Perfume Mini Reviews - Gourmands

In my recent care package from Su of My Perfume Diaries there were so many gorgeous scents that I just can´t review them all one by one. So I decided to group them and do some mini reviews. Here are a few of the noteworthy gourmand scents.

Sweet Anthem - Colin

In the jar this solid perfume is a creamy gourmand with hints of cardamom.
On wet it kind of disappares for a while, I get just a very soft benzoin. After a few moments it warms up and amber emerges. Cardamom is in the background but starting to get more noticeable. I get no frankincense or myrrh at all, for which I´m thankful as I´m not a fan of incense or oriental resins. Cardamom and honey become more and more dominant as this dries and it takes quite a while before they fade. This stage is wonderful! I LOVE cardamom! Amber and benzoin dominate the drydown together with some lingering hints of honey. Longevity is about medium with this one. Sillage is minimal, but then that´s quite normal with solids. I´d love to sample this as an oil as it is very lovely, unfortunately it seems to be a discontinued scent. :(

L'Aromatica - Kulfi

I´ve never eaten kulfi, so I have no idea what it is really, but in the vial this smells exactly like cardamom dough to me, the kind that I use to make cinnamon rolls! Delicious! On wet cardamom dominates in big way. At this stage it doesn´t smell like dough anymore, just a powerful cardamom. The cardamom soon calms down and turns more creamy and sweet. I can definitely smell the coconut and it is such a  delicious coconut! This is incredibly mouthwatering! This scent stays a creamy cardamon/coconut all trough the drydown, but it gains a background of sandalwood. Both sillage and longevity are about medium. Kulfi is much more powerful than Colin and the associations I get are equally powerful, all in all a very nice experience! I don´t quite know if I want a full bottle of this one... It is absolutely gorgeous and a year ago I would not have hesitated, but now this is just not quite "me"...

SaraWen - Cake or Death

In the sample bottle (tiny and really pretty!) this is a  rich and moist vanilla cake, very sweet. On wet there is a lot more amber in this cake and it is not as foody as one might expect from smelling it in the bottle. There are hints of spice in here, I think I get a whiff of cardamon. Something about this scent is also slightly medicinal, at least on my skin, a dark sharpness like some hidden poison. The drydown is a soft vanilla amber, nice but not very special. The sillage is of monster proportions, at least at first, while longevity is about medium. This scent is nice, but not very complex and it doesn´t change very much on my skin... The sweet cake together with darker, more sinister, notes makes for an  interesting as well as enjoyable scent, but I would actually have prefered the rich and moist cake that I could smell in the bottle.

Trying on these scents has reminden me of why I´m not very into gourmands anymore. They are all absolutely lovely, creamy, gorgeous and delicious! But they just don´t take me anywhere, they give very few associations outside of the food they smell like, they bring no images to my mind or transport me away to places in my memory or imagination. Out of these scents Kulfi was the best in that it actually stirred my memory and brought me home to my kitchen and memories of cardamon dough.

Do you enjoy gourmand scents? If so, what are your favorites? If not, why? What scent types do you enjoy the most?

(Sorry about the particularily ugly photo, I couldn´t  be bothered to seek out better light as I am a lazy bastard!)

Perfume - My adventures in perfume blending

2012 has been a perfume year for me! I discovered perfume last spring. That might sound strange, but I really never thought much of, or used, perfume before that. Most commercial scents have never really worked on my skin, or been much to my taste... They are often too fresh, too sharp, too boring... (Not to mention that I can´t afford the few commercials that I like.) Last spring I discovered indie perfume oils, wonderfully strange concept blends that were sweet and dark rather than fresh and light... So started my obsession! 

Ever since I discovered perfume oils I have also worked on learning to blend them myself... I have used single note essential oils as perfume since I gave up on commercials, so I already had a few, I just had not thought of blending them. I have since bought essential oils almost obsessivly and now have a nice little collection of about 30 different oils. After much experimenting and many awful scrubbers I have now finally managed to create a blend that I find pleasure in... Behold, in this green bottle resides my first perfume! It is murky and strange and made from mostly essential oils diluted in almond oil... Top notes are bergamot and petitgrain, two citrus notes that I can stand simply because they are darker and not so fresh. Middle notes are myrtle, roman chamomille and hints of spices.The base is mostly benzoin with cedarwood, patchouli and birch. The most dominant notes here are myrtle and benzoin and I like those two together, the sweet and dark of the benzoin made interesting by the more lively and fresh myrtle. On my skin this blend is almost unsettlingly sweet, vaguely like something rotting...

I don´t have a name for my perfume, and I don´t know if it needs one honestly, that would feel a bit pretentious. But for me it brings to mind a wild garden at midnight, an abandoned garden where nature's circle of life and death has taken over again... I wish I could add notes of moss, fern and more dark herbals and resins to this, but I had to make do with what I had.

Have you tried blending your own perfume? What kind of perfume would you want to make?

P.S. If you are wondering about the bottle ( I know I would, as I´m always hunting small bottles for my perfume experiments), it is an old Cognac miniature bottle, 30 ml... The lable is still on it.