BPAL - Aglaea, Phantasm, Siren

[chomiji]

I've gone and done it - I ordered Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab imps (little samples that BPAL calls "imp's ears" and that everyone who has this hobby seems to call just imps). BPAL sells strangely named perfume oil blends, and just reading the descriptions on the website is a total kick.

Anyway, there's a delicious and slightly absurd element of ritual (my sister called it that, when I described it to her) in the way one tests these things. That's not to say everyone does it this way, but wotthehell, I can see the point of it, and maybe it will eventually help me learn to detect some of these scented ingredients, so I'm gonna do the whole in-the-bottle, on-the-skin, drydown thing. And I'm going to give them points out of 10, which is something I've seen done on several blogs with BPAL reviews.

Aglaea - Splendor (7/10)
Three golden ambers, bright musk, peach wine and myrtle.

note - irritating to broken skin

• in bottle: intensely sweet, like peach candy
• on skin: still very sweet, but warm and powdery notes (possibly amber and musk?) emerging
• drydown: faint, sweet amber with spicy undertone

I liked this, but not to wear, myself, as perfume. I gave it to the Young Lady. I think maybe I should try some more amber-ish stuff.

Phantasm (7/10)
Green tea, lemon verbena, jasmine and neroli.

• in bottle: sweet, lemony, pleasant yet piercing
• on skin: similar but more floral/herbal
• drydown: faint, interesting scent ... can't decide whether I like it, but I kept wanting to sniff it

Pretty, but not very long-lasting. Some people have called the initial scent "Lemon Pledge," but it's nicer than that.

Siren (6/10)
White ginger, jasmine, and a touch of vanilla and apricot.

• in bottle: slightly sweet, pungent, and spicy
• on skin: warm, sweet, spicy, vanilla increasingly apparent, slightly medicinal - almost like some sort of confection (smillaraaq was absolutely right about this - it's really like white chocolate goodie with fruit)
• drydown: vanilla/floral only

Meh.

I had also ordered Croquet, Zephyr, and La Belle au Bois Dormant, and they sent me Vampire Tears and Yew Trees as freebies. I tried the Croquet and Zephyr before I decided to get systematic, so I guess I'll have to try them again ... phooey, because I didn't like them that much (men's cologne and old-lady floral soap, respectively).

This makes me realize how lucky I have been with regular ol' perfumes ... Calyx, Escape (a little too sweet), and Acqua di Gio are my usual ones.

Comments

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Mmmmm amber, my YES YES YES scent! Ambers that work well on me:

Jacob's Ladder 2006 (Xmas limited edition)

The Lion - amber and dry grass, which smells like the savanna to me and is therefore unique in being the only BPAL scent that actually matches its description. :D

Bakeneko (limited edition) - Smelled better when new; has aged into mostly just cinnamon.

Schwarzer Mond (another LE) - Unique in being the only one with patchouli as a major element that doesn't go head-shop on me.

Gypsy Queen (Carnaval Noir LE)

Bastet

Brisingamen - Mmmmmmm. Soft fruity blossoms and warm amber.

Versailles - MMMMMMMM! Regal citrus and amber.

Megaera - Very close to Versailles

[chomiji]

See, I didn't know I liked amber until I started playing with these!

The regular things I like are all called "fruity florals," but they're all light and fresh - so I was basing most of my choices on those. But I realize that I also love my Origins Ginger Souffle body creme stuff, which actually has a warm, spicy scent (despite the description on their site, which makes it sound all citrus-y ... yeah, there's citrus, but also tons of spices and eucalyptus and things ... ). So that might be another direction to go, amber and citrus and spices.

I keep expecting to get an allergic reaction from something on one of these, because regular perfumes frequently give me horrible headaches. But this small sampling hasn't given me anything like that yet.

[chomiji]

I'm starting to get quite a list for my next shot at this!

I've seen both Embalming Fluid and Shanghai mentioned favorably. I can live with most of BPAL's funny names, but ... Embalming Fluid?

[chomiji]

Yeah, I have a feeling I won't be able to resist another batch for long, with all these good suggestions.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

"Fruity florals" might be a good technical description of what works on me, because while straight apple and peach and cherry and plum tend not to, peach blossom, apple blossom, cherry blossom, and plum blossom all do. Or maybe that would be "floral fruits." :D

[chomiji]

Hee, I think "floral fruits"! Yeah, my ginger body mousse stuff uses orange flower water, which is nice.

