Thirteen (13): October 2006

[moonarcana]

In our paean to all the mysteries surrounding this enigmatic number, there are thirteen lucky and unlucky components: cocoa and vanilla beans, Mysore sandalwood, star fruit, orange rind, red amber, fig leaf, mimosa, rooibos tea, bourbon geranium, rose otto, nutmeg, and lavender.

My birthday is 10/13 so I was especially excited to get this scent...even though I've had questionable past experience with cocoa scents and am not particularly fond of orange notes.

In the bottle - WHEW! That's some strong stuff! At first it's pure dark chocolate with bitter, bitter orange and a big waft of rooibos tea. I wince in olfactory pain. Bravely, I sniff again and through the profuse tainted orange, I can detect moments of other notes coming to the surface...spicy amber and soft but non-descript floral mostly.

Upon application the bitter cocoa/orange/rooibos sensation makes itself at home and I fear the worst...how can "MY" birthday scent be so...not something that I totally love?!



but wait! after about 15 minutes I don't smell bitter cocoa/orange/rooibos AT ALL. As a matter of fact, what is left in the wake of it's departure is quite gorgeous! Soft creamy cocoa and vanilla kissed with sandalwood and a very faint floral tone dancing in the background. I never smell specifically any one of the floral notes mentioned in the description...and I would love for any one of them to peek out and say hello, but the combination is nice and does not contradict the lovely softness of the choco/vanilla/sandalwood.

I tried this out last night after I got my order, and this morning could still smell the scent clearly upon my skin - so it's got staying power on me for sure. I'm wearing it again today and the cycle described above was a repeat. I'm hoping the bitter orange will mellow with some age. However the end result is worth the torture.

...maybe my opinion is clouded because I WANT to love this so much.

For right now, I'll rate it a 3/5 - it would get a 4.5/5 if I didn't have to suffer through the first 15 minutes of wearing it. Edited November 18, 2007 by Shollin

[kraken]

In the Bottle: I get a soft cocoa scent with a hint of sweet vanilla orange and something sharp, possibly lavender.

 

Initial Wet: Hmm, very morphing, but mostly notes of rooibos tea, amber, and vanilla bean. I get vague florals and the mimosa underneath it all. The throw is cocoa with maybe a hint of orange.

 

Initial Dry: Floral mimosa now with undertones of tea and lavender (and star fruit? something sweet...). It's not as smooth as it was before, punctuated with an herbal sharpness. The throw is cocoa and lavender.

 

Drier Dry: Cocoa, vanilla, and a hint of lavender and amber. It's become smooth again with the cocoa and vanilla softening the herbal notes. The florals have faded until almost nothing. The throw still has hints of orange in the cocoa, but it's mostly just cocoa.

 

Overall, I like it, though not as much as the previous incarnation. I was leery of this description since fruits tend to go bad on me and was hoping that the cocoa and vanilla would fix that (and it did!). I'm sad that I didn't get much sandalwood out of this--I was kind of hoping for a spicy Velvet with tea, lavender, and rose. I'm very excited that this worked out on me as well as it did and that I got two bottles.

 

edit: I got some on my nose when I sniffed the bottle too closely. Now all I smell is chocolate!

Edited November 7, 2006 by kraken

[k8tey]

New formulation.

 

This doesn't smell at all like I expected.

 

I smelled chocolate and spices and orange for about 5 seconds but now I smell like cedar chips. This has never happened before with any of these notes...crap. Maybe it's the Roiboos? The sandalwood?

 

Maybe this will work on the boy. Or aged. Or swapped for something else.

[Natch]

Oct. 13 2006 Formulation

 

in the bottle: chocolate, orange flowers with a little wood.

 

wet: a little more floral, a little more wood, a little less orange. Still chocolate. This has a lot going on.

 

dry: Wow, a delightful, complex little bugger. There is only a hint of chocolate left, and I get so much more: a little lavender, something that makes me think cucumber/melon, a touch of sandalwood, something else floral, a little something teaish...

