosher?) If I wear this I won't get hungry myself, but I feel like people around me would. Basically, this is sexy!holiday pie. :DDDDD P.S. Sorry about the double posting! Is fixed now.

I went to Versailles castle just recently, so I was excited about trying this oil. Soon after arriving at Versailles, however, I quickly tired of the overblown, gaudy construction and decoration. The palace is sickeningly decadent for my tastes, but amazing and admirable, a symbol of its time. This oil Versailles is a complete success at capturing the place. My skin has the same reaction as I had to the real palace: overwhelmed and far too decadent! The oil is a mishmash of syrupy sweet perfumey florals, the amber choking me in a fog. It brings to mind a red velvet couch in which overperfumed, overpowdered yet dirty French aristocrats sat to gossip about nothing important. I am similarly amazed at the scope of this oil, as I was at the palace, and I wholeheartedly cannot wear it myself. I hope this style suits others more than me!