The Piemaker - Sarawen Perfume Art

First sniff:
Fruit, but for once not gross fruit. Okay, I'm going in.

First applied:
Sort of like cherry, but this smells like actual cherry pie made with actual cherries, not that cough syrup cherry note you usually get in perfumes. I kind of like this - it's warm but light at the same time.

After 30 minutes:
Jammy fruit and something floral - it smells like one of those blossom jams you get at farmer's markets. There is a very, very slight dustiness - I hope that goes away. Sillage is not high, even after just half an hour I don't really notice the perfume unless I sniff my wrist.

After 3 hours:
Sadly this went completely dusty not long after the 30 minute mark, and pretty much disappeared within 2 hours. That first burst was pretty nice, but it didn't like me much after that.

Longevity: 
Not long - not even 2 hours. I find that with a lot of Sarawen perfumes, my skin just seems to eat them.

Actual notes/description: 
Having baked pies all morning, the piemaker opened his establishment and commenced to serve his customers. The scent of berries, baked pastry and a hint of floral wafts through, beckoning one to sit at a booth and enjoy one of the piemaker's fine treats! The piemaker is inspired by the character of Ned from Pushing Daisies, and is a balanced unisex fragrance with a floral amber background blended with gourmand notes. Main notes: berry pies, pale musk, apple spice, tuberose, amber.

Availability:
Sarawen Perfume Art
Limited Edition - Valentine's Day 2015
Available at the time of writing in sample and full size.

Jack and The Devil - Solstice Scents

Source

First sniff: 
Leather, chocolate... or maybe a deep vanilla?

First applied: 
Leathery tobacco and vanilla. Very masculine but smooth. There's some patchouli there too but thankfully it's not crazy.

After 30 minutes: 
The patchouli is prominent now, unfortunately. The tobacco is also stronger - this has become even more 'manly' than when I first applied it. It's probably awesome on a bloke, but not my kind of thing at all.

After 3 hours: 
The patchouli has mellowed at last and it's quite a smooth, masculine vanilla amber now. Again, I'm sure this would be amazing on a man but it's not something I would wear.

Longevity: 
About 6 hours.

Actual notes/description: 
Vanilla, tobacco, oakmoss, amber, patchouli, pumpkin and soft spice.

Availability: 
Solstice Scents
Permanent (was originally part of a limited edition Fall collection)
Full size and sample size.

Blood Kiss - Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab

Details: 
Blood Kiss
Bewitching Brews
Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab

Notes: 
Lush, creamy vanilla and the honey of the sweetest kiss smeared with the vital throb of husky clove, swollen red cherries, but darkened with the vampiric sensuality of vetiver soporific poppy and blood red wine, and a skin-light pulse of feral musk. 

This is a spicy vanilla with a sour note that is probably the clove. Not quite a scrubber but not pleasant. The dry down is slightly sweeter but that clove still comes through enough to be irritating. And of course, because I don't really like it the sillage is fairly high and it lasted 8+ hours on me. *sigh*

Rating: 
1/5

Day 181!

The Sacred Queen - Twyla Perfumes

Details: 
The Sacred Queen
Maia Collection
Twyla Perfumes & Apothecary

Notes:
Beautiful, ruthless and fiery - The Sacred Queen, with over 14 essential oils, is a deceptively sweet, complex and unmistakably regal blend of honey and smokey vetiver, amber and vintage patchouli, frankincense, neroli and bitter almond with smoldering spices, sacred incense and a heady blend of florals.  

I thought I would hate this at first because in the vial all I got was a big huff of patchouli. However, once applied it almost immediately sweetened and mellowed. I don't really get a distinct floral note but I think there's something flowery about it. It's very, VERY hippie-ish. Not my cup of tea, but not nearly as bad as I initially thought it would be. Oddly I can't smell the honey if I put my nose to my wrist and sniff, but I can smell it when I'm just moving my wrist around - I kept getting whiffs of it at work while I was typing.

