Wooden Goat

[Usagi]

A new year's blessing! Peony, China's national flower, with bamboo for flexibility, plum blossom for perseverance, courage, and hope, tangerine for wealth, orange for happiness, lychee for household peace, pine resin for constancy, golden kumquat for prosperity, King mandarin for good fortune, cypress for longevity, and peach fruit to represent the fourth phase of Wu Xing. This year's Lunar New Year blend has an extra dollop of blazing red of dragon's blood give you fortitude and strength, and, of course, to assist in scaring away the rampaging Nian.

In the bottle(after about an hour's rest from mailing): I smell very sweet jasmine, and very bright citrus.

wet: The jasmine turns itself to support for the citrus note, making this a creamy-fizzy-sweet kind of deal. It's bright and happy and...prosperous?

drying: As it plays with my skin chemistry, I'm getting bits of another, slightly watery, delicate floral underneath the citrus, which has a little bit of a tang to it when you inhale deeply enough. If I had to guess, I'd say an interplay between bamboo, peony and pine, maybe? I'm not really smelling anything discernibly Dragon's Blood, yet-- which is surprising. Yet, the whole thing dances so beautifully on the skin and in my senses. It's like sitting in the shade of a late spring garden, with a cool rock pool next to your feet, watching rays of sunlight play across the stones.

drydown(little over an hour later): It's dried down to a soft, creamy floral. There was a short phase where it veered a teensy bit towards a slightly soapy(albeit really nice, quality soap) phase. But now, it's just a cool, close to the skin, soft green floral, with a lingering hint of the gorgeous citrus.

Wooden Goat is absolutely beautiful, and I am so very enamoured of this incarnation of my zodiac animal. It will be getting a lot of wear. Out of the seven Lunar New Year scents I have tried, this one is probably my second favorite(right behind Water Dragon). It's happy and vibrant, but not overpowering-- with a close throw, and pretty decent lasting power(showing now signs of fading here at the one and a half hour mark).
Unless you absolutely loathe flowers or citrus, I would recommend you give this a shot. You may just fall head over heels in love(says the girl who can't stop sniffing her wrist). And, no, it does not smell the same as the Lunar creatures that have come before.
The closest comparison I might make would be the lovechild of Water Dragon and Water Snake. It isn't as 'WOO, citrus!' as Water Dragon is at the outset-- and the citrus has a different quality to it(more like citron in Water Dragon),nor is the drydown that beautiful mystery musk. But it isn't anywhere near as jasmine-floral as Water Snake. Wooden Goat seems to bridge somewhere in between, and adds its own glimmering coolness, for a unique scent of its own.

[Auspicious Q]

Wet in bottle - flowers, citrus, mints

 

Wet on skin - I can really smell the warmth of the wood here and a minty note comes out first too. Interesting.

 

Dry down. Over the course of an hour this changes a into a floral scent with peony in the foreground, and then settles into a soft complex floral scent with the underpinnings of wood and with a tiny zing of mint and citrus over top. It is dimensional and gorgeous.

 

Edit to add: I'm not sure what note is coming across as mint to me. Hm!

Edited March 4, 2015 by Auspicious Q

[zankoku_zen]

Super amped up sweetness. A ton of golden fruit (lychee, mandarin, orange, peach), with bamboo, plum blossoms, and peony. It's got the throw of Fire Pig but amped up on fruity sweetness and peony. It's actually got huge throw, and huge wear length.

 

It's too much for me. Everything got dialed up to 11. EVERYTHING.

[kpaige]

This is my first time posting a review, and I don't know why i chose a scent that I have a hard time describing... But I ADORE this one so much I needed to comment.

 

I have an especially hard time picking up specific notes on this particular fragrance. It's a creamy fruity floral with just a touch of that dragon's blood essence in the background. It has the teeniest tiniest hint of the soapiness quality but is it NOT soapy. It's almost like it has whatever positive element of soap there is without everything else that goes along with it. It's just soft and beautiful. It's like floral without being floral and fruity without being fruity...and that bamboo and dragoon's blood - they just give this complexity.

 

Good throw and longevity.

 

Definitely a winning scent. My current favorite BPAL scent!!