Perfume Review: Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab's Single Note: Burning Book

By Unknown

Nothing to Disclose

Burning Book on a Kindle, destroyer of paper books.

"Kerosene," he said, because the silence had lengthened, "is nothing but perfume to me."

--Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab's "single note" perfume Burning Book was created as an exclusive scent for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund's Welcome Party at the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con. (I was lucky enough to purchase a bottle thanks to a kind soul who was attending the party and offered to pick one up for me.)

While this is marketed as a single note, it's actually a normal multilayered perfume--even the name of the single note is a clue to this: a "burning book" involves paper and smoke at a minimum.

The scent opens with a fairly mild leather note--similar in tone to BPAL's RPG scent Rogue, but not as sharp or strong. It has powdery undertones that take it quickly from pure leather to a smoky, soft leather-vanilla melange. (Thankfully, it's free of the smell of kerosene.)

The smell of old books is similar to the smell of vanilla due to the lignin in paper and that compound's similarity to vanillin. In Burning Book, the dusty vanilla note gives a convincing impression of an old bookstore with shelves of leather-bound books--the best "paper scent" I've smelled to date.

With the gentle smoke note in play, this scent has certain similarities to smoky vanilla scents like Arcana's Devilish, a vanilla-brimstone scent which leans more towards sweet, burned-marshmallow gourmand vanilla, or, from what I remember from sniffing it recently, CBIHatePerfume's 7 Billion Hearts (I don't have a sample, so I can't compare side by side)--however, it's still definitely dressed in a raw black leather coat.

The label art features what appears to be a sepia-toned medieval etching of a book burning, trimmed with slate blue, and emblazoned with the name of the perfume, the perfumer, and "CBLDF SDCC WELCOME PARTY 2013."

If you can get your hands on it, the Burning Book single note is a beautiful option for a book-scented perfume. If you can't, try layering leather and smoky vanilla scents like the aforementioned Rogue and Devilish, or look into other book scents like Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab's Aziraphale or The Buggre Alle This Bible, both of which are available in BPAL's general catalogue.