Peninsula Fulminum

[zankoku_zen]

The Peninsula of Thunder. A rolling, booming scent, heavy with foreboding and bristling with peril: scorched ebony wood, raw myrrh, blackened benzoin, Tunisian black musk, bourbon vetiver, black copal, and a sharp, yellow-white blast of cognac and chaulmoogra.

Oh man, this one was a little disturbing. It was cedar and dirty patchouli dominant. Which meant, it smelled like smoked, burnt wood (that been the wood and vetiver thrown in together).

[Monday]

If the Music of Erich Zann and Schwarzer Mond got together and had a baby this is what I imagine it would smell like. Smoke, patchouli and vetiver with some sweetness from the black musk. A true smoke blend from the lab like a smouldering campfire or stick of incense.

[milo]

Unpleasant. I'm getting vetiver and musk. Blech.

[FragranceLush]

I really enjoyed this when I first got it, but ultimately decided that the vetiver was too strong for me personally and put my BNNU bottle on my sales page, while keeping the decant I had in another bottle. Well I tried this again today and the vetiver has already evolved into a much tamer beast, and the blend is so much more lovely than before! Definitely smoky, vetiver prominent, and all those "black" notes shine through to define the evocation of the scent, but I no longer think of this as necessarily masculine or a room scent. I am now keeping my full bottle and selling the decant!

 

Also wanted to say that I think it is funny that, patchouli lover I am, I do not get patch in this at all. I know it's not listed in the scent notes, but other reviewers noted it. I think maybe it's that "black" evocation?

[Julia]

To me, this smells like asphalt just after rain has fallen and the sun is starting to shine again. I love it but it's definitely not an everyday scent.

[quickdrawkiddo]

Wow, this is complicated and awesome! I love vetiver but I don't think I've tried anything like this before. The black musk is actually not amping as much as it usually does on me (a lot), and I don't find this nearly as smoky and "burnt" smelling as most vetiver blends. This is more like vetiver, woods, and something sharp -- maybe the cognac? It has a pleasantly chemical undertone that I can't identify but is VERY familiar to me. It's almost like brand-new leather or lemon verbena (because those scents are so similar ) I can tell it's going to drive me nuts all day, but in a good way. Very different! I wish I'd jumped on a bottle.

[annemathematics]

if I were out camping and a bolt of lightning stuck a nearby tree/log, and I then ran up and inhaled the still-smoking scorched area of that wood...that is what this smells like to me. I really love it and this actually combines so beautifully with the other scents in this lunacy series (I don't know how intentional this is, but to me/on me this series seems like it was meant to be layered).

[Blood onmy hands]

I was hopeful about all of the resins in this scent, but the vetiver comes in strong and smoky and ruins everything for me. This winds up smelling like a smoky bbq scent on my skin mixed with an extra bit of sharp woodsmoke. The drydown turns a little powdery.
This one was really strong, but I wound up scrubbing it off after about a half hour. Too smoky and sharp smelling for me.

[nathanielhebert]

This one was a bit of a head scratcher for me, because on paper, it's like a checklist of all my favourite notes. Scorched wood, myrrh, black musk, vetiver? Yes, please! Even the reviews in this thread made Peninsula Fulminum sound quite enticing, with the promises of smouldering campfires and scorched earth.

Unfortunately, I didn’t really experience any of that because right in the bottle and on my skin, cognac comes SCREAMING to the fore. This is by far the booziest blend I’ve yet to experience from BPAL. And it’s really not a pleasant one—it’s like someone spilled a bottle all over their liquor cabinet, and after it evaporated, the sticky sweet leftovers were scraped up and added to the mix. Maybe it’s a case of something not aging well in the bottle, but this is far too cloyingly sweet for me, smelling more like a fortified dessert aperitif than a dry brandy.

I had to wash it off the first time, and thought the scent deserved a fair chance, but I couldn’t sit through the second application to get through most of the dry down. I can tell there’s something complex and possibly awesome happening underneath the cognac, but it’s just too much in the foreground to really tell. I’m thinking maybe the myrrh and benzoin are sitting under the alcohol, lending the impression of a dessert wine gone bad, but the intense booziness of this made me too queasy to see if the other notes would emerge from the shadows of the cognac.