Jessye Gets Bubbly: Special Edition! Haus of Gloi Spring 2015

By Unknown

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Spring is here! Time to change from the foodie gourmands of winter on to the florals of the new season.

Haus of Gloi's 2015 Spring Line has six scents this year - down from the nine of last year - all returning classics from 2014. Last spring, Lisa did a huge review of the 2014 Haus of Gloi Spring Collection. In their newsletter, the Haus noted that Honeybelle was "slightly reformulated to be more creamy and more orange blossomy." There was no mention of any changes to any other scents so make sure to check out Lisa's review for a perspective from another nose!

Today we're focusing mostly on the bath and body side of the spring release but since our spring order was pretty large, we're also going to be doing a compare and contrast of the scents between different products. Since the same scent is used throughout, there should be very very similar notes but different elements come out over different bases.

Haus of Gloi will be doing one restock of the Spring Collection on April 5th (probably at noon PST) and their stuff has been selling out FAST so make sure to mark your calendar if you see anything that you like!

Selkie

The break of waves, gurgling sea foam, kelp, rain tinged air, sand smoothed driftwood and wild sage. 

Jessye

I bought All The Selkie for The Husband. And then promptly considered stealing it for myself. And then I tried it. It's a great scent, but it's not a great scent on me. The perfume oil is this beautiful sage water mix that smells delicious on him and blah on me. On him, it is this lovely mellow, blends into his skin and just gives him a bit of a watery herb to his natural scent. On me, it's a little astringent and sage heavy and I don't like smelling it on myself.

The soap is great. The Husband claims he smells cucumber, but I get this lovely fresh watery herbal smell that I cannot get enough of. It's bright and clean without being sunny or citrusy.  It's all his, but I do love using it on him. ;-)

The pumpkin sits between the two for me. It's a little hard to smell if you aren't applying it to yourself and are having it applied for you. I knew it existed. I knew it was there. I just could barely smell it even though it was all over my entire body. This smell was much closer to the perfume oil, just slightly muted. The Husband found this particular blend to be a little lighter than previous HoG pumpkin butters and left very little residue on his stress-induced eczema legs, whereas my more naturally oily skin was left with enough reside on it that I went and washed it off.

AG

Given how few Haus of Gloi perfumes work for me, it's pretty surprising that they make one of my favorite scents from any brand. I've been using Selkie in Pumpkin Butter, hair oil, and perfume oil forms for the last couple of years.

The Pumpkin Butter is my favorite Selkie format, and not just because the PB formula works nicely on my dry skin. On application it smacks me in the face with bright, aggressive, slightly bitter sage. The sage slowly recedes and reveals a beautifully done salty aquatic base with no musk in sight, thank goodness! I love applying this as a body lotion right before bed - it's got enough punch in lotion form that my sheets smell amazing the next morning. The perfume oil is lovely as well, but doesn't have quite the same amount of punch or staying power as the lotion. The hair oil smells true to the perfume oil and lotion, but since I can only smell it when I'm applying it, it's also lacking the longevity I'm looking for with this scent.

Selkie always tops my list of recommended aquatic scents, partially because I love the truly salty base and partially because I think the sage is a brilliant addition to the mix. If you're a fellow salty aquatic lover and you find that so many aquatics smell like musk and disappointment or just too many goddamn flowers, I can't encourage you enough to nab some Selkie before it disappears for the year

As a side note, the jar of Selkie Pumpkin Butter I picked up this year smells a little different in the jar than last year's Selkie products when I sniff them all side by side. Fortunately, after about twenty minutes on my skin, it settles into the scent I know and love. This is definitely not one to judge right out of the jar!

Kristin

The first thing I noticed when I opened up my jar of Whipped Soap is that the Haus is getting creative. I have three soaps from this release: Selkie, Splendiferous, and Honeybelle, and they all have a colored bead-like exfoliant that doesn't dissolve along with the rest of the soap. Selkie has tiny blue beads, Splendiferous has purple, and Honeybelle has orange. In addition, the Selkie soap has a slight blue tint while Splendiferous has a pale yellow streaks through it. edit: User Pookabbit on Reddit contacted Haus of Gloi and found out that these tiny beads are made of jojoba oil! 

But back to Selkie in Whipped Soap form. I have to agree with Jessye's The Husband. In the shower, cucumbers. It's like a cucumber salad tossed with cucumber dressing topped with more cucumbers. At least, that's how it is in loofa form. When I lather it with my hands, the scent becomes less flat watery and more of a complex "I've just been walking along the beach" scent. I'm going to have to remember to keep this one by the sink instead of in the shower.

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Whipped Soaps Selkie (left), Splendiferous (right)

Splendiferous 

White cake, lemon zest glaze and sugared violets.

Kristin

On first sniff out of the jar, this was just violets. A batch of violets drowning in a sugary grave. I was almost ready to pass it off at just that but I gave it a shot in the shower and mmmmmm this one changes. 

