So tonight I'm gonna party like its...

A Review of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Miskatonic University

So El Hubs and I are heading out of town this weekend to watch a dear friend graduate college (Go Audrey!), visit his parents, and celebrate his birthday.  I think the image to the right accurately reflects our respective attitudes toward travel in general.  I would be the Sheldon in the scenario, and for David, Penny equals our cats.  It usually takes less than twenty-four hours before he starts verbally speculating about how they are and what they are doing, which usually means he is missing them before we even manage to leave the house. We are going up to one of my favorite areas in the world, the top of the Olympic Peninsula.  My plans include eating at Bella Italia in Port Angeles (shut up, Twi-haters, I love that damned ravioli), jewelry shopping at Lila Drake in Port Towsend before a quick stop at the old-fashioned soda fountain, and if it's nice, a long walk down Rialto Beach.

Did I mention it was his birthday? Yeah. This is what happens when I ask what he wants to do and he says, "Whatever."

And now, for the sleeping.

While I'm mentioning exciting things, I'll throw out there that this past weekend I finished my first draft of the sequel to Spooked, the YA supernatural noir I am currently trying to find an agent for. I wrote for thirteen hours straight to finish it because there is a point I get to near the end of these things that it is literally pouring out of me and I won't be able to focus on anything else until it is done.  On the whole, I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. There is something really satisfying about finally getting around to telling the end of a story when you've known it for a long time.  Now my lovely betas are hard at work reading, trying to ignore my egregious typing errors and grammar discombobulation. I have nothing but hearts and sparkles for my peeps, who keep me encouraged when I want to lay on the couch like a beached whale slathered in ice cream remnants moaning about how untalented I am and how it is never going to happen for me.

Also, in case you haven't noticed, gifs have come to Feminine Things because apparently I have now caught up with internet technology circa 1999. FN1.

I was up super late writing, so now I am so in need of coffee I decided my best bet is to smell like coffee.  To that end I bring you Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Miskatonic University, part of their Picnic in Arkham series.

A venerable New England university, whose vast library holds many rare, diabolical and obscure arcane works, including one of the few surviving legitimate copies of the Necronomicon. Home to innumerable scholars of the esoteric and the occult, and the notorious Dr. Herbert West. 

Notes: The scent of Irish coffee, dusty tomes and polished oakwood halls. 

The initial impression is coffee, hazelnut, and bubblegum?  I have no idea why I get bubblegum.  I think it's the attempt at the Irish part of the Irish coffee.  Over time the bubble-gummy note dissipates (thank goodness) and becomes a mixture of hazelnut coffee, dust, and dry hard wood.   For me, it's worth waiting out the bubble gum for the weird delights of smelling like you've fallen asleep while reading old books in a library with your head resting next to a still warm cup of good sweetened coffee. If you are worried about sweetness; don't.  It get so dry and woody within the first hour that I'd say it more hints at gourmand than actually acts like one. In fact the wood is so strong at the in its almost resin-y.

Let's get this birthday road
trip started! Who has the snacks?

Four hours later, the wood (which took on that ripe young new wood smell) and coffee melded weirdly so that I kept hitting a hint of fig. Nose to pulse point, the notes were still distinctive, but at arm to head length, it was straaaaangely fig fruity. This may just be on me, but that's what I got.  You try it and be the judge. The sillage is relatively low, but the longevity is pretty good. I could smell light wafts eight to ten hours later (though if you read regularly, you know scents tend to last a long time on me.)

This is a classic three-ish nodder for me.  I like it, mostly, but also feel like someone else would like it more, it would fit them better, or I'd like it more if it were only X, Y, or Z.  That said, if you like a little sugar with your wood (dirty!) , this might be a good scent for you. For me, it's sort of meh.  I think I'll shelve it for a few months, try it again in the fall, and if I still can't get into it, make it a gift to someone who can. Could that be you?  Perhaps, dear reader.  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

If this sounds interesting to you, stay tuned.  I'll probably give away a BPAL sample set in the next week or two and I'll make sure to include a sample of Miskatonic University.  But first, I have to steal, I mean celebrate, my husband's birthday.

Until then, yours in writing-induced exhaustion,

Diana

______________________________

FN1. And that's how we are supposed to party, amIright? 

You know I've never been to heaven, but I've been to Oklahoma.

