There's no place like home for the holidays.

NPG Home for the Holidays: Mermade Magickal Arts EverGreen Incense 2013

November First, dear reader! We have reached November! First! I can now unabashedly run toward the winter holidays with open arms. FN1.

I love winter holidays. I love Thanksgiving and Solstice and Saturnalia and Christmas, and I'm sure I'd love Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, too, given the opportunity. November 1 to January 1 is always my most wonderful time of the year. Also, when I'm super lucky, there is SNOW!

My winter good mood got an early kick off this year when I received the following scentvitation from the Natural Perfumers Guild:

The holiday season means it’s cold outside and everyone is spending more time indoors, with the windows and doors closed.  It’s time to feature beautiful natural scents to highlight the festive spirit.  The Guild members are dedicated to using 100% natural aromatics, and for this season, members of the Natural Perfumers Guild created ambient fragrance for the home and office, using incense, candles, room sprays and wax melts. 

Eight Guild perfumers and associates have independently created lovely ambient scent products to celebrate “Home for the Holidays” 2012.  The natural scents work hand-in-hand with the idea of fragrant Christmas trees, boughs and wreaths fragrancing the homes and offices.

Now I ask you: who could say no to such an offer?


I received a beautiful an exceptionally generous package from Katlyn Breene of Mermade Magickal Arts, which included EverGreen Incense 2013, along with a beautiful electric incense burner, foiled paper, and a carved wooden incense server stick to use with it.  EverGreen is described as follows:

A rich Resin Incense Blend created to celebrate the Ancient Forest. The best of the woody, balsamic and green scents, it is a wonderful blend for the Winter months and seasonal celebrations. It has a base of resins and woods with notes of green fir, pine and cedar. Fresh and invigorating and filled with the scents of the wilderness, of tree resins and growing things. Burn this incense to let the forest in, and enliven your space with the spirit of the holidays.  

Contains: Hougary White Green and Black Frankincense, Copal Blanco, Pinion Pine Resin blended with Cedar tips (wild crafted), Himalyan Juniper, Grand Fir,  Fir Balsam and Western Cedar oil.

EverGreen smells like...evergreens? Ha! How succinct of me. Truly, though, it smells like the beautiful green trees I love among. The primary scent is the smell of dried pine needles and tree resin.  If someone made the floor of the forest into an incense, this would be that scent.  It has that peaty smell of layered greenery moldering and mulching and becoming the death that helps make new life. It has a gently medicinal quality with hints of good dry straw, like the smell of a pile of fresh hay piled onto a cart for a harvest hayride.

This scent is perfect for the winter holiday season because there is nothing commercially 'Christmas-y' about this scent.  It smells like the evergreen woods: dark, lovely, and deep.  I haven't had a chance to try the body incense yet, but I suspect it will be terrific.

In the electric burner provided, set at only a heat setting of 10, less than a teaspoon of EverGreen filled our entire two story house with beautiful scent in under fifteen minutes.  It's been a couple of hours now, and though the incense has been spent for about an hour and the burner has been off for almost two, the house still smells wonderful.

EverGreen is available for only $10.75, and is one of a number of fine quality incense blends available for equally reasonable prices, any of which would make an outstanding stocking stuffer.  While we 'fumies are constantly bombarded with pitches for matching perfumed candles and fragrant oils and reed diffusers, there is something to be said for a well made incense, a scent that is strong and beautiful and requires a little heat to bring it to life.

Also, I'd like to make a pitch for the electric burner. I have never had an electric burner. I have been using incense for probably about twenty years, and both the quality of scent and the method of burning is far superior to anything I've ever experienced.  If you like or use incense or resin, I really recommend getting an electric burner from Mermade Magickal Arts.  It is a beautiful, handcrafted item available for only $59.95, and would make an excellent gift for the scent lover in your life.

I am really grateful to Katlyn for introducing me to this option.

To read about the other NPG Home for the Holidays offerings, check out these other fine bloggers:
~ Ca Fleure Bon
~ Perfume Critic
~ Perfume Shrine
~ The Passionate Perfumista
~ That Smell

Other Natural Perfumers Guild members participating are:

Andrea Shanti of Holistic Body Therapy : Anita Casamento of Happy Herbs Soaps : Anya McCoy of Anya's Garden Perfumes : Elise Pearlstine of Belly Flowers Perfumes : JoAnne Bassett of JoAnne Bassett Perfumes

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FN1. Shut it, holiday haters. I don't want to hear a single word about how it is 'too early.' It is never too early for winter wonderland magic for me.

Take me out to the black, tell them I ain't coming back...

