Beguiled - Haus of Gloi

Details:
Beguiled
Summer Collection 
Haus of Gloi

Notes: 
Lemon cake made with the tang of fresh buttermilk and raspberry coulis - an otherwise innocent cake corrupted by cardamom and deceptive pink peppercorns.

Caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake! (That's an in joke for Jacquie.)
This perfume is not so much cake to me, more like a sweet lemon custard. It's quite strong at first but does mellow. Very, very lemony for quite a while - thankfully not the toilet cleaner kind of lemon! The lemon fades a little in the dry down and blends more in with the other notes. This is when it becomes more cakey in my mind. I didn't get the spices at all - I found it very smooth all the way through. I did say earlier in the year I was a bit over cake/dessert scents, but I would almost be tempted to buy a full size of this one. It's very well done and super pretty. If you like gourmand scents, this is definitely one worth checking out. Beguiled lasted about 7 hours on me before I felt I needed to reapply.

Rating: 
4/5

Day 198!

Edit: Liber Vix made a cake from this scent's notes and it looks and sounds amazing. Definitely going to try this! 

Snake Oil Salesman - Enchanticals

Details: 
Snake Oil Salesman
Enchanticals Perfume

Notes: 

"Hurry, hurry, step right up! Find it here and here alone, the one, the original Snake Oil Liniment direct from the Santa Rosa Mountains. What does it do you ask?! It heals the sick, and grows hair on your head, rub it on your belly and watch it shrink overnight. Got a headache? Muscle aches? Just rub a bit on the affected area an VIOLA! Pain be gone! This stuff cures all that ails ya, and if you act right now, you can be the one millionth and oneth happy customer who has purchased this miracle ointment!" Ok, I'm lying but I think you might like this one! A sultry unisex fragrance created with tons of love and essential oils like this: Blended together are ancient cypher's, incense accord with frankincense, Egyptian sandalwood, a shot of whiskey, spices like ginger and cardamom, and a bunch of deep dark secrets that well, if you told you I'd have to kill ya ;)

In the vial this is a spicy incense; applied to skin I can smell ginger and what I think might be cloves. Some kind of strong spice, anyway. It's quite masculine and dark. After a couple of minutes it took a horrifying turn and became... fertiliser. I'm not kidding. You know in Spring when the council comes out and lays fertiliser in all the nature strips and it's kind of fresh and country-ish but also gross and manky at the same time? Yeah, that. I thought maybe I was imagining things at first - that I'd stepped in something and that's what I was smelling, but nope, definitely fertiliser.

Like the trooper I am, I stuck it out and thankfully after 20 minutes or so when it had dried down, the fertiliser smell faded and it morphed into a spicy resin, very masculine and not too bad but definitely not my thing. Longevity was low-ish to medium - it had gone completely in 4 hours. Sillage was high at first but didn't last long.

Rating: 
2/5

Day 154!

Dark Winter's Tale - Deep Midnight Perfumes

Details: 
Dark Winter's Tale
Deep Midnight Perfumes

Notes:
The winter night air freezes your breath on your scarf as you walk towards a waiting haven of light, safety and the inviting smells of a winter cottage. Hurry to get inside from this dark winter night, and an evening of warmth and joy awaits you! Inspired in part by a fantastic cookie recipe from Morgan Crone, this holiday perfume contains many wonderful scent notes, including: dark gingerbread, rich vanilla, molasses, cardamon, anise, and black pepper. A scrumptious, gourmand, rich and spicy unisex winter scent!

I've pretty much come to the conclusion that most of Deep Midnight's perfumes are sadly not for me. The vanilla note - which is in a lot of the ones I chose or were sent for free (from memory, the owner was particularly generous with free samples) has a distinct synthetic element that just bugs me. It's not that hideous toilet spray vanilla that some companies use, but it's just a bit NQR on me. Dark Winter's Tale has that note and it immediately put me off as soon as I realised. It's kind of an odd thing - it almost smells like coffee. There's a spice note in the vial as well, gingery but also probably the cardamom. Something like allspice in a Christmas cake. Once applied the ginger really comes out on me and combined with the pepper it actually made me a bit sneezy for a couple of minutes. When it settled a bit I didn't mind the ginger, if only that synthetic note would have gone away. After 20 minutes or so it started going dusty on me and stayed that way. Sillage is low and it didn't last terribly long - very, very faint by about the 3 hour mark. 

