Gibbon's Boarding School - Solstice Scents

Source

First sniff: 
Leather. This is some kinky kind of school.

First applied: 
Leather, musty wood and something like... lime? Is it bay rum, maybe? It makes me think of pirates on tropical seas. This is quite a masculine scent. Something about it is verging on fly spray - maybe that limey note is making me think of citronella.

After 30 minutes: 
There's not much change, but it's a bit more mellow now, and less fly spray-ish. This would smell nice on a man but it's not really my thing.

After 3 hours: 
Much softer, it fades considerably after the first hour. Kind of a generic man scent now - a bit woody but really mellow.

Longevity: 
About 6 hours but very muted after the first hour.

Actual notes/description: 
Dusty wooden desks, paper, carefully hidden tobacco pouch, dying fire, dried leaves, leather chairs, Autumn breeze.

Availability: 
Solstice Scents
Limited Edition - Foxcroft's Autumn Festival 2014
Full size and sample size.

The Baker's Boy - Sarawen Perfumes

Details: 
The Baker's Boy
The Hunger Games
Sarawen Perfumes

Notes:
Spend a day frosting and decorating cakes with Peeta. A luscious, gourmand fragrance bursting with ripe strawberries (from Katniss of course!) and delicious yellow cake. Underneath the delicious-ness drifts soft vetiver, leather, and golden amber. This perfume is a unisex blend that borders towards feminine.

In the vial, and when I first applied this, I thought I smelled hay. Looking at the notes now I realise it's vetiver. At first this is a fairly masculine scent - the vetiver and leather dominating. The dry down however, is when all the sweet foodiness comes out, and I find that really interesting as it's generally the other way around. The strawberries are almost floral-smelling rather than fruity, and the amber is sweet and mellow and not overwhelming. The longer I wore this the more I liked it. Sillage is lowish - it sits reasonably close to the skin but I imagine if you lashed it about you'd make yourself known. The longevity is medium - I reapplied after about 5 hours as it was beginning to smell more faint by then.

Rating: 
4/5

Day 160!

Leather Rose - Black Baccara

 

Details: 

Leather Rose

Black Baccara

Notes: 

Leather rose had been in the works for some time, as I wanted to created a leather and rose blend that was deep, rich and evocative while at the same time not being too floral. This is not a delicate floral, and it is comparable to my Black Rose blend in regard to the darkness of mood. I also consider it the female counterpart to my popular men's cologne, Marquis De Sade. This blend contains four different types of rose including Hawthorne Rose and Tea Rose. The roses dance with a deep, dark leather. This blend goes through many changes. At the onset, the different rose varieties begin to bloom, seemingly one at a time. Soon after, the roses retreat and make way for a subtle leather whisper, which gradually grows in intensity.

Where is the leather? There is no leather in this that I could smell at all. I just got rose, rose and more rose. This smelled like Yardley Roses. There’s not much more I can say about it, really. 

Rating: 

1/5

Day 124! 

Aequitas - Darling Clandestine

Details: 
Aequitas
Darling Clandestine

Notes: 
Yes. It's a fragrance inspired by the Boondock Saints. Smoke and blood and whiskey and damp alleys and leather and steel and gunpowder and sweat and denim and sweet wooden rosary beads and a bit of clover struggling up through concrete cracks. It is unisex and so, so, so sexy.

Aequitas contains highly concentrated German chamomile, so it's got a bit o' the green. And since it also contains real whiskey, the dark resins and lovely insanely green oil-bubbles tend to separate and settle at the bottom. Just give the bottle a shake, and the perfume turns the color of a luna moth. :)

I wore this for three days in a row trying to get my head around it and I'm still baffled. I can't really pick out any notes, it smells like... green. In the bottle I think I can smell the steel note and also the whiskey, but to be honest I could only pick out those notes once I knew they were there. It's very masculine - slightly too masculine for my tastes. Once applied it stays that way for quite a long time, but then a couple of hours later there's something floral about it - no particular flower, not particularly girly, but definitely floral. It's weird. I have no idea whether or not I like it. Sillage is medium, longevity is about 10 hours.

Rating: 
Undecided. I'm going to try it again in a month or so and see if I can make more sense of it.

Day 114!

Bar Sinister - Possets Perfume

Details: 
Bar Sinister
Possets Perfume

Notes: 
Green Bourbon vanilla extract, sweetbriar, a powerful green musk, and a very highly refined leather, a background of labdenum, and a high and intoxicating silk accord. If you were born to gentry, you might have a stripe running from right to left on which you would have some heraldic figure. That is if you were legitimate. if you were the love child of a powerful man, you might  have a coat of arms with the bar running from left to right and the same figures on it to show who your father was and why you were powerful. This wasn't always granted, but often enough to have the bar sinister be a feature in heraldry. All of the elements of illicit love at play here. Sultry sultry sultry.

In the vial and applied wet, this is a masculine vanilla, kind of boozy and musky, and there's a sharp green note as well. There is a resin note from the labdanum that is thankfully not overpowering - resin can amp on me sometimes and give me a bit of a headache. It just stays in the background warming up the scent and making it all manly mannish. Leather comes out more in the drydown, and the combination of that with the vanilla made this one compulsively sniffable for me. The whole time I was wearing this I was: *sniff sniff* "Mmmmm!" *sniff sniff* Mmmmm! I think this would do nicely with a smokey note too - I'm going to try layering it with something like Alkemia's Smoke & Mirrors once the heatwave is over (if it's ever over - waaaah!), and see what happens.