I recently switched cell phone providers to an Android phone, and uploaded a bunch of music to Google Music to try it out. It turns out that I forgot I had a bunch of audio clips from TV shows and movies I love on my hard drive, because I will occasionally build a mix CD off some other medium -- a piece of visual artwork, but more frequently a quote from a poem or book or film or show -- and I like to use the audio clip to open or close the mix CD. FN1. So now occasionally I get these clips mixed in with my music, which is surprisingly delightful, particularly when the following song seems to pair with the quote.

I aim to misbehave.

One of the quotes I keep running into is this from one Malcolm Reynolds, captain of the firefly-class space ship Serenity: "The darkness. Kind of darkness you can't even imagine. Blacker than the space it moves through."
So imagine that you are me, mindlessly drafting away on legal documents, listening to music, and then these words pop into your head. What perfume do you instantly think of?
For me, it's obvious: Bvlgari Black.
Created in 1998 by Annick Menardo, Bvlgari Black is described on the Bvlgari website as follows:

Black is unconventional, a fragrance conceived around the smoky, woody notes of Lapsang Souchong tea, that celebrates the pleasure and freedom of expression. A fusion of cool, stripped-down design in high-tech matte rubber with a chrome cap and transparent glass.


Notes are black tea, rosewood, bergamot, cedar, oakmoss, vanilla, amber, sandalwood, and musk.

What can I say? Black is  a multitude of wonderful smells, and yet, difficult to describe. Its immediately evocative of hard vanilla candies, incense smoke, hot rubber, the smell when you pull cold water rushing over stones into a cup in your hands and bring it to your lips, the smell of the inside of your boyfriend's leather coat when you are held with it wrapped around your whole body. 

But that's just me.  Other people get "celery salt and rubber" and "pale green;" "dark vintage cashmere allure;"  "urban cool;" and a tie for my favorites: "biker eating an ice cream cone" and "most likely work best on attractive young yuppies or hipsters of either gender." It's somehow everything, and nothing, and appears to change a lot, based on the person wearing it. Not unlike looking out into the Black, I suppose.

Do I like Black? Of course I do.  It's sweetly strange, delightfully sexy, and weirdly delicious.  I can't decide if I want to taste it on my lips when I kiss someone's neck or spray it on a riding crop or spray it on my scarf on a cold morning.  Perusing reviews, it seems the real test of Black, though, is how it holds up next to one of my all-time favorites, the equally avant-garde L'Artisan Dzing!

Ah, the infamous hockey puck!

Trying them side by side, Dzing! and Black seem like cousins. Okay, perhaps less cousins, and more like.... You know how, when you see someone from the back or the side or at a weird angle and you are110% sure that it is someone you know and it is not until you actually walk up to them and say something that you realize they are a complete stranger and you have made a complete fool of yourself? That's what mistaking Dzing! and Black is like.  You are sure they look alike, but when you really pay attention, you realize they are nothing alike. FN2.

 I never thought there'd be two of them, and there aren't really.  Black is sweeter, smoother, and less aggressive or muscular than Dzing! Dzing! is heavier on the rubber and salt on me, while Black is heavier on the amber and sandalwood end of things. I like them both, and I think my preference for one over the other would probably hinge on my mood, or the weather, or the day, or my destination, unlike the great LT, who put Black in the top 10 fragrances of all time. FN3. Me? I think I might be more of a Dzing! girl, but I'm biased. After all, I've lived with and loved Dzing! for years now.  That said, at the low price point one can acquire a bottle of Black, I say, why not have both? I found a 100ml bottle on Amazon for $35 of all places!

Black is marketed unisex, and that's a good thing, because it is a lovely scent that could work great on anyone.  And at the low, low price of practically next to nothing, I command you to get thee to a Sephora to try it, and don't be dissuaded if they happen to have stuck it on the 'men's' perfume wall. 

 Want more? Try:
~ a review from Robin at Now Smell This!
~ a review from I Smell Therefore I Am
~ a review from Muse in Wooden Shoes
~ a review from Bois de Jasmin
~ a review from + Q Perfume Blog
~ a review from ChickenFreak's Obsessions
~ a review from All I Am - A Redhead
~ a review from Pere De Pierre
~ a review from Nathan Branch
~ a review from Scent of the Day
~ a review from Scentsate
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FN1. Yes, I love the mix tape, for lo, I am a child of the 1980s, and I *still* have tapes x-boyfriends made me twenty years ago, even though I have nothing to play them on, because I think they are some of the most personal gifts I ever received.


FN2. Or, Oh! You know that tumblr of Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber? It's like that! Like mistaking one of those lesbians from a distance for the real Bieber! (BTW, I have an IRL friend who was actually featured on the site.) (It's even Bieber approved (See video clip below.))

FN3. LT = Luca Turin, author of Perfumes: The Guide, and other fancy perfume accomplishments.  If you don't know, google it.