I'm continuing my reviews of the Lovecraftian scents from the Miskatonic Valley Philharmonic collection from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab; like La Lugubre Gondola, Und wir dachten der Toten is another music-themed perfume inspired by Franz Lizst. These limited edition perfumes were part of the Halloween release and the website states they will be around "til December"--I'm not sure exactly when in December, but as of this writing they are still available.
Price: $24 for a 5 mL amber glass bottle of perfume oil with polyseal cap.
Samples: Not available
(More details about price and shipping can be found in our Company Overview post about Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab.)
Description from the website: "Bourbon vanilla, Indonesian patchouli, raw coffee bean, and Himalayan spices."
Wet, this scent is extremely fruity-smelling, almost like apples (though not as crisp) or perhaps green bananas; I think that's the raw coffee bean. It's not a particularly pretty fruitiness, more the jumbled smell of mixed and slightly bruised fruits.
This is quickly overpowered by a rising tide of patchouli deepening, smoothing, and darkening the scent. It's earthy, but definitely not the dirty, skanky patchouli I'm often afraid of encountering in perfumes; it stays pretty light, inoffensive, and smooth, like sipping a blonde roast coffee instead of crunching on espresso roast coffee beans.
The vanilla note sweetens the mixture a bit and the coffee bean remains as a ghostly green/fruity presence. It's much less coffeeish than I had anticipated, which is good, I think; when I first started learning about perfumes, I gravitated towards recognizable scents that I enjoyed in real life, coffee among them, only to find that I intensely disliked them as perfume notes.
I detect a bit of an anise note as well--perhaps this is the Himalayan spices? I don't know enough about the cuisine of that area to know what typical Himalayan spices smell or taste like.
Once it dries and settles, it's a rather smoky patchouli-vanilla blend, but with both notes pulled from the center of the spectrum--I have a bottle of BPAL's Banshee Beat, a fantastic and now sadly hard to find vanilla-patchouli blend, but that one pulls from the extremes and hence smells very different: it's an almost cloyingly sweet and buttery vanilla made bitter and rich with a dirty, earthy patchouli, while this one is rather middle-of-the road, not overpowering in either the vanilla sweetness or patchouli funk departments. (Other opinions on this differ, ranging from "too sweet" to "not sweet enough," and I don't know if this is personal taste or batch/skin chemistry variations.)
I think this is a good unisex scent, although on principle I oppose certain scents only being intended for men or women. But you know what I mean, right? It swings neither to the fruity-pink-Cosmo or Stetson Cologne extremes of perfume.
After several hours, this fades to an indistinct perfuminess. I find it fairly mediocre overall, not bad, but not amazing. It's too bad, since the notes list sounded so promising. If you're looking for a replacement for Banshee Beat, this isn't it (though I can recommend a widely available smellalike for BB if anyone's curious). It's pretty enough, but, in my opinion, forgettable. It may age into something better, since vanilla and patchouli oil blends both tend to improve over time, but as of right now, I'm not tempted to spring for a full bottle of it.
Note: this scent is vegan.
0 comments:
Post a Comment