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Showing results for tags 'Halloween 2009'.
Found 35 results
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LORD RUTHVEN (the Vampyre, John Polidori) It happened that in the midst of the dissipations attendant upon London winter, there appeared at the various parties of the leaders of the ton a nobleman more remarkable for his singularities, than his rank. He gazed upon the mirth around him, as if he could not participate therein. Apparently, the light laughter of the fair only attracted his attention, that he might by a look quell it and throw fear into those breasts where thoughtlessness reigned. Those who felt this sensation of awe, could not explain whence it arose: some attributed it to the dead grey eye, which, fixing upon the object's face, did not seem to penetrate, and at one glance to pierce through to the inward workings of the heart; but fell upon the cheek with a leaden ray that weighed upon the skin it could not pass. His peculiarities caused him to be invited to every house; all wished to see him, and those who had been accustomed to violent excitement, and now felt the weight of ennui, were pleased at having something in their presence capable of engaging their attention. In spite of the deadly hue of his face, which never gained a wanner tint, either from the blush of modesty, or from the strong emotion of passion, though its form and outline were beautiful, many of the female hunters after notoriety attempted to win his attentions, and gain, at least, some marks of what they might term affection: Lady Mercer, who had been the mockery of every monster shewn in drawing-rooms since her marriage, threw herself in his way, and did all but put on the dress of a mountebank, to attract his notice -- though in vain; -- when she stood before him, though his eyes were apparently fixed upon hers, still it seemed as if they were unperceived; -- even her unappalled impudence was baffled, and she left the field. But though the common adultress could not influence even the guidance of his eyes, it was not that the female sex was indifferent to him: yet such was the apparent caution with which he spoke to the virtuous wife and innocent daughter, that few knewhenever addressed himself to females. He had, however, the reputation of a winning tongue; and whether it was that it even overcame the dread of his singular character, or that they were moved by his apparent hatred of vice, he was as often among those females who form the boast of their sex from their domestic virtues, as among those who sully it by their vices. The father of all dandy aristocrat vampires: Aqua Admirabilis with polished boot leather and blood. In bottle: Very aftershave. Lavender fougere and leather with a hint of the aquatic. Wet: Vaguely herbal. It’s an excellent masculine leather scent. The vaguely aquatic touch adds interest to the leather/fougere blend. Dry: Unusual. It’s still a leather dominant aftershave, but it has teeth and… powder. The blood is more noticeable. The whole effect is weirdly viscous and a little unsettling.
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Pumpkin Patch III Pumpkin, fir needle, pitch, rosemary, and tomato. In bottle: Whoa! This is the most pumpkin pumpkin patch I’ve ever smelled. The fir and tomato complement the pumpkin beautifully. It smells like early autumn garden. Nice. Wet: Even richer on the skin The sweet pumpkin does lovely things with the tomato/rosemary/fir. I think I’m in love. I was hoping for a pumpkin cousin to planting moon and the gamble paid off. Dry: Almost apple cidery pumpkin with tomato dominant garden. The elements shift some, but it remains fascinating
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Pumpkin, black musk, tobacco, myrrh, and clove in the bottle bog standard BPAL pumpkin, a little reminiscent of pumpkin V from 2007 and pumpkin queen: swarthy, buttery pumpkin but not quite as buttery as, say, jack wet on skin i'm getting the richness of the tobacco and just a little resin from the myrrh. no clove to be found yet, which is good, as i love the concept of clove, but generally find it doesn't work in any way on my skin dry on skin a little clove, yeah? just enough to spice it up and make it swing a little toward foody. this reminds me very much of pumpkin V '07, only not as bright. it's a wearable foody pumpin that's just a little bit dark and resinous. a surprise winner from my haul and this will most likely keep me happily in pumpkin for a long while. highly recommended if you liked any of the above pumpkin blends.