After 4 or 5 hours this is just my skin, but better. Just a soft, calming, creamy, delicious, enveloping sweetness

 

overall impression: This is a very nice, complex scent. It is rich and deep, while still being clean. It also has a certain relaxing quality to it. While it is not what I was expecting from 13, it is a very pleasant surprise, and I like it a lot

Edited November 8, 2006 by Natch

[QueenFae]

Out of the bottle, this actually smells like peanut butter. When first applied, it's heavy on the chocolate note and orange note. The chocolate in this version of 13 is more milk chocolately as opposed to last year's, which was white choco. On the dry down, the choco fades into the background, and the perfumey, floral notes start to show themselves. After awhile, this smells sort of like a heady, expensive women's perfume, with just a hint of coco underneath. It's a pretty strong blend when first applied, but after two hours I can barely detect it. I like this better than the first 13 and I think I'll wear this one a lot more because of its uniqueness.

[Bagfish]

I'm afraid that 13 was more of a Candy Butcher experience for me than Bliss or Velvet. It smells lovely in the bottle, definitely chocolate-orange with some interesting sweet and delicate fruity sharpness going on (starfruit?). However 13 just does not work on me, it is a real mish-mash of smells with an underlying scent of plastic similar to what I got from Snow White.

 

I can only smell the chocolate when I huff on my arm and smush my nose up against it and the delicate fruity scent I can smell in the bottle just seems to disappear.

 

I will give this another try, but so far it is not for me

 

19th November edited to add:

 

I have had a Road to Damascus conversion over 13 I decided to give it another go before sending it off for swaps, and have given it many more goes since after realising that this isn't horrible and plasticy at all, it is beatiful, complex, sweet and comforting scent.

 

I definitely get a progression of scent, starting with the lavender, chocolate and orange rind as short lived top notes, progressing through the sharper, fruitier Rooibosch, fig leaf and star fruit and ending with sweet, spicy comfort of vanilla, sandalwood, amber and nutmeg. OMGyum, how could I have thought this was horrible to start with. I'm just so pleased I tried again.

Edited November 19, 2006 by Bagfish

[skye]

In the bottle: dry cocoa

 

On me: creamy floral vanilla

 

Between this and the cakey goodness that is Haloa I'm so happy.

[Faeried]

Hodge-Podge of buttery, autumn scents. It's lovely, definitely a keeper!

[mmcfa2]

this is just yummy! Count me among those who could not wear the original 13, it went sour and heavy on my skin. This one though is chocolate then orange then vanilla and round again. The morphing is fabulous and the scent lingers close to the skin. This has a slight throw, I can wear it to work without screaming out my scent but I can smell it some distance from my wrist.

 

BRAVO!!

[Aredhel]

Rating (on skin): 1/5

Summarised in a few words/smilie: Lavender.

 

Pre-review thoughts: The vanilla beans, amber, rooibos, and fig leaf swayed me enough to pick up a bottle of this. I'm kind of hoping I don't like it, because I haven't seen many bottles of it around, which would mean serious hunting if I do, and want more.

 

In the bottle: Vanilla bean! Also, orange, and amber!

 

On skin, wet: Cocoa, vanilla, and a strong tea. It's crisp, but smooth, almost buttery. I think the floral edge I'm detecting is the rose otto, but I'm really liking it (I hate rose notes in perfume), so I'm doubtful.

 

On skin, dry: No, that's not rose otto: it's lavender, and it's strong, as always. The longer it wears, the stronger it becomes, until it eclipses nearly every other listed note, and becomes the herbal-lavender kind of scent I just don't like.

 

Conclusion/Notes: I hate that my skin amps lavender so. I can rarely wear a scent with lavender: it always overshadows everything else. A shame, too, as it started out so wonderfully.

[sophia_helix]

ARG.

 

No chocolate. No nutmeg. No lavender. Not even a hint of rose or geranium or fruit or anything. Just the same sickly-musky vanilla as in Underpants and pretty much every other vanilla-resin BPAL I've ever tried. I have got to figure out if this is the same vanilla everyone else swoons over, or if it really is as gross on me as I think it is.

 

Either way, I must stop getting my hopes up that any scent with a drop of vanilla will work on me.

[mooncityminx]

In the bottle: Dark chocolate smokey goodness!

 

Wet: Eh, whew! It's like vanilla-grapefruit dreamsicle. It's not exactly bad, it's just that pretty much all BPAl citrus so far has gone sicly sweet on my skin. Thirteen is a very good motvation for me to get a scent locket, and I'm not sorry I bought two bottles because I can also use it as a really yummy room fragrance.

