shopping Scents and sensibilities

Posted March 24, 2005 • Comments Off on Scents and sensibilities

Cleolinda wrote the other day about Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, which sells essential oil scents. 85% perfume oils, whereas your typical cologne is like 5%.

She was so enthusiastic about it, and the site is so cool, that I cannot resist and just ordered six little sample vials.

The site looks like a Karen Elizabeth Gordon book. Wonderful Gothic horror clipart, spare typesetting, words chosen for aesthetics rather than specific meaning. It’s really enjoyable.

The scents are described pretty much by their ingredients, but another LJ user named dark_geisha has done dozens of reviews of the scents. This was hugely helpful. One scent called “Sea of Glass” sounded perfect until she told me it had a strong lemon note in it. I do not like lemon as a scent, but I want clean, like linen and gardenia. Floral but not too floral, aquatic but not salty.

Can you tell I’ve tried ordering perfume online before? Reflect.com does it, through what I still think is a really wonderful interface (currently down as they “revise” it). You pick colors and images, and they translate that into scent. I got three perfume samples from them years ago, and I hated one of them. One I liked, but I spilled it the second time I opened the little vial. One I liked a little less, but the caps on the vials weren’t tight, and it evaporated. I do love Reflect.com, though. They sold me a lot of stuff back in the day. The best of it was a clay face mask that makes me very, very happy.

Black Phoenix’s stuff comes in cobalt blue glass vials. They had me at hello.

I ordered Desdemona, Goneril, and Queen Gertrude from the Illyria (Shakespeare) collection. I ordered Dirty and Magdalene from the Sin and Salvation section. And I ordered Dragon’s Tears based on dark_geisha’s glowing review.

With names like these, I greatly fear that I will smell like some sort of fallen woman. On the very surface of it, Desdemona may have cheated on her husband. Goneril disowned her father. Gertrude married her brother-in-law. And then you have Mary Magdalene.

Role models.