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An Irish Halloween tradition! This fruit bread is used as a method of divination: a medallion of the Virgin Mary, a sliver of rag, a pea, a coin, a stick, and a ring are baked into the pastry. On Halloween night, it is cut up and served to the household. If you received the stick, you would spend the next year in conflict… if you received the medallion, you would be called to the priesthood… if you received the rag, you would be plagued with misfortune… if you received the ring, you would be married within the year… if you received the pea, you would not marry within the year… Each bottle of Barmbrack spray comes with a toy coin and a wish for your good fortune in 2010! Oh wow! First to review! It smells like really good sweetbread with a touch of cinnamon and dried fruit. Foodies rejoyce! However in my place it tends to dissapate and is not so strong. Also mine came with a pirate coin and a jack-o-lantern yoyo, fun.
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PUMPKIN PIE BATH OIL Devilishly decadent and a little bit ridiculous! I was thrilled to see a pumpkin pie bath oil show up on the last update. I love pumpkin pie, and anything spicy and autumnal is right up my alley. The scent is DIVINE. The tiny bit of spice I got in the bottle amped like whoa when applied. In the bottle, I also get a fairly strong whiff of what's probably pumpkin and buttery crust, but what reminds me very strongly of SEX, a little musky and rich and oh so devilishly decadent. Applied, it's all clove, nutmeg, cinnamon, and star anise -- all the beautifully warm spices that go into pumpkin pie. I only just used it in the shower, applying the usual way by putting a small amount in my hand and then rubbing over my arms, shoulders and upper chest. The scent is strong and makes me want to eat my hand. Those with extremely delicate skin should probably not apply. I don't normally get red patches when I use spicy blends, but this one made the crooks of my elbows and the skin under my breasts (plus a nipple and my nose, which I must have accidentally touched while I still had oil on my hands) BURN. As is normal with BPTP bath oils, it's definitely moisturizing; my skin is soft to the touch.
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COUNTESS DOLINGEN OF GRATZ (Dracula's Guest, the omitted introduction to Bram Stoker's Dracula) Now and again, through the black mass of drifting cloud, came a straggling ray of moonlight, which lit up the expanse, and showed me that I was at the edge of a dense mass of cypress and yew trees. As the snow had ceased to fall, I walked out from the shelter and began to investigate more closely. It appeared to me that, amongst so many old foundations as I had passed, there might be still standing a house in which, though in ruins, I could find some sort of shelter for a while. As I skirted the edge of the copse, I found that a low wall encircled it, and following this I presently found an opening. Here the cypresses formed an alley leading up to a square mass of some kind of building. Just as I caught sight of this, however, the drifting clouds obscured the moon, and I passed up the path in darkness. The wind must have grown colder, for I felt myself shiver as I walked; but there was hope of shelter, and I groped my way blindly on. I stopped, for there was a sudden stillness. The storm had passed; and, perhaps in sympathy with nature's silence, my heart seemed to cease to beat. But this was only momentarily; for suddenly the moonlight broke through the clouds, showing me that I was in a graveyard, and that the square object before me was a great massive tomb of marble, as white as the snow that lay on and all around it. With the moonlight there came a fierce sigh of the storm, which appeared to resume its course with a long, low howl, as of many dogs or wolves. I was awed and shocked, and felt the cold perceptibly grow upon me till it seemed to grip me by the heart. Then while the flood of moonlight still fell on the marble tomb, the storm gave further evidence of renewing, as though it was returning on its track. Impelled by some sort of fascination, I approached the sepulchre to see what it was, and why such a thing stood alone in such a place. I walked around it, and read, over the Doric door, in German: COUNTESS DOLINGEN OF GRATZ IN STYRIA SOUGHT AND FOUND DEATH 1801 On the top of the tomb, seemingly driven through the solid marble-for the structure was composed of a few vast blocks of stone-was a great iron spike or stake. On going to the back I saw, graven in great Russian letters: 'The dead travel fast.' There was something so weird and uncanny about the whole thing that it gave me a turn and made me feel quite faint. I began to wish, for the first time, that I had taken Johann's advice. Here a thought struck me, which came under almost mysterious circumstances and with a terrible shock. This was Walpurgis Night! Walpurgis Night, when, according to the belief of millions of people, the devil was abroad-when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel. This very place the driver had specially shunned. This was the depopulated village of centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay; and this was the place where I was alone-unmanned, shivering with cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again upon me! It took all my philosophy, all the religion I had been taught, all my courage, not to collapse in a paroxysm of fright. And now a perfect tornado burst upon me. The ground shook as though thousands of horses thundered across it; and this time the storm bore on its icy wings, not snow, but great hailstones which drove with such violence that they might have come from the thongs of Balearic slingers-hailstones that beat down leaf and branch and made the shelter of the cypresses of no more avail than though their stems were standing-corn. At the first I had rushed to the nearest tree; but I was soon fain to leave it and seek the only spot that seemed to afford refuge, the deep Doric doorway of the marble tomb. There, crouching against the massive bronze door, I gained a certain amount of protection from the beating of the hailstones, for now they only drove against me as they ricocheted from the ground and the side of the marble. As I leaned against the door, it moved slightly and opened inwards. The shelter of even a tomb was welcome in that pitiless tempest, and I was about to enter it when there came a flash of forked-lightning that lit up the whole expanse of the heavens. In the instant, as I am a living man, I saw, as my eyes were turned into the darkness of the tomb, a beautiful woman, with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on a bier. As the thunder broke overhead, I was grasped as by the hand of a giant and hurled out into the storm. The whole thing was so sudden that, before I could realise the shock, moral as well as physical, I found the hailstones beating me down. At the same time I had a strange, dominating feeling that I was not alone. I looked towards the tomb. Just then there came another blinding flash, which seemed to strike the iron stake that surmounted the tomb and to pour through to the earth, blasting and crumbling the marble, as in a burst of flame. The dead woman rose for a moment of agony, while she was lapped in the flame, and her bitter scream of pain was drowned in the thundercrash. The last thing I heard was this mingling of dreadful sound, as again I was seized in the giant-grasp and dragged away, while the hailstones beat on me, and the air around seemed reverberant with the howling of wolves. The last sight that I remembered was a vague, white, moving mass, as if all the graves around me had sent out the phantoms of their sheeted-dead, and that they were closing in on me through the white cloudiness of the driving hail. Hailstone-pounded cypress boughs, olibanum, and an ozone blast of lightning. First of all, as you can tell from the description, this does indeed have a big shot of ozone! I've never had a problem with ozone, but if you do, you probably already know this scent isn't for you. Okay.....with that out of the way, this scent will be very familiar if you like the Lab's aquatic and wintery scents, especially Archangel Winter*, but the olibanum does set this apart. I guess olibanum is frankincense, and it brings a little more richness to this scent. And then as the scent dries, the cypress starts to come out, just adding a slight woody element. It's very ozone and icy, fierce winds blowing hail through the tree-tops, and sweet in that slightly fruity way that the fresh-water aquatics can be. So.....no real surprises for me here, but definitely something I can wear, since I love this kind of scent. My only problem with aquatics is that they can be hard to tell apart, but that just makes it more fun to try them all! This one is somewhere between Archangel Winter and Eanach Duin, maybe with a touch of Death Of The Gravedigger. *Edit: After some comparison/testing, this definitely does not smell like Archangel Winter and I'm sorry if I misled anyone. Maybe it was the Snow Storm that I'm thinking of, I tend to get them confused. The Countess has a lot more wood than Archangel Winter (which has no wood at all that I can smell).
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Pumpkin, chocolate, coffee bean, vanilla bean, and hazelnut. This is my first time making a topic so hopefully I did this right. >>; As soon as I saw the description I knew I had to order it and I'm really glad I did. In the bottle: It smells just like the Pumpkin Spice Latte from Starbucks from Fall last year. Wet: For about 10 minutes I got an odd dirt note with a really strong coffee scent. The dirt note vanished and then it became mostly coffee until slowly fading to a warmer pumpkin spice scent with a slight creaminess from the hazelnut. Dry: I'm not getting a lot of coffee anymore. It is mostly just a pumpkin with the a hazelnut after note with occasional wifts of vanilla. It still sort of smells like a Starbucks drink. I didn't really ever get the chocolate. EDIT I still get occasional wafts of this scent and if I hold my wrist up to my nose the scent is quite strong still, though I put it on 8+ hours ago. It definitely is reminiscent of a Startbucks Pumpkin Latte. I think I want a back-up bottle.