Rating: 
2/5 

Day 143!

Daydream Nation - Twyla Perfumes

Details: 
Daydream Nation
Twyla Perfumes & Apothecary

Notes: 
Musk seed, nagramotha, cardamom, dark patchouli, myrrh, clove, pomegranate accord, spice, amber and rose otto.

This is quite sweet in the vial, not in a sugary way but like the kind of spices you get in rice pudding. Applied to skin this is very heavy on the patchouli - at least for me. I'm not a patchouli fan, as you'd know if you read this blog regularly, and even though Twyla uses one of the few patchoulis I can tolerate, this one is too much for me, especially blended with amber. There's a spiciness to it and something that smells a bit like hay. It's very hippie-ish and could be worn by either men or women. I found this quite strong - the sillage is high for a Twyla perfume (it's one of the newer stronger versions), and it lasted a good 7 or 8 hours.

Rating: 
2/5

Day 131!

Alchemy - Black Baccara

Details: 
Alchemy
Black Baccara

Notes: 
In this bottle is an Alchemist's lab strewn with bottles, jars, brews, and divinely scented, decaying cabinets of curiosities. A mysterious unisex perfume blend -deep and sensuous with notes of incense, honey, sandalwood, cardamom, and the faintest hint of plum.

This is a funny one - lots of weird things going on but I can't pin down anything in particular. When I read the notes, I was thinking, oh yeah - that's there, and that's there, and that's there... but without that to tell me I was lost. It's incense but not quite, spicy but not quite, woody but not quite. There's something in the opening notes that almost makes me dislike it, but then I kept getting drawn in to sniff past whatever that was (and I still don't know - something sweetly sour, like when a baby spits up milk). The whole time I was wearing this I sniffed it compulsively, even at work like a weirdo. It's so interesting, even though I can't decide for sure whether I like it.

The dry down is sandalwood, and it smells musky even though that's not mentioned in the notes. The base is more of a classic scent than the unusual opener. I've probably been of no use at all describing this one, but it's a mystery to me, even though I wore it for a couple of days in a row trying to get my head around it. Sillage is lowish, but longevity is good - 10 hours at least.

Rating: 
3/5 I might come back and make this higher eventually. I'm not entirely decided.

Day 85!

Monster Mash - Solstice Scents

Details: 
Monster Mash (discontinued)
Solstice Scents

Notes: 
Monster Mash is a blend of the Mahogany paneled walls in Dracula's castle mixed with a background note of musk and some other dark and mysterious incense smoke and spice. Notes are Mahogany Wood, Amber, Vanilla and Cedarwood combined with Essential Oils of: All Spice, Black Pepper, Sandalwood and Cardamom. All these scents meld together to create a dark, rich wood with a hint of sweetness and a pleasing spice note. 

This was one of the perfumes that Rachel sent me recently to play with, and I was a bit excited because I've really come to love Solstice Scents. For some reason, I expected this to a sweet, candy kind of smell. I assumed that with a name like Monster Mash it would have been a Hallowe'en perfume, and they're generally foody. So I was pretty surprised to sniff it and find it was actually spicy and woody.

I wanted to like this, and in the vial, it seemed promising - a smokey, spicy resin smell sweetened by a dab of vanilla. I can get down with that. However, applied to my skin it's... fly spray. It stays that way for about half an hour and then completely disappears. It was so weird that I decided to try it again a few days later, thinking that maybe something I'd eaten or some other product like a body lotion or soap or something on my skin already was affecting it. The exact same thing happened. I want the scent in the vial, damn it! The second it hits my skin it turns to fly spray and stays that way. It's so bizarre!

Rating: 
2/5

Day 75!