The other day I was chatting on Twitter with some people about that fashion in the 90s for the semi-goth look, with long flowing velvet dresses, lace up boots, chokers, hair dyed black or red, etc. This perfume evokes that style for me. There's something about it that says to me: Wiccan, hippie, probably wears or carries a crystal. Sillage is medium - it packs a bit of a punch at first but settles down fairly quickly. Longevity was good - I could smell it on myself for most of the day.

Rating:
3/5

Day 177!

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!

Nevada - HEAT - Possets Perfume

Details:
Nevada - HEAT
Possets Perfume

Notes:
Nevada, it's HOT. It's exciting and it gets YOU hot! They work at that, and it's a natural phenomenon. Supersweet vanilla grabs a sassy orange/citrus for a fast ride through the desert at sunset. Resins drip into and out of the blend, and a blast of spice comes from nowhere to tie it all together. Heat isn't for everyone, and certainly not for the timid nor for the conformist, unless you really want to have a brief holiday from your hum drum existence. Gives you all the excitement of that last shake before you roll the dice. USA, spicy resin, long lasting.

There's an episode of one of Nigella's Christmas specials where she soaks a turkey in a bucket full of brine to which she has added a ton of seasonings like orange peel, cloves, star anise, vanilla pods, and so on. Oddly enough, this is exactly what Nevada made me think of when I first smelled it. It doesn't conjure up any kind of hot weather for me at all - quite the opposite. It makes me think of a cold, wintery Christmas.

In the vial it's mostly citrus, but the spice comes out on the skin and the vanilla sweetens it, but thankfully not in the same sickly way as Florida. The drydown is spicy citrus resin, still resolutely holiday food, but deeper and darker. 

Sillage is medium and longevity is quite good - about 8 hours later I could still smell it on my wrist. I don't know if I like it all that much - it's not bad but it just doesn't make me think of what it's obviously supposed to represent. I think this perfume should actually be called Nigella's Christmas Turkey.

Rating:
2/5

Day 153!

Florida - Possets Perfume

Details:
Florida
Possets Perfume

Notes: 
Florida, is there a place which is more closely tied to oranges? Several different natural orange essences from a variety of different sources giving different nuances to the idea of orange. Then we have barded it over with an intense and wild musk for staying power, spices to keep it interesting and a strong a bitter sort of musk which mimics the bitterness of the peel if you put your tongue to it. Bracing but sexy, not for the faint of heart, and real alluring. This is as interesting as a weekend in South Beach!

Well, this is definitely orange, but it's a sickly sweet orange that frankly makes me feel a bit nauseous. It's like an 'orange fruit drink' - the kind that pretends to be juice but isn't. After about 20 minutes this was literally making me feel sick and I had to get it off, so I can't tell you anything more about it. Definitely not for me!

Rating:
1/5

Day 152!

Conjure - Solstice Scents

Details: 
Conjure
Dark Spring 2013
Solstice Scents

Notes: 
A magical blend of Vanilla, Amber, Cedar, Spices & Cauldron Smoke. 

As with Manor, I can smell something a bit leathery in this perfume, even though it's not listed as a note. In fact, this perfume is vaguely similar to Manor - quite masculine but also a bit sweet from the vanilla and amber. The spice smells a little bit like ginger and maybe even some nutmeg. (I have whole nutmeg - nutmegs? nutmeg nuts? - in a jar in my kitchen and secretly I like to just stand there sniffing it - gorgeous).

The dry down is a smooth, smokey woody vanilla. I do like this, but I think it's a bit like Old Cedar Magus, just blokier, and since I already have a beloved full bottle of that I don't think I'd spring for this one. Sillage is medium to high - I was quite aware of it most of the day. It lasted a good while too, I could still faintly smell it 12 hours later.

Rating:
3/5

Day 147!

Pyrotechnik - Darling Clandestine

Details: 
Pyrotechnik
Darling Clandestine

Notes: 
Carefully blended and infused by me in small batches in vintage glass wine bottles, this fragrance is a sangria-spicy concoction with bold notes of cantaloupe and raw sandalwood darkened with smoke and earth. A multitude of different scent elements and weeks of methodical alchemy make Pyrotechnik no ordinary scented oil mix—it's a truly inimitable fragrance. The spice element in this one can warm the skin a bit, so take note if you're a sensitive type.

