BPAL review: Dorian

[rushthatspeaks]

Lab Description: Refined, elegant, and lovely, with a noble bearing and seemingly gentle air. This blend is an artful deception: a sweet gilded blossom lying over a twisted and corrupted core. A Victorian fougere with three pale musks and dark, sugared vanilla tea.

Vial: Oh, definitely sugared vanilla. This scent is madly sweet on the surface, too sweet, dripping, and then underneath a musky dry spice. I don't know if fougeres always involve lavender, but if I were told there was some in Dorian I wouldn't be surprised one bit. In the vial this is a too-sweet and not quite as pretty version of O.

Wet: Like a mad combination of O and White Rabbit, which makes sense because O has vanilla and White Rabbit has tea. Since both of those are very high on my favorites list and the sweetness is toning itself down a bit, it smells fine: pastry-honey-tea-dried flowers.

Drydown: A spray of dried lavender under a shelf of baklava, with a warm cup of tea on the table: wistful, nostalgic, a scent for a sunny and sleepy afternoon. The musk seems to have gone AWOL. There just isn't any darkness in this scent, at least on me.

Later: This goes to baby powder *really really fast*. Like, less than an hour. Which is a little annoying. Especially since the powder lingers.

Overall... eh. I like it, but I really can get the same effect from a mixture of two scents I already own, and the mixture will last longer, too. And I've got too many sweet scents about as it is; I need some spices and woods that work on me. I don't mind having this one around, because O causes my wife to haul me off and be distracting, which is usually a major plus but sometimes not the point, and White Rabbit, although it is my very favorite ever, always makes me need to go have a large piece of cake and some tea, which is also sometimes not it. But if I find anybody who'd like to swap this, sure.

Comments

[ryenna.livejournal.com]

I think I might be getting this from a group decant deal with some friends, but I'll have to check the lists we voted on. If not, I'd gladly swap for one of the imps I'm not keeping. I'll have a list up as soon as I test Nero and Saturnalia.

[sovay]

A spray of dried lavender under a shelf of baklava, with a warm cup of tea on the table: wistful, nostalgic, a scent for a sunny and sleepy afternoon. The musk seems to have gone AWOL.

Hm. That's almost one hundred percent the anti-Wilde. Or at least I don't put "baklava" and Salome together in the same sentence if it can be avoided.

(Keep in mind, however, that thanks to one of my professors at Brandeis, I associate The Picture of Dorian Gray and Salome intimately with Enigma's "I Love You . . . I'll Kill You" and some kind of smokily sexual incense, so just about anything that smells like a bakery will register as wrong to me. Unless it's like the Bakery of Debauchery, in which case I just want to know its address.)

[randomblade.livejournal.com]

huh, the bakery of debauchery. There's an image and a half. I'd like a long roll, please, and a stud-muffin. Woo!

[signy1.livejournal.com]

So am I the only one thinking that the Bakery of Debauchery is probably right down the block from the Petshop of Horrors?

[sovay]

But is it on the same street as Sweeney Todd's Tonsorial Parlor?