Sillage is medium - it doesn't throw itself around the room, but it's definitely there. It lasted a long time on me - upwards of 8 hours. And let me tell you, I enjoyed those 8+ hours immensely. *sniff sniff* "Mmmmm!" If I passed a guy in the street wearing this, I'd probably follow him home.

Rating:
5/5 Definitely a future full bottle purchase.

Day 68!

'67 Chevy Impala - Delightful Rot

Details:
'67 Chevy Impala
Delightful Rot

Notes:
A man's scent. Bay rum, spiked with graveyard dirt, gunpowder, a touch of leather and a ring of salt, with an overtone of masculine musk. 

Manly men doing manly things. When I was 11 or 12 my aunt and uncle had a friend who was extremely masculine - I think he was a truck driver, and he could fix cars, had a motorbike, and wore neatly pressed Hard Yakka shirts with the sleeves rolled up and Blundstone boots. I had the biggest crush on him, even though he was probably in his mid-30s at the time. He smelled like this perfume - like a mechanic's garage - car oil, manliness and ability to fix things.

Once it dries down I can smell the bay rum (which I'm really starting to like generally as a scent note), leather and musk. This is an amazing masculine scent - I haven't been able to stop sniffing myself while wearing it. Having said that, I would probably never wear it - it's just too blokey for me. I feel like if I wore this I might grow testicles.

Rating:
4/5

Day 42!

Dee - Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab

Details: 
Dee
Bewitching Brews
Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab

Notes: 
John Dee: master of science, alchemy and magic. Hermetic philospher in the schools of Rosicrucian Christian Mysticism and Platonic-Pythagorean doctrine, and Queen Elizabeth's astrologer, advisor, cryptologist and spy. With Edward Kelly, he created a field of study and work in Angelic Evocation, and isolated the Angelic language: Enochian. His scent is soft English leather, rosewood and tonka with a hint of incense, parchment and soft woods. 

I had an imp of Dee a couple of years ago and I remember I liked it enough that I was considering a full size bottle at one point. This time around I’m not so enamoured of it. In the imp and when first applied, it reminded me a lot of some kind of common 1970s cologne – the kind my dad would have been wearing back in the day. It’s a little bit sweet as well, like there’s cologne mixed with baby powder. When I looked up the notes I realised why – my dad used to wear English Leather and this is pretty much exactly what it smells like. When I smell this I think of terrible 1970s Cleo centrefolds (you’d have to be a 35+ Aussie to get that), dad shorts with socks and sandals, Abba, olive green and orange kitchen decor, and rissoles. It’s... well, it’s daggy. That’s pretty much it.

What I think of when I smell this perfume (that's my brother mid 1970s)

Rating:

2/5

Day 37!

Deadwood - Alchemic Muse

Details:
Deadwood
Alchemic Muse

Notes: 
Wild bergamot, clover honey, and a light dusting of spice leading to a heart of warm amber and barley grass grounded in a rich base of black vanilla, musk, teak, and worn brown leather.

In the vial I smell leather and something slightly sweet, which might be the honey. Once applied the sweetness comes out more, but the leather still dominates. It dries down to a vanilla musk with the amber adding a bit of depth but not really distinct from the blend, and the leather is there right to the end. Sillage is medium, as is longevity. I found it had faded quite a bit after about 5 hours and reapplied, then it lasted well the rest of the day.

I chose this perfume purely based on the name, because I love the TV show Deadwood. As it turns out it's yet another masculine scent that I find myself liking.

Rating: 
3/5 I wouldn't buy a full bottle as it's not a scent I'd wear too often, but this is a nice blend and definitely worth trying if you like leather notes.

Day 22!

Pirate's Keg - Deep Midnight Perfumes

Details:
Pirate's Keg
Deep Midnight Perfumes

Notes:
Oh, that Black Jack – you can only imagine the booty he possesses! Raise a glass and toast him on his way to more grand swashbuckling adventures. Bay rum, rich leather, wild musk, and a shot of coconut and lime. A delicious unisex scent!

I don't tend to like masculine scents all that much, but now that I have to review 365 perfumes I thought it would be a good idea to step out of my comfort zone occasionally, otherwise all you'll ever be reading is variations of chocolate, cream and white florals. I chose Pirate's Keg because I'm only vaguely familiar with bay rum as a scent note, and also because it has leather.

In the vial I smell booze and lime. My ex (now BFF) and I would quite often drink vodka with lime and bitters on hot days (and in Adelaide there a lot of those) and that's what this made me think of at first. Once it's applied I can still smell the booze, and also now the leather. The coconut is there, but it's not the suntan oil kind of coconut - it adds kind of a warm, faintly sweet softening to the rum and leather. The lime pretty much disappears on my skin, but every now and then I thought I could catch a whiff of it. The dry down is leather, softened a little by the coconut. I rather like this perfume, despite it being more blokey than I would normally lean toward.

Rating: 
3/5 Not sure if I'd get a lot of use out of a full bottle, but I will put the sample away and bring it out again when the weather cools down.

Day 17!