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 - Slumberhouse part 1

My review of these fascinating scents from Slumberhouse has been forming in my head for almost two months now and finally I feel ready to write down some words. These scents are really the best and most intriguing I have encountered so far on my perfume journey!

Norne is described as "Fog caked needle, lichen, fern and moss perfume the nocturnal air beneath grandiose canopies of fir and hemlock...". The undertitle of this scent is "Ind i Fjeldkamrene" which, it seems, is a song by Ulver, a Norwegian folk music inspired black metal group. I´m not a fan of any kind of metal myself, but I do love scandinavian folk music! This particular song is inspired by the folklore belief that there were supernatural beings who governed the mountains. These could abduct the unvary and keep them imprisoned in the mountain. In the case of this song a maiden has been taken into the mountain and is begging with her last dying breath to be released therefrom. I found the lyrics and an English translation (because my Norwegian sucks) here.

The song paints a picture of a cold blue mountain in the wild north, it paints a picture of a dark night without moon and stars, of rain and of storm. To me the scent of this does not paint quite that same picture. This perfume is dark deep green and the scent of it is the same, a deep dark green coniferous forest. This is resinous and it carries the scent of recently cut wood, only darker not as fresh. I have never before smelled a perfume with such lifelike wood resins! On me there is no evergreen in this scent, only coniferous resins. Norne is neither complex nor simple. It does not change much on my skin but it is so wonderfully deep and evokative! Notable Scents did an interview with Josh Lobb, the perfumer behind Slumberhouse, in which he mentions that he doesn´t use top notes. That lack of top notes is definitely noticeable in these scents, and I like it! I like it a lot! This particular scent is also completely natural, made using only absolutes! Despite being all natural this scent has terrific staying power and fabulous sillage! If I could afford a full size I would buy it in a heartbeat!

Rume is described as "Inspired by a room - the explorer's hideaway. A burgundy/silver cologne with animalic pulse paired alongside a warm hush of clay, cola, filbert and hay. Rume is an idea, communicated through fragrance, of the desire to constantly seek out, experience and explore. An idea that contentedness is a poison and regret is the aftermath" and as having notes of bay, myrrh, labdanum and praline. I don´t have at all as much to say about this one as about Norne. I don´t quite understand the inspiration behind Rume, nor does it evoke any images. Many have waxed poetic about this scent, about it being resinous, spicy, smelling like gingerbread... But on me it just turns sour and the only one of the notes above that I can smell in this is the hay. It is rotting hay and a sour whiff of urine, it smells like a not so clean stable or barn... It´s definitely a chemistry malfunction though! When I try this on my favorite guinea pig, also known as my friend Blomma with the completely different skin chemistry, it is fabulously spicy and sweet with just a golden hint of dry hay! I love it on her but hate it on me...

Vikt is described as "Dark balsamic woods slowly oozing sweet metallic oils - motions of soft smokey black agar woods through syrupy bronze resins". I don´t have much to say about Vikt either, it isn´t very evokative for me and I don´t quite get the concept. I have a feeling that there is an interesting concept behind it, but it is hidden and so fails to add intrigue to the scent. This scent is so balanced that I can´t quite sense any individual notes. It is woody, but not in any traditional way, the resins are so sweet and deep. Not coniferous like in Norne but rather more exotic. There is a slight sour note in this too, but this one is much easier on my nose and it is not quite the sharp sourness of Rume but a more rounded sourness. I have heard said that oud can sometimes be a bit sour so maybe it is that. Still this scent is soft and gorgeous and I love it but I´d love it more if it didn´t fail to transport me.


Part two with reviews of Jeke and Grev and the free samples can be found here.

Perfume Review - Incendere

Incendere by Alkemia.

A late night, early morning post from me, because I just put on Incendere and felt it needed a review. I have read rave reviews about Smoke and Mirrors, Les Mysteres and Miel de Sauvage et Tabac (sorry, can´t be bothered to look them up right now, to late/early for that) but not even one word about Incendere. Yet it is one of three scents from Alkemia that I really have to get a full size bottle of (along with the aforementioned Smoke and Mirrors and Les Mysteres).

I bought this one because I had gotten it into my mind that carnation was a floral I would probably enjoy. You might have noticed that I really hate florals in general, but I had never sniffed a carnation perfume and they were always described as spicy and hot, and that appealed to me. So I thought, why not, it is only a sample. Thank the gods of perfumery that I did because this is gorgeous!!

In the bottle this smells of creamy cinnamon and floral, plus something boozy (the bay rum?). On wet it is strong at first, with hot spices and a sharp floral note that I suppose is the carnation. I believe I can smell black pepper and clove here, my absolute favorite spices, so I´m sold already! Soon the spices calm down and the carnation gets deliciously creamy and soft. For a while it is still definitely floral, but what a lovely spicy floral! Then it happens! When completly dry it turns into the most glorious chai tea! When I sniff this I remember the most delicious cup of chai I ever had. It was at a folk music/world music festival in nothern Sweden. In the festival area there was a cafe, on the outside it looked like a dingy party tent but on the inside everything was covered in oriental rugs. They only served two things in there, that most glorious chai and hookahs. I remember that the tobacco in the hookah was a superb blend of licorice and mint and in my memory the chai smells exactly like the drydown of this perfume. Every time I wear this perfume I´m brought back to that deliciously decadent, exotic place full of peace, licorice and mint smoke and creamy spicy chai...