 

Drydown: As it dries it becomes sandalwood/creamsicle. I love sandalwood so this is good, but I stick to my vow to buy a scent locket.

 

The chocolate scent in the bottle is just too damn good for me to settle for creamsicle.

[Melantha]

Oh, oh, oh, I'm in love!

 

This is the first BPAL cocoa scent that likes me! And I can pick out vanilla, and lots of sandalwood, and a touch of orange and amber. I've had it on for a half hour now, and it's so lovely.

 

Keeper!

[jessiesquash]

In the bottle it smelled like cocoa with just a hint of citrus and a bit of smoke.

 

On wet, I got chocolate with maybe a tiny bit of the citrus but with lavender starting to take over. As it dried, the lavender became stronger until that was all I could detect beneath the chocolate. Oooh chocolate covered lavender! Not bad at all.

 

After completely drying it turned into Underpants until it faded away! I love it but it's a bit masculine for me. I'm wondering if it might not be pretty darn heavenly on a man. I'll have to find one to spill it on.....

 

In the meantime, I'll try it again because I really want to like it on me and I want it to last longer than a half hour!

[yeahbutnobut]

13 (reformulated)

 

In the bottle: lavender chocolate with a perfume like sharpness, possibly a mix of rooibos, starfruit and orange.

Wet on skin: now I think I can smell geranium, gorgeous bourbon geranium, along with sandalwood! the lavender is also much stronger.

Dry on skin: this smells so wonderful! Lavender, chocolate, geranium, sandalwood, orange and dry tea, with a hint of rose and a warmth provided by nutmeg, this smells amazing. The lavender is very strong at the moment, giving an almost therapeutic feel, but the sandalwood and vanilla undertone mingles so nicely with the cocoa, and I smell that sharp tea and orange overtone. Complex and with many layers, it reminds me of a very good quality perfume and smells quite expensive! My mum even says it smells similar to Thierry Mugler's Angel.

After a while: the lavender lasts an amazingly long time, but now a wonderful sophisticated perfume like fragrance appears in the scent. it's incredibly well blended. The chocolate deepens and I get the vanilla-sandalwood undertone which is indeed reminiscent of Underpants. The nutmeg note is gorgeous, adds a lovely bit of spice, and I like the way the geranium adds a slight earthy-herbal scent to it, whilst a sharp, fruity note hovers on top-either orange or rooibos.

Eventually this is like chocolatey Underpants, with a geranium-nutmeg-rose undertone…there's also something sweet and bright to it which may be this 'red amber' note? it smells like amber, but it's different to the golden/Egyptian/black amber notes I'm familiar with, it's actually more perfumey, but it's really good. The sandalwood is top-notch, really rich and very red and dry and almost aged in feel.

After a couple of hours this really does smell like chocolate Underpants (hmm, slightly more fun than a chocolate teapot? ) or chocolate Morocco with a waft of orange-amber, a scent which is like gold over velvety maroon.

Verdict: wow, this is better than 13 v.1. I wasn't sure how all the notes would work together but they blend together so well that I'm impressed-nothing clashes here. It smells like really expensive, well made, quality perfume. First it's like lavender chocolate and orange-starfruit tea, then the nutmeg, geranium and rose come out, then the vanilla and sandalwood, and then the amber. All in smooth, slow succession, merging so nicely, making for a scent that is simply sublime. This is the grown up, sophisticated sister of the last incarnation of 13, which was more fun and youthful. Beautiful, well crafted, this smells like it should cost a million dollars, goes to show how much of an olfactory artist, what a pro Beth is with scent (and another reason I love BPAL…Beth makes wonderful perfumes that sometimes smell costly but are an absolute bargain!)

Emoticon rating:

Is it a keeper? YES! Might need to search for another bottle!

If you like this, try: 13 (the original), Velvet, Candy Butcher, Morocco, Great Sword of War, Tezcatipoca, Xiuhtecuhtli

[Loligo]

I love this. It opens with strong cocoa, vanilla, and rooibos. I don't care for rooibos as a beverage, but it makes a surprisingly nice scent. As the rooibos recedes, I can pick up a sweet/tart fruit scent -- once I read the note list again, I could tell it was star fruit. The florals are never strong on me (thank goodness); they just add a pleasantly perfumey quality to it. The chocolate only sticks around for an hour or so before turning into more of a cocoa butter scent -- still quite nice. A faintly spicy vanilla note sticks around the longest.

