Midsummer Magic - A Scentual Journey

Hi everyone! Sorry about the long absense! Finishing up my studies and moving back home again took a lot of time and effort.  My room is in chaos, too many books for such a small space, but it's getting less and less chaotic every day! I'm really happy to be back home again! Especially right now, Finland is so magical at Midsummer!

(This will be a very picture heavy post, consider yourself warned!)

It never gets dark here at Midsummer, the time between sunset and sunrise is so short that it never gets darker than twilight. One of my Midsummer Night traditions is to around midnight take a walk through the woods to a dark forest lake where I can swim naked and alone in the black water. That is Midsummer Magic for me. Last night I took my camera with me so now I can invite you all along on a little journey through a Finnish Midsummer forest! I will also make this a scentual journey by adding perfumes that to me give much the same experience as these landscapes.

The nature is so lush that the path is barely visible...

Ferns.

The forest I walk through is dark and dense. Moss covered rocks, ferns and blueberry shrubs are shaded by slender white birches and dark green spruces and pines. This part of my journey reminds me of Norne by Slumberhouse. This dark and mysterious forest is just as magical as that fragrance. Herne by Arcana would also suit this landscape. This scent is heavy with powerful resins enhanced by spicy cinnamon. Definitely what a dark god of this forest would smell like.

Suddenly the forest ends but what is coming is hidden on the other side of a hill and will be invisible for a few more steps. Anticipation bulids because I know what I will see and it is always magical. The lake is nestled in a deep bowl surrounded by the rugged rocky forest hills. The suitable scent fro this part of the journey is Samhain by Haus of Gloi. There is a hint in the air of something wet, of humid soil and green herbs.

The sun is already rising in the northeast, or maybe this is the lingering glow from the recent sunset in northwest... It is hard to tell when the wholse nothern sky is aglow above the mirror calm lake. Sometimes there is mist on this lake, but not tonight. The scent that would suit the beautiful dark lake is Gaea by Alkemia. This scent is water over rocks, decaying plant life and the clear scent of white water lillies.

Blueberry and Cloudberry shrubs and birches.

The edges of the lake are wet and marsh-like, very lush and green. Devils Milhopper by Solstice Scents has a similar note of fresh green leaves. A powerful green, full of life and growth, just like Midsummer is the height of the growing season.

Labrador Tea leaves and flower.

Other parts of the lake edge is dryer and rockier, here flourish baby pines and lingonberry. But all around this lake grows Labrador Tea, looking like rosemary but with its own unique scent and white flowers. As the name implies this fragrant herb has been used for tea. Every year I collect and dry the fresh sprouts so that I can drink this tea and enjoy this wonderful scent all year.

Tea of Labrador Tea and Veronica flowers.

You can get an idea of the scent of Labrador Tea by sampling the perfume oil with the same name by Salmonberry Origins. Or if you are really interested in smelling the real deal I can just send you a little sprig of Labrador Tea!

That's the end of the journey folks. There are no pictures of me skinny dipping in the lake...
The quality of the pictures is a bit influenced by the thousands of mosquitoes that landed on me every time I stopped to take a picture. Sorry about that. I have pictures of what my arms, legs and neck looked like afterwards, but I'll spare you. I looked like a victim of bubonic plague...
Several of the scents mentioned here were gifts from the wonderful Amanda of more tea, Wesley?, she really nailed my tastes when we swapped packages! Here is a picture of the perfumes I got from her! :D

Hope you all had as wonderful a Midsummer as I did, those of you on the Northern Hemisphere who celebrate the solstice that is... ;)

Perfume review - Slumberhouse part 2

This is part two of this review, part one can be found here.

Jeke has a fascinating concept that started "with a batch of smokey cade oil and the idea of a night time stroll with burning autumn woods in the distance - something fiery and burnt yet chillingly desolate, November illusory, breath of fog, ablaze. Into this design I sought to embed a defined masculinity - something well-worn yet intellectual, a refinement streamlined with rustic attributes - warmth of cigars in humidors, old leather shoes and odd buckles, traces of a fragmented sweet spice, the mysterious atmosphere that adorns the well traveled."
Jeke is intriguingly smoky with warm woody notes, a sensual hint of leather and a fantastic tobacco! My mother rolles her own cigarettes and keeps her shag in a leather tobacco pouch so when I sniff this I get the image of that pouch in my mind. This does not smell like tobacco smoke to me, but rather of woodsmoke. We have a tradition of Easter bonfires in Finland and this scent transports me to such a bonfire. The dark forest, the chill in the air, but most of all that blazing heat of the huge bonfire, the smoke drifting towards the dark blue sky and my mother rolling a cigarette. I think I get this image because of the fact that I won´t be going home for Easter this year... I regret that I´ll miss that bonfire and I definitely miss my home... I suspect that at any other time of the year this would be a scent to make my inner Steampunk happy. It could provoke the feeling of being an explorer of the Steampunk kind, gritty and dirty from tinkering with the airship, garbed in leathers, smoking a pipe and looking at old maps of exotic unexplored places. I really want to own more of this some day, when I have the money.