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CRISTINA (For the Blood is the Life by F. Marion Crawford) He was near the village now; it was half an hour since the sun had set, and the cracked church bell sent little discordant echoes across the rocks and ravines to tell all good people that the day was done. Angelo stood still a moment where the path forked, where it led toward the village on the left, and down to the gorge on the right, where a clump of chestnut trees overhung the narrow way. He stood still a minute, lifting his battered hat from his head and gazing at the fast-fading sea westward, and his lips moved as he silently repeated the familiar evening prayer. His lips moved, but the words that followed them in his brain lost their meaning and turned into others, and ended in a name that he spoke aloud -- Cristina! With the name, the tension of his will relaxed suddenly, reality went out and the dream took him again, and bore him on swiftly and surely like a man walking in his sleep, down, down, by the steep path in the gathering darkness. And as she glided beside him, Cristina whispered strange, sweet things in his ear, which somehow, if he had been awake, he knew that he could not quite have understood; but now they were the most wonderful words he had ever heard in his life. And she kissed him also, but not upon his mouth. He felt her sharp kisses upon his white throat, and he knew that her lips were red. So the wild dream sped on through twilight and darkness and moonrise, and all the glory of the summer's night. But in the chilly dawn he lay as one half dead upon the mound down there, recalling and not recalling, drained of his blood, yet strangely longing to give those red lips more. Then came the fear, the awful nameless panic, the mortal horror that guards the confines of the world we see not, neither know of as we know of other things, but which we feel when its icy chill freezes our bones and stirs our hair with the touch of a ghostly hand. Once more Angelo sprang from the mound and fled up the gorge in the breaking day, but his step was less sure this time, and he panted for breath as he ran; and when he came to the bright spring of water that rises half way up the hillside, he dropped upon his knees and hands and plunged his whole face in and drank as he had never drunk before -- for it was the thirst of the wounded man who has lain bleeding all night upon the battle-field. She had him fast now, and he could not escape her, but would come to her every evening at dusk until she had drained him of his last drop of blood. It was in vain that when the day was done he tried to take another turning and to go home by a path that did not lead near the gorge. It was in vain that he made promises to himself each morning at dawn when he climbed the lonely way up from the shore to the village. It was all in vain, for when the sun sank burning into the sea, and the coolness of the evening stole out as from a hiding-place to delight the weary world, his feet turned toward the old way, and she was waiting for him in the shadow under the chestnut trees; and then all happened as before, and she fell to kissing his white throat even as she flitted lightly down the way, winding one arm about him. Chestnut trees, juniper berries, violet leaf, labdanum, dazzling, moonlit white musk, and night-blooming summer flowers. Wow, I love this one! Smells like buttery chestnuts and sweet florals and yet there's a sophisticated loneliness in the sharpness of the musk....nom nom nom. I can see a big bottle of this in my future. Nom.
