BPAL - Aglaea, Phantasm, Siren
Nov. 13th, 2007 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chomijiI'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.
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Date: 2007-11-13 11:47 pm (UTC)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...
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Date: 2007-11-14 02:38 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2007-11-14 02:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-14 02:55 am (UTC)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; )
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Date: 2007-11-14 10:33 pm (UTC)I might have known you'd have the answer!
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Date: 2007-11-16 03:50 am (UTC)Wow, I loved that article! And I was very interested in the comment about how "Giorgio Armani perfumes have one of the industry’s cleanest signatures." Because that really describes my Acqua di Gio - very clean and light.
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Date: 2007-11-17 05:44 pm (UTC)I think I've run into those blogs when I was doing searches on what notes might be in my current mainstream faves. I thought "Now Smell This" was a pretty laid-back sounding name!
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Date: 2007-11-27 03:17 am (UTC)Hmm, yes, I guess I'll add one of those to the next order. Yes, Acqua di Gio is interesting that way! Thanks for the research.
Heh - Douglas at Union Station? I walk past that every work day - you were a stone's throw from my office! If you'd continued on past it to where the train platform gates are, them hung a right down to the end and a left at the McDonald's, you would have seen a set of big glass doors labelled "To Station Place Office Buildings." That's where I work!
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Date: 2007-12-10 04:58 pm (UTC)Oooh, sounds pretty! Well, if we go shopping or something together sometime soon, maybe we'll have to check out perfumes.
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Date: 2007-11-15 11:46 pm (UTC)Have you ever tried making your own scented lotions and such using the BPAL oils?
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Date: 2007-11-17 05:10 pm (UTC)Yeah, I have basically oily skin, but when the heat goes on, the body lotion comes out! (And the special facial stuff that doesn't clog my pores.)
Maybe Whole Foods or our natural foods co-op will have some unscented lotion I can mess with.
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Date: 2007-11-14 02:35 am (UTC)(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.
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Date: 2007-11-14 02:45 am (UTC)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. ^__^
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Date: 2007-11-14 02:58 am (UTC)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 ... .
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Date: 2007-11-14 10:35 pm (UTC)The Young Lady really likes Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap! She uses the liquid version like it was shower gel. I first got it for her for sleep-away camp because a bottled soap is less messy that a bar for taking to and from communal showers.
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Date: 2007-11-16 02:49 am (UTC)Wow, and you're in AX, VA, right? We lived in Arlington for a while, and I don't remember having hard water problems. Hmmm ... this page says your water is from the Potomac and the Occoquan ... Arlington's is just from the Potomac. (Ours is from the Patuxent.) I can't see why it would be hard ... maybe it's how they treat it.
The worst water I ever encountered was at the Mr.'s aunt and uncle's near Corning, NY. They have a well, and the water is so hard that it feels slippery on your skin, and it smells like sulfur.
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Date: 2007-11-17 05:42 pm (UTC)Well, I notice some eventual mineral build-up on things, but not the filmy-weird-slippery that I associate with hard water.
(And we're in The People's Republic of Takoma Park, on the Red Line, just outside the District on the eastern side.)
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Date: 2007-11-14 10:37 pm (UTC)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.