smellsgood | Perfume newbie looking for some help

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discussion: rec me!

Perfume newbie looking for some help

Several people in my DW circle are really into perfume, and I've been reading and enjoying their posts for a while now. One of them mentioned this community had started, and I figured this was a good place to ask some questions.

I have been to the BPAL website, and I have to admit that I find the descriptions of the perfumes kinda intimidating and confusing. I'm not sure where to start.

I also have the added issue that my husband reacts poorly to some scents. He can't abide anything heavily floral which has limited my perfume choices over the years.

I was wondering if I could get some BPAL recommendations from those of you who are more familiar with the perfumes there based on my scent likes/dislikes that I've listed below the cut. :)

Likes

All citrus
Herbal scents like rosemary, basil, parsley, clary sage
Grass
Green plants
Lavender
Fresh Cannibas Santal (Top Notes: bergamot, Brazilian orange, black plum; Middle Notes: patchouli, cannabis accord, rose: Bottom Notes: chocolate, vetiver, vanilla musk)
Church incense

Beyond that, I'm not really sure what I like. :)

No-Gos

Anything overly sweet
Anything floral, particularly tea rose, gardenia and honeysuckle

I would appreciate any recommendations y'all can give me.

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Hi hi!

Based on your likes, what's coming to mind is that you might want to try The Apothecary (for citrus and herbal) and as far as incenses...Cathedral is supposed to be a real churchey incense, and some of my other incensey favorites are Anubis and Cairo, and if you can find some Midnight Mass (Christmas LE), I hear that's also a very ecclesiastical incense.

Good luck! :)

Hi! :)

Thank you so much. I really appreciate the suggestions.

What's your favorite BPAL scent?

You're welcome! :)

Nnnngh, favorite. It depends on the day, but my faves are probably Anubis, Golden Priapus (pine and vanilla!), and a Halloween Limited Edition called Samhain that...smells like fall in the sweet dried leaf sense. :)

Those sound fabulous, especially Samhain. We had a tree in the yard of my childhood home and its shed leaves smelled so divine in the fall. I'd crush them up my hands and make "potpourri."

Enthusiastic seconding of Samhain. *_* So, so good, and while it is a limited edition, it's one that reappears frequently, if not every year. (And possibly every year--I can't remember. I have at least two iterations of it.)

Yussss. The full description is damp woods, fir needle, and black patchouli with the gentlest touches of warm pumpkin, clove, nutmeg, allspice, sweet red apple and mullein, but to be honest, I can't hardly pick out any of those things. It's just that well-blended.

Devil's Night is another Halloweenie fave (the scent of autumn night, fires in the distance, with a touch of boozy swoon, playful sugar and thuggish musk), though it is more...aggressive? than Samhain. :)

Oh my. Do we eat or wear these things? LOL

I can tell this has the potential of becoming an obsession. :)

*g* There's a reason people refer to BPAL as a fandom!

I KNOW, RIGHT? :D

One thing that's helpful to remember is that the 1ml samples, I've found, last a LONG time. Like, I don't know who's getting only half a dozen uses out of them. I've had imps/samples for years, and even the ones I've used 20 times have only started to show their wear. A very SMALL amount is needed to get a good smell. So, if you're not sure of something and you CAN get it as a sample, I'd say go with that. :)

Also, there are plenty of outlets to buy samples and partial bottles off other enthusiasts. The BPAL forums/BPAL.org is one place, ebay is another, and LJ has an evil_enablers community where I tend to get my BPAL-and-other-etailers fix on. Sometimes you can find a real deal if someone has lots of things you want to try, and they're trying to destash. :)

Thanks for confirming my suspicions. I reined myself in when ordering because I assumed the imps would probably last me awhile. :)

Hi! I've been doing BPAL since 2010, so I've tried a few. Or maybe more than a few... ;)

Church incense: Penitence, Cathedral

Citrus: Embalming Fluid (A light, pure scent: white musk, green tea, aloe and lemon.), Carnal (Bold, bright mandarin paired with the sweet, sensual earthiness of fig.)