JoAnne Bassett Perfumes Collette parfum

It's possible that if I favorably mention JoAnne Bassett's Night Queen one more time within a single month, people will think I am on the take. Take heart, dear reader: unlike our elected representatives, Feminine Things remains, at date, bribery free. FN1.

So I'm not going to talk about Night Queen. In fact, we're not going to talk about Night Queen at all. We're going to keep her out of this.

Instead I'm going to talk about another offering from JoAnne Bassett Perfumes Collette parfum. According to the card that came with my sample, the notes are as follows: Cepes and Whit Cognac from France, various citrus essences, and others.

According to JoAnne, the scent concept has its roots in France, motherland of perfumery. FN2. I have never been to France (or Spain or England or anywhere but all over the US and a bit of Canada, really). So let's see how my little nose meets the challenge, shall we?

Collette opens citrus but immediately turns toward this slightly green open-air dirt smell on me, one that I seem to mentally associate with the smell of standing over a freshly dug grave before anything is put in it. It isn't the foremost experience of the scent, but it hangs around like soil clinging to exposed root. I think that must be the mushroom "used to ground and reveal secrets of Mother Earth," as the scent description provides. I have a friend who is a budding mycologist; I'll have to ask her what she thinks.

As the song says, I've never been to heaven, but I've been to Oklahoma...and Wyoming and South Dakota and New Mexico. I can't tell you why this scent makes me think of the Badlands or the year I lived in Santa Fe or a few days I spent once in Wyoming or long drives across portions of Oklahoma, but there is something about a scent that aims to capture the beauty of earth that makes me think of the stilling grandeur of such places.

These are not places full of obvious life. They are not like the lush greenery where my heart and soul find succor and internal sustainability. FN3. And yet, they are no less alive. Stand in the places in the world that appear barren for more than a few minutes, and what you'll find is that the impression of isolation from modernity may fit, but isolation from life itself is not. In the supposed emptiness of the desert or the tundra teem a million lives that ignore us, not the other way around. Our view of our environment is myopic and self-centered, which is a reflection of our limited bodily knowing of the world. But if you close your eyes, and you listen and you feel, not with your hands as we typically choose to define the world, but with your whole body, you will realize that the world is a thousand fragile things in every moment, most of them missed by us all the time.

We worry about the dishes and the laundry and being late to movies and who will feed the cats and if our jobs will last and if we will be happy and who will win the last football game of the season and if the writers of Vampire Diaries will ever just get on with it already and give Damon and Elena the hook-up they deserve and stop torturing us, and we miss...

...everything. So many everythings. The birth a bird in the tree by our window, the death of the worm its mother feeds it. The way our loved ones are slowly changing in front of us, the way our lives pass away in massive floods or slow forming drops.

 Some people will send you to an island if you want to slow down, or a forest if you want to reconnect with nature, and I understand that. But if you want to remember yourself, I say go to the desert for a few days. Force yourself to look past the initial sense of nothing and see the world, in you and outside of you. Notice how the earth and the land meet in the far horizon in an unbroken line that seems impossibly long, how the wind feels against your bare arms, how the sounds grow sharper as you notice them, as if hearing them for the first time. Lay on the ground, look up at the sky, and realize you are clinging to the earth as you float through an infinite space of impossible magnitude with a kind of magic that we call science because we like to think we are in control. Your life is everything to you, and nothing to the universe. You are infinitesimally small and extraordinarily large in every moment, even in your death.

Close your eyes and inhale. The dry night air is alive with mysteries, intimate and unknowable. Mysteries that smell like this.

FN4. FN5.
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FN1. Though I am not above taking free perfume for consideration, review, drawing, etc. as long as it's on my terms  Perfumers, see the solicitations policy up top. <g>
FN2. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh, Mutherland! (Sorry, I'm a little punchy today.)
FN3. For lo, I have lived in ugly, uninspiring places, and in the immortal words of Fleetwood Mac, "Ooooh, never going back again."
FN4. If you got the Twin Peaks reference buried in this post, you are either a. someone I could be friends with IRL b. one of a very specific group of fumie tweeps I heart; c.someone forced annually to spend your Thanksgiving weekend watching Twin Peaks with me, d. all of the above.
FN5. Also, my apologies about the Vampire Diaries-related angst but no new episodes until January 2012? Really!?! *Dies*

Scent provided by perfumer.