Smelly Yeti is a new-on-the-scene indie perfumery (I believe they opened in October 2014) and I placed my first order with them recently. Among the scents I was most excited to try was Owlcat, a perfume with an unusual-sounding list of notes including tomato leaves and grass.
Price: $15 for a 7.4 mL glass bottle of perfume oil with glass applicator wand. Shipping details can be found here.
Samples: You can buy a set of 5 samples (pick your own) for $15. The samples come in the cute, squat 1.3 mL amber glass mini bottles you can see in the photo above. They do not have an applicator wand or polyseal or reducer cap.
Description from the website: "The owls are not what they seem.
Owls look like cats. This is kind of hard to explain. If you look at a photo of an owl, what do you see? Owl. In person, they just sort of...look like cats. Small children will even point to them and say "cat!" Despite the fact that the exhibit is clearly labeled BIRDS OF PREY. In the moment, it's not hard to see why. That disdain in those big round eyes. Their love of perching. Only in flight do they look anything less than feline.
The scent of wildness. Tomato leaves, grass, vanilla, dirt, a slight hint of anise."
I read all the perfume descriptions and picked out five samples I thought would be nice when I placed my order, and then promptly forgot what the descriptions were for almost all the perfumes. When the order arrived, I did a cold sniff of all the vials and picked out Owlcat as the most appealing to me straight out of the bottle, then tested it blind without looking up or remembering the notes list.
The results were interesting. My initial notes on this were: "green, sweet, slightly fizzy, smells like Sprite with a slight dusty undertone. Soapy." As it dried down, I sniffed and sniffed again, thinking it smelled very familiar--suddenly I realized what it was; that sort of refreshing but kind of soapy scent was a dead ringer for a clear glycerin soap I used to buy all the time and totally loved--it was decorated with fishes and smelled like lemons, limes, and ginger ale.
Once I'd written down those impressions and figured this out, I went back to look at the notes list, thinking I'd see something like ginger ale or lemon-lime soda on the list--but no, there was nothing in those notes that smelled anything like what I thought I'd smelled, aside from the dirt note that I had picked up as dustiness!
I've had the scent for a little while now and tested it a few more times, and it's changed a bit from my initial impressions but still smells quite different from what I was expecting, and still gives me a ginger-fish-soap vibe overall.
There is something spicy and gourmand-smelling when I put this scent on now, and I'm not sure what it could be--I don't quite think it's the vanilla, as it smells a bit like nutmeg and kind of like a cookie or cake baked-good note to me, one that I'm not especially fond of. Under that is the green fizziness of the tomato leaf-grass accord, containing the fresh, carbonated, nose-tingling scent that I'd pegged as Sprite when I first tested it, and muted with the subtle dusty dirt note.
The anise smells more obvious as the scent dries down, and a soapy clean-musk quality comes to the forefront as well. The baked-good note thankfully mostly fades away. After a while, once it's settled on the skin, it starts to smell to me mainly like greenness and white Dove soap, like very clean tomato leaves--but that green note still keeps me thinking about limes, really. I never really get much vanilla, but it may be overpowered in my mind by the sharper top notes.
Aside from the brief and mysterious bakery interlude when I first apply this scent, I find it a nice, fresh, summery type of scent, very appealing. I actually wish it smelled wilder than it does--more tomato leaf would be great! But it's a pleasant and clean scent overall and I think it's a nice one to try out if you're assembling a Smelly Yeti sample pack.
Note: this scent is vegan.