(Heh, the right icon for this would be that pic of Hakkai with the cut orange ... that whole series of things she has of them with various edibles is so very intriguing psychologically ...   XD  )

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Well, there's some scents I can tell won't work on me from a bottle-sniff. Mostly the ones that have enough jasmine or cedar in them to trip my allergic reactions. XD

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I've got a bunch of imps right now that I'm probably going to give the sniff-test too, but that's only because I've got so, so many to test. XD Oh - and I just remembered: I can often tell the intensity of the musk by a sniff-test, and darker musks go really awful on me, but midrange and lighter can sometimes be really nice, so sometimes I can tell that way if it won't work for me, but for the most part I need to test on the skin. :D

[chomiji]

I'm a big believer in individual body chemistry, so I can't see not trying them on the skin - unless the smell in the bottle is a complete turn-off (and I'm afraid that's what happened with most of the little paper samples you sent ... ).

See, I didn't know I liked amber. Also, at the moment, since I have some mainstream perfumes that I like, I'd rather play with these silly things! For one thing, I like supporting small businesses, when I can. For another, this is good for training my nose. My sniffer is pretty sensitive - I was always the housemate/roommate who had the dubious pleasures of sniffing things to see whether they'd gone bad and tracking down "what's making that awful smell!" - and it's nice to be using it for something pleasant!

[sanada.livejournal.com]

Ohoho, those things are addictive... I've got a bunch of them. My personal favorite is "Dee", which has a dusty leather and incense smell that makes me think of a medieval library. I've got a lot of the really sharp pines, herbals, and labdanums too. I stay away from the florals and berries because they're too girly... the only floral I've liked was "Envy", which smells a lot like hyacinths and other springlike green things. But I like BPAL perfumes because they usually have two or three notes that come through strongly and actually smell like *something*, unlike regular perfume where I can't place any of the scents so it comes off kind of chemical-y to me.

[sanada.livejournal.com]

It's such a *nice* incense, too! It doesn't smell like a secondhand shop run by a hippie with a half-smoked joint dangling from his lips. *laugh* Ahh, I was hoping I'd get more of the sharp herbs and mint, but my skin chemistry made it really floral! (so anything that's intended to be floral is usually overpowering)

[sanada.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there's some really interesting chemistry at work here... *laugh* I know oils in the skin intensify fragrance, but I wonder how people can get such a wide range of experiences out of the same little bottle? I think the incense/wood scents seem to be the "safest" and least likely to go all wonky.

[chomiji]

Well, I just had an experience that bad with one of the BPALs that seems fairly popular ... I had to go scrub it off because it was making me feel like I was hyperventilating. I think the suspect ingredient was probably tonka. (I'll be putting up 3 more reviews shortly, including that one.)

[chomiji]

Well, you know, the sense of smell is supposed to be one of the best for calling up vivid memories, so these probably bring up completely different images for everyone.

[chomiji]

So how do you play that?

[chomiji]

And I never knew you were into this thing! Not in all the hours of talking we've done! (Which I think is wonderful ... people should be fractile-ish ... always another dimension to uncover, no matter how closely you look ... .)

The regular ol' perfumes I like are all classified as "fruity florals," but the fruits aren't really sweet - I guess they must be citrus things or melon or something. So I was trying things with those kinds of ingredients.

I know what you mean about "smelling like something." So many perfumes, to me, just smell like ... perfume. Who cares about something that smells like that?

The other inspiration I have for picking these things will be the two scented body lotions that I like - I had almost forgotten about them because I wear them (I alternate between them) only once the heat needs to be on. Thymes' "Green Tea" has tea, woody, and rose scents in it, and Origins "Ginger Souffle" has orange flower water, citrus, eucalyptus, and lots and lots of spices (mostly ginger, obviously).

[sanada.livejournal.com]

I could have sworn we'd talked about these! *laugh* Well, welcome to another weird, fannish hobby!!

The only regular old perfume that I wear regularly is "Tea for Two" from L'Artisan, but the BPAL scents with similar notes (ginger, tea, more ginger) have been hit-or-miss because their ginger is so easily overwhelmed by whatever else is in there.

Yeah! Most perfumes are unidentifiable flowers + that weird alcohol/chemical bitterness (aldehyde, I guess) or so many things blended together that it smells like the equivalent of throwing the contents of your fridge into a blender and eating the resulting slurry. Er, maybe I just don't have a very sophisticated nose.

Have you ever tried the soaps and lotions from Lush? Lots of BPAL fans are into Lush too (and they do the same descriptive blogging!) I think they have a store in Bethesda. The soaps are so pretty too...