You might also like Arcana ( Frankincense, rosemary, lavender, neroli, and verbena) or Nephilim ( Holy frankincense and hyssop in union with earthy fig, defiled by black patchouli and vetiver, with a chaotic infusion of lavender, cardamom, tamarind, rosemary, oakmoss and cypress).

btw - If you're interested in getting a ton of recommendations, there's a discussion board -- BPAL.org -- that has tons of recommendation threads. If you want to start there, I strongly suggest starting with the short guide, which has links to threads by note.

If you join the board, you also have access to the sales and swaps section, where you can frequently get samples ("imps") of the scents you're looking for at considerably less than retail.

Edited 2014-03-29 02:02 (UTC)

Oh, wow. Thank you so much for the recs and for the tips. :) I really appreciate it.

All those you listed sound fantastic, particularly Embalming Fluid.

I am getting excited for payday!!

What's your favorite BPAL scent?

I can't possibly pick just one. Actually, I can't even pick just two -- have four: :D

From the General Catalog, my favorites are The Curator (Mysterious herbs and ancient resins. Dust settled on ancient relics, both holy and malevolent) and Dracul (Black musk, tobacco, fir, balsam of peru, cumin, bitter clove, crushed mint, and orange blossom).

Limited Editions, my favorites are The Montauk Project (shagbark hickory, sassafras, black gum, bald cypress, pine, dogwood, wild comfrey, swamp sunflower, and trumpet creeper) and Mopsfledermaus (Brown sugar and ginger root with smoky clove, bourbon vanilla, cardamom, and Indonesian musk).

Heeeeee. I just went to your journal and started reading your review posts that were on the first page. Curator sounds really neat.

I worry that I don't have a discerning enough nose to appreciate all the nuances of these fragrances. But I am going to try!

The thing is to enjoy it. It doesn't matter if you appreciate the nuances or identify all the notes -- or any notes at all. If you enjoy the way you smell with something, that's the important part.

My tastes changed quite a bit over the years, some of which is probably having a more discerning nose, but some of it is just realizing that I can enjoy smelling like all kinds of different things.

In other words: Have fun!

*hugs*

thank you. This is indeed wise advice. :)

I just got into BPAL this year and have been going mad testing things. Your scent needs sound a lot like mine (anything floral goes horribly, horribly wrong on me in remarkable ways.) Given that, I'd recommend:

Beer from the Marsh Woman's Brewery (beer flavored with marsh arrow grass, yew berries, purple foxglove, and giant hogweed) -- green and yeast on me. Has a wonderful and very unusual smell. This was the first perfume I ever bought, a couple years ago, and it's still a favorite.

Druid (ancient trees, fertile soil, wild herbs, spring grasses, and burgundy pitch incense) -- on me this smells very, very green and a tiny bit spicy, exactly like freshly broken ferns.

Nanshe from the Oeniros collection (no notes listed) -- smells strongly of basil and lavender on my skin. Scents in the Oeniros collection tend to have strong lavender notes in general.

Yggdrasil (nine woods, nine leaves, and three herbs each for Ratatosk and Vidofnir, with three final herbs to placate Nidhogg) -- the birch in this comes through strongly on me for a wintergreen scent. It's all woods and herbs.

Envy (green herbs slithering through mint, lime and lavender) -- I admit that this was a complete disaster on me for some reason (the scents combined in a mysterious and horrible way), but there's no reason it shouldn't work oh you, as my skin chemistry is very odd. It has a whole lot of notes that should work well for you and nothing that you wouldn't want.

I had gone to the site and started to fill up my shopping cart and now I shall have to ADD MORE THINGS OMG!

Thank you so much for these recommendations. I am so stoked. It's possible I will have to try them all.

I am particularly interested in Druid and Nanshe.

Yay!!!!!!

As I was saying elsewhere, I don't have a hugely discerning nose (part of the reason I'm following the comm. is to try to get more of a feel for scents by seeing how other people talk about them!)--but I'm gonna toss this out there anyway, especially since I also generally dislike florals. ^_^

Most of my imps are seasonal limited editions, which does complicate things a bit, but by far my favorite incense scent is Devil's Night, which has come around at least twice in the Halloween updates. And I second the suggestion of Midnight Mass.

Nearly all of my favorite scents are at least somewhat foodie, and a lot of them sound really sweet, but aren't necessarily, so I'm just going to suggest not being afraid to try some of them. I tend to really like BPAL's takes on apple, pumpkin, and chocolate, in particular.