[edenssixthday]

13 (October 2006 formulation) - This is the best of all the 13s so far! I'm absolutely crazy about this scent. When I first apply it, I smell the dark and bitter scent of unsweetened cocoa powder blended with the woodiness of sandalwood and the sweetness of vanilla. As it begins to warm up on my skin, more and more of the notes in this blend become evident, such as a hint of nutmeg, a sliver of orange rind, a drop of amber and a splash of rooibos tea. It's foody without being gourmand/bakery, and it's incredibly delicious, dark, spicy, and exotic. Sadly, it doesn't last on my skin for more than a few minutes, but in a scent locket, the scent wafts around me all day long. I'm going to give this bottle of 13 a lot of love. The previous 13s didn't work for me and I almost passed on this one. I'm so glad I didn't!

[Rheliwen]

It does smell reminiscent of Underpants, with some orange thrown in.

 

It's powdery from the sandalwood, cocoa bean and lavender (which is only a distant memory), sweet from the vanilla and orange, and a little spicey from the nutmeg. This is far better than the initial 13, which I also liked.

[Blood onmy hands]

In the bottle, 13 '06 smells like an amazing blend of cocoa, creamy vanilla, and a really clean something that reminds me of lavender and white musk (though I know there's no white musk in this). Lovely.

 

My favorite candy is Dagoba's dark chocolate lavender. This smells exactly like that wonderful chocolate on my skin. A cool, sweet lavender and lashings of bittersweet cocoa.

 

I can't pick out any of the other notes exactly, and the lavender and cocoa stay dominant (yay), but there is a complexity of other notes that come out to play over the hours as I wear this. I think that I'm smelling amber and nutmeg as it warms up a bit.

 

Beautiful. I like this one even more than the original version, and I wish that I'd purchased more than one bottle.

 

ETA: I've been wearing Thirteen the last few days and after three hours or so, it dries down to a wonderfully cool, sweet scent... like the vanilla drydown of Lick It & Underpants.

Edited November 13, 2006 by Blood onmy hands

[mmmitchell]

I like this MUCH better than I thought I would from some of the notes.

 

In the bottle: I get the cocoa, a hint of the orange, and a sense of the sandalwood anchoring it. It's not the intensely "dessert-like" chocolate/orange I get from Vice. This has an almost praline-ish undertone to it, vanilla-sugary, but brown sugar rather than white. That seems a bit odd to me, because there's no real "sugar" listed in the description, so it must the way the sugars in the fruits are interacting with the sweetness of the mimosa and rose, and giving my nose "brown sugar praline".

 

Wet: When it hits my skin, everything starts to warm up, and the whole mixture becomes very oriental-perfumey. Not in a bad way....I like oriental perfume scents. This is very well blended on me, so much so that all the notes really muddle for me to just create this lovely scent, warm and sweet and aromatic.

 

Dry: Not much morphing from the wet stage, it's reallyreally nice. And, this was just driving me SO nuts, but it really reminded me of something I'd smelled before. Finally, I remembered a little perfume sample that I got one time (maybe last winter holiday season) at a big department store perfume counter. It was called "Magnetism" and it was by Escada. I tried it a couple of times before deciding that it wasn't for me.....for one thing, it's dry down smelled like a giant vat of burnt cotton candy (ick), and it was also one of those scents that just invaded the nose and sinus cavities of everyone in your zip code. (also ick)

 

I mention the above, because 13 turns out to be a GREAT scent for me...all warm and cozy, and all of the notes play nice and behave. Personally, I chalk that up to the Lab giving us a product blended from essential oils, rather than a product diluted with a lot of extraneous chemicals. Quality shows.

[Miss Lynx]

This is only superficially similar to the original 13. In the bottle, they smell slightly similar -- both have that paradoxical food/not-food feel to them, and immediately noticeable elements of chocolate and orange with undertones of a whole lot of other stuff, but the new 13 smells less sweet, and a bit more herbal.