[chomiji]

I sometimes wonder if what I don't like in some perfumes are the "carrier" substances. Thymes makes a cologne version of their Green Tea, and I really don't like it as much as the lotion! The tea smell doesn't come through as well, and the rose note doesn't seem as full or as warm.

[sanada.livejournal.com]

Yeah! It almost smells as if there's some kind of volatile nasty in there. Didn't they used to use some part of a whale as the carrier substance? ^^; I'm sure they've got a synthetic version...

[chomiji]

Spermaceti, I'm pretty sure you mean ... yeah, they probably use something synthetic now .... .

(Holy crap, Care went up to bed 30 min. ago and I just now heard her shower go on ... what's she been doing since she went up there?   o_O;  )

[chomiji]

Have you ever tried making your own scented lotions and such using the BPAL oils?

[chomiji]

(Oooh, nice Ginko icon!)

Hee! Caroline & I hit the new Lush at MoMall (Montgomery Mall, by the same process that rendered the late lamented Montgomery Donuts "MoDo's," and the county itself "MoCo") before all my surgery mess, when I needed some more soft bras. I got some nice facial stuff with avocado in it and then only used one hit of it before the pull-date ran out, and I got Care some lip balm. We had fun there. Lush is to neilgaimanboard what BPAL seems to be to my LJ crew, probably because there's a number of Candians on gaimanboard, and that's where it came from. And I have silly expensive Origins Ginger salt scrub to go with my body mousse, but it's very oily, so that might be something else to get at Lush next time.

I can't deal with multiple soaps in the shower (Karl & I share one), and I like mostly clean scents anyway, so we have a selection of gender-neutral soaps selected by a long series of hit-and-miss trials: Sudz "In the Pink" (which is grapefruit-y, and nowadays I have to buy it online), One With Nature "Dead Sea Salt" and "Coco-Walnut," Pre de Provence Agrumes (citrus blend), Crabtree & Evelyn Avocado, and various other things that I get at the co-op down the street or at Whole Foods.

[sanada.livejournal.com]

(Thanks!)

Ooh, so they've got one in Montgomery Mall now? *laugh* I actually haven't been to either of the DC ones, but I've hit the ones in other states. I like the solid shampoo bars they have!

Our shower is stocked with mint-scented beeswax soaps from a local farm. Actually, most of the shower stuff is minty... it's the only thing that everyone can agree on. ^__^

[chomiji]

I'm really ambivalent about mint as a scent to put on my skin, because I mostly associate it with toothpaste. Hmmm ... now I have lemon toothpaste, which I think is nicer. Maybe I should try a mint soap again ... .

[chomiji]

Yeah, they seem to be very hippie-ish hit-and-miss that way ... it's like their stuff is selling on the basis of the fresh ingredients gimmick, so they don't have to worry about marketing ideas like scent-lines and such.

[the-resa.livejournal.com]

(trembles)
Oh ...
Must Have!

[chomiji]

XD

This seems to be the hobby of geeky women ... I first ran into it on neilgaimanboard, when it came up because of the BPAL line of Neil Gaiman-inspired scents, but didn't even think of looking past that page until I realized how many of my LJ friends had this particular jones. smillaraaq finally pushed me over the edge! You can get 6 imps, plus a couple of freebies, for $20 ... .

[chomiji]

Awwwww, there now! You just made it sound so friendly and approachable, that's all!

:-)

[chomiji]

Oh, you pusher, you! Shall we sing a chorus of "The Old Dope Peddlar" in your honor?

XD

[sanada.livejournal.com]

If you really want to get weird about it, you can swap half-used imps and stuff on LJ comms like bpalmarketplace or sinandsalvation - then you can get all of those discontinued or rare ones without waiting for BPAL's slow shipping~ And people on those comms usually toss in a free imp or some candy or tea with your order, which is cool. (also, you can easily unload the stuff you didn't like and try new ones!)

[chomiji]

Heh, I don't think I'm into it enough for that! (Not yet, anyway .... )

XD

[chomiji]

I'm actually having mixed feelings about gaimanboardies at the moment ... folks here on LJ and on Shejidan have been wonderfully, sweetly supportive over the past few weeks, but the boardies ... they offered up good wishes when I mentioned the situation, but no one's ever checked on how I was doing since then. Which makes me a bit sad, and I don't feel so much like reaching out to them at the moment.

Maybe when I have a few more things to trade, I'll take you up on the offer of an intro!