Oh, and I really love some of the water scents like Thalassa, the Galapagos Mermaid and Sturgeon Moon. (The latter is a 2008 Lunacy scent, so I'm more suggesting looking for something with similar notes if you like the sound of it, rather than trying to hunt it down.)

And my two very favorites are both from the Carnaval Diabolique: Tiresias, the Androgyne and Wulric, the Wolfman.

Me either! In fact, I had originally included a long tangent in this post about the kind of wine drinker I am. I love wine. I drink a lot of wine. I know what I like. I can differentiate quality levels. But when I read labels and realize I'm supposed to be tasting earth or berries or gravel or whatever LOL I'm all, "Mkay, whatever you say." I'm pretty much stuck at the "I like that! Yummy!" or "Ewwwww. No!" level. And I worry that my nose is not discerning enough to truly appreciate the complexity of these scents.

But they seem so cool!!!!!!! LOL

Thanks for the recs. I am clearly going to spend a lot of money.

[Also, this is not the place, but I am soonishly to be making a post about finishing Feed. *sobs and sniffles and weeps* So freaking good]

I've tried a few times to break away and stop buying new imps, because I don't wear them most of the time! But then new updates come out and I get sucked in. I think it's been a few years now since I bought anything other than from the Halloween and Yule updates, but oh my gosh, those two are so amazing every year.

I'm a complete night owl, and in 2008 (a friend had a baby the week this happened, which is why I remember the year so clearly *g*) I bolted awake at something like 5 AM, after only a few hours of sleep, and went immediately to my computer to see if the Yule update was live. That's how much I've loved those scents. *^^*

On the odd chance you haven't noticed this--have you seen how on the BPAL site you can (unless this has changed) order a set of imps from the general catalogue rather than full bottles?

And if your goal is to try a lot of things, I'd highly recommend finding a decant circle for limited editions. Easily 90% of my collection is from decant circles, which is largely why mine are almost all LEs. (I'd direct you to the one I usually went through, but the decanter has stepped back from doing it--it's a ton of work, and she decanted for a LOT of people.) And most of the time, unless the mail gets really backed up, decanters are able to get your sample imps to you in time for you to try them and then order full bottles of your favorites from the Lab before the update comes down.

[When you make that post, I will come and weep with you. Oh, book of my heart...!]

I did see the imp sets!

I think I want to try some standalones and a sense for what the site means when it uses scent descriptors I'm not familiar with and then I think I'll be able to choose a set that I really like.

Thanks for the telling me about the decant circles too. I probably wouldn't have figured that out on my own.

It's been quite a while since I went looking for a new decanter (although if you also have an LJ account, there are a couple of people I've gone through there who may still be active?), but IIRC they'll usually link to a post where people comment and report on their experiences, or if you go through the BPAL forums (which are a dangerously addictive wealth of information) there should be feedback posts there too.

I'm really looking forward to seeing how this all works out for you! *^^*

(part of the reason I'm following the comm. is to try to get more of a feel for scents by seeing how other people talk about them!)

This is very similar to what I'm doing. I've been reading the various perfume posts going around DW these past few weeks, and I'm just ... well, boggled. Boggled by how some people can describe a scent - fascination-boggled, I have to say, because some of those descriptions make my writing brain weep with envy - and equally boggled by how people can pick out SO MANY NOTES. I keep telling myself that it's a learning process just like I learned to do logic puzzles or do CSS or any other variety of things. There will eventually come a moment where I say OH THAT'S WHAT THAT DOES. XD

I wish there were a way to just go somewhere and sniff the individual, unalloyed notes--I know BPAL offers single notes, but I don't want to own any, just...sniff. And see if I can retain them and get a starting point.

(I suppose it's possible such places exist, but I don't know of any near me. I don't think we have local perfumers or anything.)

Synecdochic mentions doing that in this thread and I was trying to think of places I could go to do that.

Aveda carries singular notes, but they're mostly stuff I already know how it smells.

The woman who does my facial has started selling DoTerra which has tons of singular notes, and I bet she'd let me smell any of the ones she has.

Outside of that, I wonder if acupuncturists or health food stores might have that kind of thing?

