Venus Libertina - Arcana Soaps

Details: 
Venus Libertina
Arcana Soaps (bought from The Rhinestone Housewife)

Notes: 
Night-blooming tuberose, pink gardenia, wax myrtle, tiare, bay rum, sandalwood, cucumber, iris and a teensy spill of champagne. 

Don't those notes sound lush? I imagined this to be a gorgeous, rich white floral with a dry down warmed by the sandalwood - pretty much my jam. And yet what I got was... lemon toilet cleaner. I don't get it. There is nothing lemony mentioned in the notes. Could it be the bay rum? I know sometimes that can be a tad limey. The wax myrtle? Wax myrtle gives us the scent bayberry. Fine and dandy except I have no idea what that smells like. Is it lemon?

Not to put too fine a point on it, this was grooosssssssss for the longest time. I really wanted to scrub it off, but I wasn't going out anywhere so I stuck it out, hoping that somewhere along the line it would morph into the amazing white floral I'd been expecting. Nope. Never happened. Instead after about an hour the toilet cleaner finally went away and I was left with a very faint, generic pot pouri floral that was completely gone within 2 hours. I considered trying it again the following day to see if there was just something weird going on with my skin chemistry, but you know what... I didn't want to.

Rating: 
1/5

Day 224!

The Shipman - Possets Perfume

Details: 
The Shipman
Possets Perfume

Notes: 
An aquatic as only Possets can do them. The tang of the seashore, rushes up against Lime Bay Rum and a good shot of ship's wax which was used to lubricate the wood aboard, and skin musk to keep it going for a long time. An outdoorsy fragrance with an unexpectedly smoky note, but still very pretty with a great deal of depth and fun to it. Not somber at all and more of a jolly scent. 

In the vial this is a lemony lime ozone scent, definitely not my kind of thing, but in for a penny, in for a pound and all that. Unfortunately, once I applied it to my wrist, this turned to some kind of hideous lime cleaning product scent and almost made me gag. I stuck it out for 20 minutes, hoping it would become something different on the dry down, but after that I could stand no more and had to wash it off. On me - definite scrubber.

Rating: 
1/5

Day 74!

Bourbon Street - Deep Midnight Perfumes

Details:
Bourbon Street
Deep Midnight Perfumes

Notes:
Bourbon Street: The Lamplighter turns down his last alleyway, and you long to follow the scent of sexy bay rum touched with vanilla and musk. Originally created as a men's fragrance but popular as a unisex scent!

I'm really enjoying these blokier scents lately. Am I maturing or just getting old, I wonder? This is the masculine version of any number of vanilla musk scents out there, with the bay rum giving it a slinky smokey edge in the vial and when first applied. There's nothing really unique about it but I do like it quite a bit. Sillage is medium, but it doesn't last all that long - it was gone in a couple of hours.

Rating: 
3/5

Day 55!

'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!

Jazz Funeral - Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab

Details: 
Jazz Funeral 
Ars Moriendi
Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab

Notes: 
Bittersweet bay rum, bourbon, and a host of funeral flowers with a touch of graveyard dirt, magnolia and Spanish moss. 

For a long time, Jazz Funeral was my favourite BPAL, but then I discovered more and more of their fragrances and then branched out into other indie perfume oil shops, and this one was pushed aside and forgotten. I pulled it out today because I was testing some Black Baccara scents and one of them made me think of this. It's still as lovely as I remember it being.

In the bottle, it smells like damp dirt and wet grass (I guess that's the moss). Applied, the floral comes out, though the dirt note is definitely there. Something - maybe the dirt - gives the flowers a note of decay. You know when there's a vase of lush white flowers that's been around for a few days and they are just beginning to die? You can still smell the perfume of them, but it's beginning to fade and turn just a little? That's what this is like. It sounds awful, but it somehow works - I adore this perfume. The damp earth recedes as it dries down, and it becomes more of a white floral, but still with that element of decay. The bourbon and - I assume - the bay rum give it a bit of warmth and depth. The sillage is in the head kicker category - I stopped wearing this at work a long time ago because a lady who sat a couple of desks away from me complained that it gave her a headache. Lasting power is long too - I've had this on for about 6 hours and it still smells quite strong.

Rating:
5/5 I'm glad I was prompted to pull this out again - I forgot how much I loved it.

Day 19!

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!