 

On, it evolves in a very different direction! There's a sharpness and tartness to it that the original doesn't have at all, which gives it a bit of a fresher feeling. And after it's been on my skin for a while, the florals kick in really strongly, especially lavender, and there's a touch of something spicy. I began to get worried at that point, but then they settled back down again, leaving a really interesting, well-balanced blend that can't really be categorized easily.

 

It's partly floral, partly herbal, partly fruity, partly cocoa/vanilla... A little bit of everything. It's definitely got that sharp tea-like edge to it that Dorian and other similar ones have -- actually, between that and the vanilla, there's a definite similarity to Dorian, but I like this much better. It has character and complexity, while still being not so far off of a traditional perfume that you couldn't wear it in an office.

 

Interestingly, it seems to dry down differently in different places -- on my wrists, it's more spicy/herbal and aromatic; in the crooks of my arms, more floral. I like the former better, but it doesn't last as long there. After a few hours, it also seems to develop a touch of the waxy synthetic note that the original 13 also sometimes had, which is a bit off-putting, because apart from that, I quite like this.

 

All in all, though, I think it's a keeper. Further experimentation will be needed, but thus far I like it more than the original, and I liked that one quite a bit, though I've found it hasn't aged terribly well. This may make a very nice replacement for it, but the feeling is different enough that I may just wear them in different moods.

 

Grade: A

[empi girl]

I love this 13! In the bottle, it is dry cocoa powder. When wet, it retains the cocoa powder for a brief time, then settles into a creamy, sweet, soft, warm sandalwood vanilla. There are probably some other notes adding to the smooth sweetness, but they aren't obvious, and definitly it isn't orange on me. I love the dry down, and I also love the initial cocoa, so to get the best of both worlds, I put a little on the ends of my hair, in addition to my wrists. Cocoa lasted for hours! I will be keeping this one. I may get a second.

[Ohmaude]

Mmm. I was very curious to try this for a couple of reasons: One, because I love me some Sandlewood, and two, because I have come to enjoy the warm earthy smell of rooibos tea and wanted to see just how that would come out in a scent. I'm so glad I got this!

 

13 is a very sweet, very young scent. It morphs so much in the wearing, starting off as orange chocolate in the bottle. A couple minutes after applying, the lavender and rooibos come out, and then the vanilla kicks in...

 

Slowly, but dramatically, it turns warm ambery tea vanilla with the orange and cocoa staying close by..Sort of Dorian's kid sister who smells slightly of lavender and likes wearing chocolate-flavored lip gloss. The sandlewood sort of stays in the background, keeping all the other components in line.

 

Wow, it keeps mellowing over time. Very pretty! I think my bottle will do me well.

 

ETA: I'm getting the tiniest hint of the florals and nutmeg now...wow, this is perfect

Edited November 11, 2006 by Ohmaude

[crazyredhead17]

I love the original 13, so I decided to give this one a try.

 

In the bottle, it's a warm blend that I have trouble picking out of the notes of.

 

Wet on me: Why, Hello Lavender! How nice of you to amp up and drown every other note out and give me a sinus headache within seconds of putting this on my wrists!

 

After about 15-20 minutes, the sandalwood peeks out, and helps fuel the headache.

 

It's not at all reminiscent of Underpants on me - I blame the lavender, which was a gamble I took when I ordered it (the other twelve components look good, maybe they'll drown out the lavender. Ha!).

 

The lavender may indeed mellow over time, but I'm not sure it'll get the chance to.. I'll probably wash this off in a few minutes and apply Lick It to my temples to try to get rid of this headache.

 

edit: I never got around to washing this off, and for a few minutes here and there in the hour or two I was awake I'd smell something other than lavender, but this morning all that's left on my wrists is lavender.

Edited November 12, 2006 by crazyredhead17

[bibliophile]

Oh my goodness, I love love love reformulated 13. Original 13 was not nice on me (drying down to sort of a cocoa Pledge-type scent) and got swapped away immediately. On my skin, this is predominantly rooibos (which I love, in terms of both smell and taste) and sandalwood, with a hint of lavender, and with dry cocoa and vanilla lurking in the background. So glad I checked for the update that day -- I wasn't expecting anything like this! I'm going to have to try to track more of this down.