I think gourmand soaps are wonderful so when the cake note came out on this one, it was mmm mmm good. The cake note wasn't heavy kind of general "cake-y" note though, it was definitely closer to a light and fluffy angel-food kind of cake. I couldn't detect the lemon note (sadly) but the appearance of the cake turned the floral note into more of a frosting sweetness. 

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Ruth

Fresh strawberry, green patchouli, rose geranium and crushed violet leaf. 

Jessye

Patchouli is my go-to fragrance whenever I need to feel grounded and in tune with myself. It's one of those scents that I have been smelling since before I had strong opinions on smells- my mom loves import shops and “hippie” smells. I was so excited to see a mix of strawberries and florals and patchouli that I couldn't wait to smell it. When I first opened the jar, I smelled something sickly sweet- like the strawberries had died in the making of this soap and scrub. But I persevered. This is patchouli! It will come through. Well, not so much. I very much agree with Lisa's post about this perfume from a year ago. It is like the strawberries moldered in the basement for a couple of months before being put into this concoction. And the patchouli doesn't come out very well or at all. But in the shower, it does become more pleasant. Once the initial air out phase, the sickly sweet backs off and the germanium leaves and violets come out a bit in the shower, allowing for at least a more balanced scent, though one I am still debating on how much I enjoy it. The more I smell it, the more palatable I find it, but I will probably get through the whole thing without ever once decided if I actually like it or just tolerate it.

Also- How awesome do they look! I love the random chunk of green in the soap and all the color swirl in the scrub.

Kristin

I actually completely avoided this scent since I don't think I'm a big fan of patchouli at all but I smelled Jessye's soap and I think I kind of need to have it. Given Jessye's reaction to the lack of patchouli, this one might work out for me after all!  

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Honeybelle

 A blooming orange orchard, orange blossom honey, soft white tea and creamy white amber.

Jessye

So what's the difference between normal honey and orange blossom honey? I know I've eaten orange blossom honey at some point in the past, but couldn't remember, so I went and bought orange blossom honey and another single note honey that was unrefined to find out. I had clover honey at home as a base for comparison. Pro-tip: don't smell honey. It smells like fermented yuck. Clover honey is sticky sweet and has a very sharp taste to it. The orange blossom honey I purchased was a more rounded soft flavor with less sweet. I tried them on peanut butter and toast. The clover honey stuck out on my palette more, fighting for recognition and to stand on its own, whereas the orange blossom honey enhanced the flavor of the peanut butter and added just a hint of sweet. I won't discuss the other honey because it isn't necessary for this post, but I will inform you that unrefined, unfiltered honey is very very different than filtered refined honey.

Knowing what I know now about orange blossom honey, it made much more sense when I used Honeybelle in the shower afterwards. It's a soft scent, which does more to hint at what's in it than to smack you over the head with it. There are suggestions of green leaves or something a little herb-y and just the tiniest hint of sweet. The white tea gives it just a bit of that clarity that comes with tea. The whole thing just seems like a suggestion to go be feminine and sweet. It's perfectly spring. I would have happily somehow dumped either the whole of the scrub or the soap on my head and just wallowed in it for awhile.

Kristin

This is another one that was blech for me out of the jar that changed in use. The amber is the only thing that I can smell straight out of the jar and even when used with a loofa, amber. But lathered thickly on the hands, there's a soft citrus note that isn't quite like orange but is more like what I'd expect from walking by an orange tree. Just a soft note in the air. It wasn't much but it tempered the strong amber note really well.

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Ploughman

Well worn leather, dirt n' dandelions, carrot, a pinch of tobacco and a light sheen of feral skin musk.

AG

Ploughman has a half dozen masculine-leaning notes listed in its description, but on me it's all dirt, baby. It smells like fresh and strikingly realistic dirt. One of the other elements is definitely present in the background making the dirt smell softer and cleaner than real, live (?) dirt, but it's not bold enough for me to pick out exactly what it is. I don't get any hint of the leather, dandelions, tobacco, or musk, so I suspect the shy tempering note is carrot. I've tried umpteen Haus of Gloi fragrances but have destashed most of them; Ploughman passes muster for me because it doesn't go weird or artificial on my wacky skin chemistry.

I was surprised at how much this scent reminded me of one of my absolute favorite scents, Mishigami by Darling Clandestine. If you removed Mishigami's mild sweetness and turned the dirt factor way up, you'd have something remarkably close to Ploughman. Did I mention Ploughman smells like dirt? If you're interested in scents which smell as though they just got harvested straight out of the ground, it's worth a try.

Kristin

I was super curious about this scent. I mean, "feral skin musk" what is that even? Is it different from tame skin musk? I took a wiff of AG's perfume oil during a sniff session and man do I regret not picking up something in this scent. To me, this smells like wet grass. It's everything that I've wanted from a damp, earthy smell but without all of the weird herbal stuff that usually comes with it. 

I'm not sure how this will turn out in whipped soap form but I'm definitely going to find out. 

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That's it for today readers! Sadly, none of us got our hands on anything in the final scent, Milkmaid. Have any of you tried it? What do you think?

We've got an eye on a couple things from the restock but hopefully this is helpful for your planning. What are your favorites?