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JULIA STONE (The Room in the Tower, E.F. Benson.) And then, with a sudden start of unexplained dismay, I saw that there were two rather conspicuous objects which I had not seen before in my dreams: one a life-sized oil painting of Mrs. Stone, the other a black-and-white sketch of Jack Stone, representing him as he had appeared to me only a week before in the last of the series of these repeated dreams, a rather secret and evil-looking man of about thirty. His picture hung between the windows, looking straight across the room to the other portrait, which hung at the side of the bed. At that I looked next, and as I looked I felt once more the horror of nightmare seize me. It represented Mrs. Stone as I had seen her last in my dreams: old and withered and white-haired. But in spite of the evident feebleness of body, a dreadful exuberance and vitality shone through the envelope of flesh, an exuberance wholly malign, a vitality that foamed and frothed with unimaginable evil. Evil beamed from the narrow, leering eyes; it laughed in the demon-like mouth. The whole face was instinct with some secret and appalling mirth; the hands, clasped together on the knee, seemed shaking with suppressed and nameless glee. Then I saw also that it was signed in the left-hand bottom corner, and wondering who the artist could be, I looked more closely, and read the inscription, "Julia Stone by Julia Stone." Rotting once-white fabric, spotted with mold. I just had to try this, because it seemed not many other peolpe wanted to, and I have a thing for the underdog sometimes. : ) The first thoughts I had were "green" and "fresh", not mildew-y or rotted at all. It reminds me of an aquatic scent that has been dried out. And by aquatic I mean one of the sweeter ones, a little fruity, not cologney in my opinion. But.....the 'fabric' note adds a dry element to this scent, so that it ends up not really being aquatic, just reminiscent of aquatic. As it dries, it strikes me that this is a complex scent. Here and there I get hints of plant-like greenness, sort of a freshly cut stem note, just hints of that though. I also start to smell little 'flashes' of something dark, but that could be the power of suggestion. After all, I was expecting to smell something moldy, so I was actually surprised at how sweet this is. For the record, my nose tends to pick out sweeter notes more than usual, for example, I get a lot of 'sweetness' out of Oblivion. And I should add, there is nearly a powdery element to this scent, almost powdery but not quite. It's actually really nice and I think it will be more popular once people get 'wind' of it. If you like the green quality of Velvet Cthulhu, you may like this as well. I think it's similar to that but softer and sweeter, without the zippy bite that V.C. has. Edit to add.....after a while, this becomes even more dry and more powdery. At this point it reminds me of 51, with the addition of linen or fabric. It still has that sweetness.
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PERLE VON MAUREN (Revelations in Black, Carl Jacobi) I stumbled forward, my eyes quickly accustoming themselves to the half-light from the almost opaque windows. At the end of the corridor a second door barred my passage. I thrust it open - and stood swaying there on the sill staring inward. Beyond was a small room, barely ten feet square, with a low-raftered ceiling. And by the light of the open door I saw side by side in the center of the floor - two white wood coffins. How long I stood there leaning weakly against the stone wall I don't know. There was an odor drifting from out of that chamber. Heliotrope! But heliotrope defiled by the rotting smell of an ancient grave. Then suddenly I leaped to the nearest coffin, seized its cover and ripped it open. Would to heaven I could forget that sight that met my eyes. There the woman in black - unveiled. That face - it was divinely beautiful, the hair black as sable, the cheeks a classic white. But the lips - ! I grew suddenly sick as I looked upon them. They were scarlet.... and sticky with human blood. Heliotrope, grave soil, and blood. O.M.Gee! YES! I get to be the first reviewer on a scent! Hehe, sorry. I've just been wanting to do this since 2007. Hope I do this right. OK, my bottle just arrived this afternoon, and here are my impressions: In bottle : Sweet, a little powdery, ethereal. I can definitely smell the tang of the "blood" note, and I assume the sweetness is the heliotrope. The dirt note is there, but not as strong as in, say, Graveyard Dirt 2008, Premature Burial or Zombi. On me, wet: At first I get a burst of sweetness, almost like honey. Not exactly cloying, but definitely very nectar-y. After a moment, the sweetness becomes powdery, almost talcum. This must be the heliotrope. If I sniff really hard, I can almost smell the dirt. dry down: Sweet and light, almost pure heliotrope (I'm guessing). The dirt is still very, very light, but comes out a little stronger as the scent dries further. A very, very dusty light floral. verdict: I'm a little disappointed. I had really hoped that this one would be earthy and bloody, but it's sweet and effervescent -- kind of what I thought The Girl would be. Fans of Heliotrope and skin musk (which isn't one of the ingredients, but which mimics it perfectly on me) will probably love this one. People who are cautious around dirt scents probably don't have a lot to worry about. ETA: Wow. On second thought, I think this may just be a scent that I need to put on in larger quantities. When I dabbed on a little more, I found that I liked it better. It's definitely a soft and very weird scent for me, but that's not really a bad thing. Not really sure if I'll ever try another perfume with a heliotrope top note, though, since I think this floral may not be my thing. Throw is average to a little below average on me, and I'm guessing it's wear-length will be short to average. Not sure if I want to keep this one yet.
