rushthatspeaks | BPAL review: Dorian

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.