vixy: (unlock it)
Last night, [livejournal.com profile] tereshkova2001 and I had a BPAL party! Well, a sort of a mini-party, since it was just the two of us and I don't actually own that many scents. For those going WTF, that's Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, an insane and delightful perfume company.

It's an expensive little addiction but it's such great fun, trying things out and seeing what things change and figuring out what different people's chemistry does to different notes. Torrey, for instance, seems to make floral notes disappear within minutes, leaving whatever other notes are in the scent; if she smells like flowers, I know she's only just put the scent on. :) Also the more industrial type things (metal, leather, paper) smell wonderful on her, and not so great on me. And there was at least one at the Conflikt BPAL gathering that smelled awful on EVERYONE else, and turned absolutely heavenly on her. (I forget the name. The label involved a parrot.)

I'm still relatively new to this, but here's a bit of my own personal alchemy so far:

* The two scents that have turned rather unpleasantly to Mr. Bubble bubble bath on me had only carnation in common, so I figure that's the culprit. Cheap soapy bubble bath. Which there's nothing wrong with in and of itself, but it didn't smell good on me, and it's not what I want to smell like all day.

* The two scents that have turned to Bazooka Bubble Gum on me-- I'm not kidding, specifically Bazooka, that somewhat dusty, sweet but slightly spicy and a little bit stale bubble gum scent-- have only blood musk in common. I'm interested to see if that keeps happening, but it doesn't seem to be a note she uses often.

* Cakes and sugars and things that smell like dessert seem to suit me well-- except chocolate. I don't know why, but whatever is used in the chocolate scents turns evil on me, and I've never liked fake chocolate scents anyway. (Ironically, someone used to tell me that my vanilla oil perfume made me smell like Cocoa Puffs.)

* The resins smell surprisingly good on me. The dragon's bloods and the ambers and whatnot. Surprisingly to me, I mean; I didn't expect to like them, since I am mostly drawn to the dessert-y scents.

* If a scent contains honey, it'll probably smell like honey and nothing else on me, no matter what else is in it. Both O and Starborn Alchemy's November have done this. (This surprised me with O, which is amber, honey, and vanilla. But nope. Honey honey honey is what you get on me.)

* Citrus notes shove their way forward a lot on me. Lime specifically tends to start to smell like kamikazes. Or Windex. It's a gamble.

* At least one of the pumpkin-y ones that I tried last year-- I think it was Jack-- turned exactly to apple pie on me. Again, no lie, I have witnesses. We thought it was probably the nutmeg.

* If a scent contains tobacco, my skin turns it to notebook paper. Seriously! This was pretty entertaining last night. Plunder became the scent of cinnamon oil spilled on notebook paper. (I don't know what pirates would be doing with notebook paper. I now envision little potential Lost Girls with folded paper pirate hats.) Mr. Nancy went on wet smelling like BOOZE BOOZE BOOZE, but the rum faded when it dried and became the smell of sugar cookies and three-ring binders with a tiny hint of the rum still in the background. Hilariously, this made me smell like a schoolteacher who takes a little occasional nip from a flask in the back of her desk drawer. (Torrey: "I know my students make me want to drink sometimes.")

Right now I'm wearing Hymn to Proserpine, which is doing lovely and mysterious things on me. "Dark resins" and "dark fruits", which mostly seem to resolve themselves to raisins. Or plums. I'm not sure.

Fellow BPAL enthusiasts-- what's your alchemy like?
vixy: (map & money)
So, [livejournal.com profile] tereshkova2001 and I recently acquired decants of the Starborn Alchemy Palimpsest scents, thanks to [livejournal.com profile] windbourne running a decant circle (my first! Thank you honey!) These are scents based on Cat Valente's new book, Palimpsest.

(Both our decant sets also included some fabuloso original artwork from [livejournal.com profile] windbourne herself, which we may show off later if we brave the cold of the basement to persuade my scanner to work.)

I rarely make these posts because I usually can't really distinguish individual notes, so what I say mostly isn't terribly descriptive. But I thought maybe it'd be interesting to record my impressions for later, because I'm always forgetting which scents I liked.

This way to the smelly! )

I don't think I've ever had any scents change so *much* on me. These have the complexity I'm always hearing about with BPAL but rarely experience on me. November is definitely my favorite, but then I've always been partial to things that make me smell like dessert. :)
vixy: (snowfox)
Today's collection of random bits (edited to cut because it was longer than I thought): )

Kaleidoscopic recap of the weekend: relaxed, oily, and fed with ice cream; yummy homemade pasta and spicy-but-not-too-spicy-for-vixies sauce; but why is the wine gone?; Munky Brains and the Epic Fails hires a new member; the cake is still a lie (but the Lussekatter are real!); *tsk* you'd have made a better goblin; gmail wouldn't lie to you!; vixy successfully drives in snow; no really we're totally getting up now; oatmeal and cream; ice in the wheel well and the howlin' wind; moon rocks are sparkly!; chai is warm and sweet and tasty; the REAL perils of poly; fuzzy pajamas, footie pajamas, cookies and dead flesh (but no nuts); frickin' cold vs. fucking cold (DOE); don't use up all the internets; ice is less scary if you bring a monkey with you.

(ETA: Rock Concert Movement #237: Taking the audience on a Jungian journey into the collective unconscious by using the shadow as a metaphor for the primal self that gets repressed by the modern persona and also by using an underground setting and labyrinth office design to represent both the depths of the psyche and the dungeon-like isolation of our increasingly mechanistic society which prevents people from finding satisfying work or meaningful connections with others.)

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