Grev is described as "The interpretation of the dapperest embodiments of a true gentleman. A deep, spicy, earthy, rooty fragrance with an elegant kick of herbs tinted through shades of orris, clove, birch and fir".
This one doesn´t evoke as many feelings and images as Jeke but it truly is one of the most elegant scents I have ever smelled. Grev is dignified and self contained where Jeke is gritty and wild. Grev is cold where Jeke is warm. To me these two scents seem like opposites, the arrogant highborn gentleman and the uncaringly unkempt explorer. The scent itself is herbal and I get that powdery kind of smell that I associate with orris root. I can smell clove and woods too, but somehow they manage to be old and frosty. As you might be able to see in the pictures, this perfume is a pale turquoise blue color, and I feel that this color mirrors the scent very well. I get the image of a elegant gentleman all dressed up in his finery going for a walk in a frosty park.


Free samples:

Pear + Olive is, I believe, the most recent scent from Slumberhouse. On the Slumberhouse blog the scent is described, apart from the pear and the olive, as "soft shades of herbal sweetness from Roman chamomile, the bitter booziness of grape tissue from French white cognac oil, the wet and earthy hues of zdravets crowned with the rich, velvety green gem of the very rare aglaia absolute. A chord of massoia bark & calamus absolute was created to provide a trace of cream".
This scent is lovely, very balanced and well made, but I´m lacking a concept, an intriguing background. And it smells a lot like an Yves Rocher pear perfume that I had when I was little... Not a positive association at all... I will forever associate pear and apple notes with the pear and apple perfumes I owned and overdosed on back then. Anyone who enjoys pear will love this though. It has the same smooth depth as the other scents but it is a bright and happy fragrance and you all know that that´s not my thing. There are some intriguing notes here that I have never encountered before, but they can´t quite make up for that pear.

Baque is described on the Slumberhouse blog as "a warm amber tobacco flower perfume containing notes of smokey apricot, cedar, straw, vanilla, tobacco leaf, davana, ambergris tincture and parchment. Elegant, rustic, golden and warm properly sum the four corners of its tobacco and honey heart".
This one is a fine comforting scent! The tobacco is sharp at first but mellows and mingles with sweet notes of amber and honey. This scent is somehow dusty and dry, I can smell straw and I imagine that I sense that note of parchment. Baque somehow makes me think of autumn forests covered with dry crinkly leaves. I wouldn´mind owning more of this, but unfortunately it seems that it is an older LE.

Kere is described as "Milky apricot, white chocolate and spiced plum-meat accords add texture and color to syrupy orange honeysuckle absolute and licorice within a halo of vaporous aldehydes reminiscent of champagne fizz. A circus of bizarre pairings harmonized in a blurring fashion that slowly devolves into spicy sugared hay and caramel".
This here is the most awesome gourmand scent ever!! It is so complex, so deep, I can´t even tell what notes I am smelling but it is so utterly, utterly divine!! I can smell licorice and caramel but there is also a sharp bite of warm spice. I doesn´t evoke any memories or places, it doesn´t transport me at all, but hey, I don´t care! Because I´m quite happy with being right here and experiencing only this scent and nothing more! This is another brilliant composition, balanced and intriguing! And the sillage! It is monstruous!! I´d love to own a larger bottle of this one, but alas, this too seems to have been a limited edition scent... Maybe it will come again sometime, preferably when I have some money to my name.


Slumberhouse really is such a fascinating perfumery! There is an intriguing depth to all of these scents, a rounded and smooth feeling that makes these seemingly simple scents so very complex and deep. Again and again I find myself using the word deep to describe them, I´m sorry I can´t seem to put this feeling of depth into better words... I also love the mysterious concepts behind them and the beautiful images that come to my mind when smelling them! Some of them take me away to other places and situations and all at least evoke certain moods!

All of these scents have good longevity and sillage, some more so than others. You can definitely tell that they are very concentrated! As they have no top notes there are no sharp changes in scent through the drydown. Some reviewers have remarked that these scents change dramatically about half an hour an hour into wear but I have not had any such experiences. What I get at the beginning is what follows me for the whole time!