Ooh, good thoughts on places to look. I think we do have an Aveda. Maybe I'll even make it downtown in the foreseeable future (other than for work...).

Inquiring minds want to know what you wound up ordering! ^_^

Waaaaaaay to much. LOL

I got imps of

Embalming Fluid
Arcana
The Apothecary
Cathedral
Anubis
Villain
Druid
Envy
Antony
Nanshe
Ranger
Incantation

Sounds like an excellent beginning! I don't think I have any of those, so I'll be interested to see what you think once they arrive! *^^*

Heeeeee. I feel the same way. I have no idea what many of the ingredients are supposed to smell like.

I am not able to pick out a lot of notes when I drink wine either but I know what I like and what I don't and can pretty reliably judge quality.

So even if I don't develop much of a nose, I hope I'll have a similarly good experience with this. :)

I really really don't like florals either, so I will second the recs for Penitence and The Apothecary. Cathedral made me break out into a sneezing fit, but is similar. I loved Anubis and Nephilim, which others have mentioned, but Anubis, while staying very resiny (and gorgeous) on me, turned to lilies on

sarah, so it's down to skin chemistry.

For lavender, Paris ("Lavender, softly underscored by lotus and spice") was surprisingly non-floral on me -- it was a freebie and i thought i'd hate it, but wound up loving it. You might like Rapunzel for the green plants -- it smelled so much like green grass and growing things that it triggered my hay fever! ("Angel’s trumpet, bois de rose, orris, and wild lettuce.")

If you like the vetiver in that one blend you mention, Iago ("black musk, wet leather, and vetiver") might strike your fancy, and I really loved The Black Rider ("Black leather, oppoponax, tobacco, and black amber"). Since we seem to have similar dislikes, you might like it too :)

Rapunzel sounds beautiful (not the hay fever part LOL).

I'm not sure what resin and amber smell like, but I'm willing to give a variety of things a try. The imps are really inexpensive, so that makes it easy to try some things and not feel too terribly bad if they don't work out.

thank you so much for the suggestions! I'm getting excited.

Yeah, the years of apothecary work does give me an advantage in identifying notes! I recently ordered a sample pack of various incense resins to burn for sarah so she can learn to spot those notes in perfume. You could do that (let me know if you want instructions), or go to your nearest "store with loads of essential oils" and sniff all the testers... Once you learn to recognize many of the popular resins, they'll really jump out at you in a blend. They really are very distinct, and BPAL uses a lot of resins in various blends.

Anyway, my scratch and sniff tag has my previous rounds of BPAL reviews -- you might find them helpful. I also found that the BPAL review forum can be useful, although more in the realm of "what kind of range of reactions do people have to this scent" and "how true are these notes to what I think of as the 'ideal' version of the ingredients" than anything else, because my skin chemistry is just plain weird and I can't go by descriptions of how a scent wears on other people very often.

And yes, this hobby really is ridiculously fun. It's been coming up on 20 years since the last time I was playing with smelly things regularly and I'm really starting to remember how much I always enjoyed it. The latest BPAL order got here yesterday and I am covered in different patches of stuff that makes me smell good :D

That is a really good idea. I'm not sure I have access to a store that sells oils, but I have a few ideas of places to look. :)

I checked out your tag. Thanks for linking me. I'm really enjoying reading everyone's reactions.

Thanks so much for all the help.

Off the top of my head - more when it is not nearly 1am, heh -

Alecto (green)
Antony (herbal + incense)
Baba Yaga?
Bewitched? (sage + plants)
Bluebeard (lavender + vetiver)
The Bow + Crown of Conquest (lavender, sage)
The East (herbs + berries)
Goliath Birdwing, if you can find any second-hand (citrus + sage)
Lear (cedarwood, sage, bay leaf)
Nero (rosemary, bay, pine, touch of lemon)
No 93 Engine? (misc herbs, incl lemon balm, +frankincense)
Old Scratch (lavender)
Robin Goodfellow?
Whitechapel (citrus)
Wilde (lavender, citrus, thyme)
Yew Tree?

I placed my order before you commented, but Antony is one that I chose. yay!

thank you so much for all these lovely suggestions.

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Perfume newbie looking for some help

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