Needless to say, that is one scent memory that I do not mind at all! I will be buying a full size bottle of this one! The sillage is medium and so is the longevity, about six hours on me. But damn this makes me long for that most awesome of chais. And now I know that carnation is something I enjoy, I´ll have to see to it that more carnation scents come my way! Do you have any favorite carnation perfumes that you can recommend?

Perfume Review - Salmonberry Origins

I just recently got a nice little pack of samples from Salmonberry Origins! They shop is based in Alaska and the perfume olis they sell are described as arctic scent memories. Living in the north as I do, although on another continent, that concept charmed me and I ordered some samples!

I don´t remember my life through scents, I´ve never paid much attention to scents before the last year's perfume obsession. But there are a few scents that have been very important for me! The scent of a newborn puppy's mouth is one (sounds very strange, even repulsive, if you have not been there with a little puppy attached to your nose...) that scent is addictive! Another very important smell from my childhood is that of Getpors, a plant that grows everywhere on the bogs or where the ground is swampy here in Finland. The North American name for this plant is Labrador tea.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

I have always wished that there was a perfume that smelled like the leaves of this plant. They have such a wonderful, sharp but resinous and sweet, herbal scent! There is a small forest lake ner my home where I somtimes swin in the summer. Around this lake grows Labrador tea and I always take some leaves and rub the scent of them into my skin when I walk home after my swim. The leaves are very oily and if I had the know-how I could probably make an essential oil or something quite easily... but I don´t have this knowledge. So when I found a Labrador Tea perfume oil at Salmonberry Origins I just had to sample it!!

In the bottle this smells very fresh, of forest evergreens. On the skin it is very sharp at first, with evergreens and sharp resins. At this stage I´m not a fan, but then I´m not a fan of most top notes... Fortunately this one mellows fast and the sharp green notes fades and the resins sweeten. This sweet resin state is a bit longer than the sharp evergreen state, but then herbs start to slowly emerge. I can´t tell what herbals only that the sweetness of the resins is still there but that slightly medicinal soft herbals start to mingle with it. The drydown is a soft and sweet herbal that I constantly sniff at. And it lasts for a long time! 

There are no notes mentioned in the description of this scent, so the actual content is unknown to me.... But it does not quite smell like Labrador Tea to my nose... It does however evoke the memories of the forest around that small forest lake and with that I´m definitely satisfied! This is such a unique forest scent and it works so well on my skin that I´m definitely buying a full size bottle of it! When summer comes I can compare it to the real deal, right now I can only compare it to the memory I have of the scent of Labrador tea... 

The other scents I ordered were Corvus Corax and Canus Lupus Arctos, some latin names that you might be familiar with.

Corvus Corax is, of course, the latin name of the Raven. This scent has a really interesting top notes of some sickly sweet floral and berries, it sells like somthing rotten in a very weird and awesome way. It continues sweet and dark with some vague spicy undertones, but nothing that really evokes memories in me. This one disappares quickly from my skin and it is slightly soapy on the drydown, maybe a chemistry malfunction? For me this scent was all about the top notes, which is strange as I don´t normally harbor any love for the top note stage of perfumes.

Canus Lupus Arctus, latin for the Arctic Wolf, was really more of a filler, I chose between this one and Pilot Bread but in the end I felt more like sampling a masculine leather/spice/ozone scent rather than a gourmand scent. My first impression with this scent was that it smelled a lot like Aragon from DarlingClandestine, reviewed here. These two scents really have nothing incommon on paper except for a leather note and to me  they do not smell at all like they are described. They smell like saffron... Is my nose malfunctioning here? Canus Lupus Arctos is not as sweet as Aragon, where there is honey, and has a bit more of a clean smell, maybe because of the mentioned ozone, but in essence they are the same on my skin. This leads me to believe that either my nose or my skin turns a leather note into saffron galore (because while saffron might not be to difficult to imagine as an ingredient in Aragon, what would it be doing in an arctic scent memory?)! I might need a second opinion on this one... One sample of Aragon and one of Canus Lupus Arctos is now officially up for grabs if someone feels like being that second opinion!

I also received a free sample of Wild Arctic Rose which was unfortunate because rose is a scrubber for me... I think I´m traumatized by a bath set, with body lotion, shower gel and schampoo, that I had when I was a child... I loved the pretty bottles but that was still the start of my rose hate... Maybe I only hate the syntetic rose, or maybe it´s a chemistry thing, or maybe I have just not smelled any really great rose scents as of yet... I don´t know. Anyway, this rose scent is not one of the real scrubbers... In the bottle it is definitely rose of the kind that I hate, but on it is not as aweful as I feared. (I did put it on! Be proud of me!) This is rose with a healthy dose of lemon and I think something smells like cinnamon in the background. This one is up for swaps if anyone is interested! I can appreciate the vaguely spicy background here, but neither lemon nor rose is my thing. 

Now I´m lusting for more green but sweet forest scents... As I purchase my full size Labrador Tea I think I´ll buy some more samples too. I want to try Lichen, Ursus Arctos, Willow, all herbal in some whay, and maybe a smoky one, Noon Fire.

So, do you have any scent memories that you wish could be found as perfume? Or are there any notes that do really wonky things on your skin? Do you have any favorite green/herbal/forest scents? What is your favorite rose perfume? Are there any you think I would like? (Many questions on this one, but this set of samples was an exploration for me in many ways!)