The description: Aries 2007 - cardinal fire: the essence of identity. Black pepper, honeysuckle, opoponax, dragon’s blood, and wild ginger.
What I thought: Altho my Sun sign is Cancer, I have Leo rising, moon in Aries and most of my planets in fire signs and this scent sounds AWESOME to me!
The reality: It was simply ok. Quite a few of the reviewers on the message board said they got a strong scent of pepper, but...to me, all I could smell was the dragon's blood, which totally amps up on my skin and takes over. Kinda sad!
However: I got a bottle of Three Witches (cinnamon, clove and white pepper) recently and oooooh my! I LOVE it!!!
So...I combined some of the Aries 2007 with some of the Three Witches and wow! WOW WOW WOW! I think the cinnamon is strong enough to tamp down the Dragon's Blood and keep it in check. So spicy, so good!
One of the chicks at work walked into my office, stopped dead, and said, "DAMN! You smell SO good!"
Works for me!
Ooooh! Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab just released a new scent today; here's a description from the website:
13 is significant, whether you consider it lucky, unlucky or just plain odd. Many believe it to be unfortunate---
---because there were 13 present at the Last Supper. ---Loki crashed a party of 12 at Valhalla, which ended in Baldur's death.
---Oinomaos killed 13 of Hippodamia's suitors before Pelops finally, in his own shady way, defeated the jealous king.
---In ancient Rome, Hecate's witches gathered in groups of 12, the Goddess herself being the 13th in the coven.
Concern over the number thirteen echoes back beyond the Christian era. Line 13 was omitted form the Code of Hammurabi.
The shivers over Friday the 13th also have some interesting origins:
---Christ was allegedly crucified on Friday the 13th. ---On Friday, October 13, 1307, King Philip IV of France ordered the arrests of Jaques de Molay, Grand Master of the Knights Templar, and sixty of his senior knights.
---In British custom, hangings were held on Fridays, and there were 13 steps on the gallows leading to the noose.
To combat the superstition, Robert Ingersoll and the Thirteen Club held thirteen-men dinners during the 19th Century. Successful? Hardly. The number still invokes trepidation to this day. A recent whimsical little serial killer study showed that the following murderers all have names that total thirteen letters:
Theodore Bundy
Jeffrey Dahmer
Albert De Salvo
John Wayne Gacy
And, with a little stretch of the imagination, you can also fit 'Jack the Ripper' and 'Charles Manson' into that equation.
More current-era paranoia: modern schoolchildren stop their memorization of the multiplication tables at 12. There were 13 Plutonium slugs in the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. Apollo 13 wasn't exactly the most successful space mission. All of these are things that modern triskaidekaphobes point to when justifying their fears.
For some, 13 is an extremely fortuitous and auspicious number---
---In Jewish tradition, God has 13 Attributes of Mercy. Also, there were 13 tribes of Israel, 13 principles of Jewish faith, and 13 is considered the age of maturity.
---The ancient Egyptians believed that there were 12 stages of spiritual achievement in this lifetime, and a 13th beyond death.
---The word for thirteen, in Chinese, sounds much like the word which means "must be alive".
Thirteen, whether you love it or loathe it, is a pretty cool number all around.
---In some theories of relativity, there are 13 dimensions.
---It is a prime number, lucky number, star number, Wilson Prime, and Fibonacci number.
---There are 13 Archimedean solids.
AND---
---There were 13 original colonies when the United States were founded.
Says a lot about the US, doesn't it?
This is the scent description:
A base of cocoa absolute and white chocolate with thirteen baneful and beneficial bits: cardamom, fig meat, grains of paradise, rice flower, chamomile, sandalwood, catnip, clove, and a bundle of five blessed blossoms and herbs.
Mmmmm, clove! Sandalwood! I had to order a bottle, of course...I mean, c'mon...it's Friday the Thirteenth! What better way to celebrate it!
The description: wormwood essence, light mints, cardamom, anise, hyssop, and the barest hint of lemon.
My first response: Pledge...it smells like Lemon Pledge. After 5 minutes, I took another sniff, smelled anise...and then it tossed me back in time to Okinawa! It smells JUST like the week I spent there...oh, what fun we had! Geckos and beautiful warm water, pristine beaches, rainbows...just Gaylen, Reva & me.
When I want to remember the beautiful beaches of Okinawa, I will wear this scent.
Project 365: One photo a day...for a year! I started on 1/17/07...so far so good...which is saying alot for this commitment phobe!
In other news, today started out good...and then I got hit over the head. Not literally, but you know, figuratively hurts just as much.
On the bright side, I get to help plan a shower! That's always fun :-)
And two more bunchs of BPAL Imps were waiting for me when I got home Sunday night!
Continue reading "Project 365 and other stuff"Came home last night after a HELLUVA bad day...to find I'd gotten nine BPAL Imps in the mail! I'd ordered 6 from someone on the message board; she included 3 extras :-)
Black Opal: Vanilla...tonka...musk; creamy...a comfort scent.
Malice: Ylang ylang, clove, Indonesian red patchouli, and dark myrrh.
Jolly Roger: Sea spray with an undercurrent of leather, Bay Rum, and salty, dry woods. I put this on last night before I went to bed in hopes of dreaming of a certain pirate captain...but no such luck!
Midnight: A bouquet of night-blooming flowers--evening primrose, ruellia, flowering nicotiana, wild petunia, pa nani-o-kai, night phlox, night gladiolus, moonflower and the elusive scent of Nottingham Catchfly. I don't normally like floral scents, but this one smells SO good to me...must be on the dark side ;-). I'm wore it to work today and it reminds me of flowers tucked into a book to dry but that are still faintly fragrant.
Morocco: Spices wind through a blend of warm musk, carnation, red sandalwood and cassia.
Silk road: This is like a light, spicy incense; slightly woody, cinnamon, possibly a hint of clove, a touch of ginger, dried grassy. As Northernminx said: "the silk covered interior of a wagon train from the east where the spices and dust and cool shadows are protecting you from the scorching sun outside." I put this on when I got home and all I can say is WOW! It's my favorite BPAL scent so far...spicy, but not in a powdery way.
These are the extras:
Athens: A reformulation and modernization of a true Classical Greek perfume, myrrhine: voluptuous myrrh, golden honey, red wine, and sweet flowers.
Madame X from Possets: Wicked, sinful, hedonistic, and irresistable. It's musky, creamy, enticing, perfumy, slightly foody.
Shambhala Perfume Oil by Arcana, from Magical Omaha: Sandalwood, Himalayan cedarwood and a dash of spun honey.