Samples of Norne, Jeke and Pear + Olive can be ordered from the Slumberhouse website. Rume, Vikt and Grev have now been discontinued but are still available at places like indiescents until the stock runs out.

Perfume Review - DarlingClandestine

Etsy is one of the places where you can find strange scents in great numbers, whether you like steampunk, sideshow, burlesque, gothic or any other alternative style of perfumery that you are not likely to find in the perfume store at the mall.

I got this generous package from Evonne of DarlingClandestine last week. She sells wonderfully complex and odd perfumes in her shop on Etsy! I ordered the two solids that you see in the picture but because I had to wait a bit she threw in all of these other wonderful goodies!! That´s customer service for you!!

Now, I really love reading perfume reviews! I think they are the most wonderful thing ever! And I do love analyzing scents, even though my sense of smell is quite... mediocre... So I´ll try my hand at it here!

The scent that really cought my attention and made me order from DarlingClandestine was Vardogr. In her description of the scent Evonne pointed out that this was a really weird scent, and I´m all for anything weird! evonne describes the scent as "dark, damp, herbal fragrance—mossy forest floors, sunken alleys, underground spaces—with a dozen unlikely notes including pure essential German chamomile, bitter black coffee, hazy Indian musks, sharp herbs and a whip of leather". I´m usually drawn more to spicy gourmand scents, so what exactly attracted me, beyond the "weird" is hard to say. I do have a fascination for anything underground, but that is my taste in horror movies, not perfumes.
Vardogr even looks weird, it´s a beautiful green color! The scent itself is indeed herbal! it is green in a softly dark kind of way, not clean at all but full of dirt and grime. I can´t smell any coffee or musk, but, as noted, my nose is sub par when it comes to these matters. I don´t find Vardogr very weird, it is unusual to be sure but not shockingly so. It is earthy and subtly haunting, unsettling like a walk in a graveyard or a damp dark crypt. I´ll admit to expecting a stronger, less subtle, concotion, but it works! It is stunningly beautiful, but perhaps a bit too subtle for my tastes... I don´t normally do subtle.

The other solid I ordered from DarlingClandestine is much more my usual cup of tea, lo and behold, a spicy gourmand! This scent, named Big Top Train (2010 formulation), is not subtle in the least! Evonne paints a picture of a sideshow Christmas, and that picture represents this scent well with its blend of normalcy and strangeness. Big Top Train is a seemingly simple holiday spice scent. But the reality is more complex, full of strange olfactory cues. It evokes memories, fleeting memories that I can´t quite grasp.  There are scents like this one where the individual notes refuse to blend, and the result is just chaos. But here there are no dominant notes that my nose can smell, just a stunningly overwhelming mass of creamy sweet spice. I have other gourmand spice scents that grow boring after a while, but this one, in it´s complexity will surely keep my interest far longer! To me this is hypnotic, a truly intoxicating brew!! It is like a great party, of the kind that you can´t quite remember but you just know that it had to have been good!

Thanks to Evonne's great generosity I also ended up with two full size perfume oils and two large samples. I always LOVE surpise samples when I order perfumes, and Evonne took that to a whole nother level!! I really enjoy getting samples that I have not chosen myself, that way I get to experience something new, I get to maybe fall in love with something that I thought I hated.
One of the samples I recieved was like this... The thing is, I HATE clean, fresh scents. I almost completely gave up on commercial scents because there were simply too many clean, fresh scents for me to smell before I found soemthing I liked... Bottom line, I can´t stand anything clean or fresh!
And then, along comes Gram Negative and changes everything! Evonne describes it as: "Gram-Negative is deep, damp, earthy essential moss; sticky green leaf resin; a whisper of black tea; and a rare, rich, mellow, buttery orchid essential oil that is just divine."  I can´t quite agree with her description, for to me, the green leaves dominate the scent in a way that I should hate, because they are fresh and green... However, this scent also,  is crazy complex! The freshness of the green leaves is dominant, but not a terrible spike straight into my brain, like so many commercial scents. There is also an earthyness to it, a hidden depth of damp soil and moss, and a beautifully sweet orchid grows here, a sultry dark flower among these green leaves! I´m still not in love with this scent, but I like it, which IS enough of a miracle, I assure you!


Ummm... it seems I use metaphors when talking about perfumes. This is very little about the technical aspects of the perfumes (staying power, sillage etc.) and very little about notes, drydown and the like... I guess I´m more interested in what kind of associations the scents give me, be it memories or leaps of imagination. Hope some of you enjoy my whimsical flights of fancy. I might give you more on the remaining three scents, Step Right Up, Fisticuffs and Aragon, another day. First I have to wear them a bit more and see if they are friends or enemies or somewhere in between...