More smells!

[theleaveswant]

Four scents I picked up from a destasher here in Toronto (found via the sales board on the review forum), presented in order from fail to win:

Yew Trees (reviews)
Hereby renamed "Ew Trees" because it smelled exactly like the taste of fruit-flavoured Tums that have been in the hall closet in the house you grew up in with the other scarcely used medical supplies for who knows how long and are probably reeeeeeally stale. Maybe it gets better once it's had time to mellow out but I couldn't get through ten minutes with that dusty fruity medicated evocative chalkiness on my skin and I'm not going to try it again.

Fire of Love (reviews)
Another from the Conjure Bag series, which means no notes are listed in the Lab description. I can detect a bit of the ginger and cedar that other wearers describe on the review forum but on me this is mostly rotting flowers? Jasmine, possibly? The smell of a flowering tree after a rainfall when the carpet of wet shed petals underneath it starts turning to slime. No diaper smell on me, at least, not that I can tell, but there's definitely something dirty in the mix, and not dirty in a good way. If there's musk in here it's not a kind that likes me.

Undertow (reviews)
I really like the fresh-clean scent of the mint and juniper here, but unfortunately they get shoved to the margins by pushy lotus. I'm not especially familiar with lotus as a smell but here it's almost sharply sweet and smells like it can't quite decide if it wants to be a flower or a fruit. Will look for other blends where juniper and mint are stronger, I guess.

Wolf Moon (reviews)
The first Limited Edition BPAL blend I've tried, one of their irregularly recurring Lunacy blends released to coincide with particular full moons, and wow. Gonna have to keep an eye out for more of this one. I actually don't know which Wolf Moon release this decant is from, so I don't know precisely which formulation it is (seems to vary a bit from year to year, Lab and review links go to different years) or how much it's aged, but I LOVE whatever I've got. It's got elements in common with Odin (musk and forest smells) and warms up to a similar woody sweetness, but especially at the beginning it's darker, wilder, in the forest rather than near it; richly coniferously spicy from the resins and sandalwood, like loping through shadows over a carpet of dry needles between sap-oozing trunks. It smells like magic. It smells like this song.

Comments

[kore]

Aww, these are neat!

(I was pretty disappointed by Sady Doyle's perfume Tumblr post on BPAL -- pretty mocking. SIGH.)

If you like Wolf Moon you might like, let me see, Faunalia, Ivanushka, or Coyote, if you haven't tried them -- I think at least one of those isn't limited. Or maybe Hades?

I tend to go for either musky-flowery or juicy-fruity myself. Sort of jewel-tone perfumes. I have a bunch of Lunacies but they're mostly flowery ones.

(dang I need a BPAL icon)

[theleaveswant]

Thank you, and thanks for the recs! Coyote especially looks very interesting.

[recessional]

I am UTTERLY fascinated by how different our skin is! I don't get anything rotten at all from Fire of Love, and Yew Trees on my skin is this lovely light forest-sweet scent, with no fruit at all.

[theleaveswant]

Agreed! The differences are fascinating, and it's an interesting puzzle guessing where they come from--skin chemistry, perception, associations, combinations of all three.