It took me ages to work out that what I was smelling was melon - in the bottle and when applied wet there was a strong watery element that I thought might have been cucumber for a while, but then realised it was too sweet. There is also a green note and something that smells like damp earth. I don't really get spice or sandalwood, though it does warm up as it dries, so maybe that's just those adding some heat rather than specific scent notes. This doesn't last a long time on me - maybe 3 hours, and although it starts off quite strong it sits close to the skin once it dries down. However, the bottle I have is huge so frequent reapplication doesn't bother me at all. 

This would be a lovely summer scent; the melon is fresh and bright without smelling 'fruity'.

Rating: 
3/5

Day 134!

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!

Burlesque Lounge - Nevermore Body Company

Details: 
Burlesque Lounge
Nevermore Body Company

Notes: 
True to its name...this musky combination of Patchouli, black leather and tobacco with a floral hint of Frankincense, violet and amber is perfectly blended in fresh lemon, mandarin, juicy plum, red apple, cinnamon and fresh clove, dipped in vanilla and cherry cordial. Let the intoxicating scents of a 19th century Burlesque Lounge tickle your senses and take you back to another time.

In the vial this is fruity and sweet - I can smell the apple and plum, and there is a candy-ish note that might be the cherry cordial. It's basically the same on my skin but with a hint of lemon. This perfume went dusty on me within minutes and stayed that way. The sillage was low and it didn't last very long. I don't like fruit scents so even without the dustiness it wouldn't have been my cup of tea.

Rating: 
1/5

Day 130! 

Alice Liddell - Twyla Perfumes

Details: 
Alice Liddell 
Literary Ingenues - Spring Collection 2013
Twyla Perfumes

Notes:
Alice Liddell - from the Wonderland/Looking Glass books by Lewis Carroll.  When i was little, these books helped to form my already rather overactive imagination.  Alice was the epitome of the Ingenue - sweet yet quick-witted, brave and with a sense of the absurd, and totally uncorrupted by the pedestrian world in which she lived...
A sweet, proper English scent with a bit of a silly twist, Alice is sweet, floral, quirky and the epitome of innocence. Apple blossom, carnation, rose alba, lilac, bergamot, and roobios tea with milk and honey. 

In the vial, this smells like sweet floral tea. Applied to my skin it goes a little soapy, which I don't think I've ever had happen with a Twyla scent. I wonder if it's the apple blossom? I get spice from the carnation, and the tea is still there, along with the honey. The honey really comes out in the dry down, but that soapiness is still there and never goes away. Although I don't hate this one, it just isn't me. It doesn't seem to work with my skin chemistry at all. Sillage and longevity were medium, it lasted about 6 or so hours.

Rating: 
2/5 Not my cup of tea. (See what I did there!)

Day 108!

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!

Hasta la Muerte - The Morbid The Merrier

Details: 
Hasta la Muerte
Valentine's Day 2011
The Morbid The Merrier

Notes:
The innocence of lily and carnation, sweetened with vanilla absolute, smashed and marred by an undercurrent of heartless black spice.

This is one of the few perfumes I have left from The Morbid The Merrier, and it's never been a favourite. When I first bought it, I found it just okay, but nothing about it kept me going back. After a couple of years, this has aged quite well (interestingly, because the other TMTM scent I reviewed for this blog was the opposite). In the bottle, it's a sweet, very faintly spicy floral, mostly the lily with a dab of vanilla evident. Once applied though, the spice comes out and I get the carnation as well. It's so different from bottle to skin - almost like an entirely different perfume. This is what I'd call a unisex floral - you can definitely smell the flowers, but it's not girly. The spice makes it more deep and masculine.

I'm glad I pulled this one out - I really like a lot this time around. The vanilla stays in the background, just adding a slightly warm, sweet base as it dries down, but the carnation is the most definite note, there all the way through. Sillage is medium - like many carnation scents, it would be easy to go overboard with this, but subtly applied it's not too out there. Longevity is pretty good - I could still smell it 6 hours later.

Rating: 
4/5 A forgotten gem.

Day 70!

Harvesting Zombies - Enchanticals

Details: 
Harvesting Zombies
Enchanticals Perfume

Notes: 
Harvesting Zombies is an incredibly lavish, diverse & harmonious fragrance for the senses made with the finest extractions and oils available, with earthy, aged patchouli essential oil, moody black amber essential oil, sassy cinnamon, and a harvest of amazing, fresh Autumn fruits and spices so yummy no human or Zombie could ever resist.

In the vial this smells like spicy autumn fruits - apple, pear, the kind of things you make cold weather puddings out of. On my wrist it's mostly apple and cinnamon at first, and it's obviously real cinnamon oil because it itched like hell almost immediately. I was tempted to scrub it off but I let it go for a while to see how it would go, and it did subside after about 20 or 30 minutes. The dry down is a warm spicy scent – the cinnamon is not prevalent here, it’s more a mixed spice blend with the patchouli there but not taking over. The sillage is fairly low, but it lasted a really long time - at the end of the day I could still faintly smell it on my wrist and it had faded to something familiar I couldn't quite put my finger on. I asked Noodles what it smelled like to her at that point and she said, "Old people. No, old hippies." Right. Patchouli, then.  As fruit scents go, this is more on the warm side, and therefore more palatable to me than the light, bright young ones that I hate so much, but it’s still not really my cup of tea.

Rating: 
3/5

Day 57!

Boba - Delightful Rot

Details:
Boba
Delightful Rot

Notes: 
A sweet fragrance, reminiscent of your favorite bubble tea! With notes of sweet milk, cinnamon and spice tea, and a touch of black coconut, this is a definite foodie scent, with a mild and sweet dry down. 

In the vial and when first applied, this is really fruity and bright. I've never had bubble tea so I don't know exactly what it smells like, but I imagined it would be like a milkshake, whereas this is more like a smoothie. The dry down is more milky and creamy, with no particularly distinct notes - it's sweet and warm, and a tiny bit spicy. The sillage is low and it doesn't last long - it had disappeared entirely within a couple of hours.

Rating: 
2/5 It's okay, but there was nothing that grabbed my attention.

Day 40!

Madame - Nevermore Body Company

Details:
Madame
Nevermore Body Company

Notes: 
Madame’s golden days of Cabaret brings back the warm and sophisticated, yet subtle blend of apple and oak, with a spice mahogany bouquet, soothing hints of vanilla, cinnamon and dark wood, ripe tones of sweet figs and infused with a blend of tobacco, black tea and fruit spices.

 In the vial this is fruity and sweet, exactly the kind of thing I don't like. Once I applied it, it smelled sour - the apple, I assume. I'm not sure what fig smells like exactly, but I was testing another perfume with a fig note the day before and there was a similar sour note in that one, so I'm guessing that's adding to it. To be perfectly honest, this smells a bit like cat pee on me. I almost scrubbed it off, but it was quite close to the skin and didn't have much sillage at all, so I left it on for a while to see if it would change. It does eventually, and dries down to a fairly pleasant, mildly spicy vanilla base. It's quite a significant morphing, actually. The longevity is medium - I could faintly smell it after 6 hours, but only if I had my nose right up to my wrist. I wouldn't wear this purely because I really dislike the opening notes of it, and the vanilla base is nice, but nothing unique.

Rating: 
2/5

Day 25!

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!

Parkin - Haus of Gloi

Details:
Parkin
Yule 2010
Haus of Gloi

Notes: 

Glorious ginger cakes celebrating Guy Fawkes Day! Brown sugar, black treacle, oats, a peculiar blend of white spices tossed with chopped roasted chestnuts and coated with the lightest of icings.  

Ginger! This is gingery and sugary and rich. Although it's very foodie, the ginger and spiciness keep it in the realm of something more interesting than the usual vanilla or chocolate gourmand scent. In the dry down, it becomes more creamy and less sugary as the treacly porridge makes an appearance. It's definitely a winter scent, so probably not the best for an Australian summer. I would pull this out again in the colder months and wear it - it's kind of an Aran jumper perfume.

Rating:
3/5 I don't love it enough to buy a full bottle, but I do like it.

Day 9!