Herbal Tea - Storing and Drinking

Life has been chaotic for me lately. Not very busy, just turbulent. So I have spent my time online with relaxing things like netflix, fanfiction and polyvore... But I'll try to get out that second post about herbal teas now. Summer and herbal tea harvest season is over here, but maybe where you are summer is still in full swing and you can have some use for this post. Otherwise I guess there is always next year! ;)

Read part one about harvesting and drying herbs here. This second post will largely be photos of tea and a bit of information about what plants are good for tea. But first a bit about storing your dried herbs.

Here is most of my harvest. Each herb in its own jar. I use both ordinary glass jars and metal tea jars, with various types of lids. Air tight lids are supposedly best, but I use whatever I can find. It might be tempting to store the pretty herbs in glass jars where they are visible, but they stay good for longer if stored in darkness. The herbs should not be crushed to pieces. They retain much more flavor if stored whole. I write the name of the herb as well as the year of harvest on the lid so that I can be sure how old that particular herb is.

White clover flowers.

Rose petals.

Fireweed (Chamerion angustifolium), leaves and flowers.

Yarrow, leaves and flowers.

Pansies and violets.

I have made a few herbal blends but I prefer to store each herb on its own. This doesn't stop me from drinking blends. I usually choose a blend of several different herbs (whole) to put in my cup before adding hot water and a bit of honey. Here are some pictures of pretty and tasty herbal teas!

White clover flower tea. This is a herbal tea for the beginner! The taste is very sweet and almost a bit honey like even without sweetener. The flowers even look very pretty!

Lady's mantle leaf tea (Alchemilla Vulgaris). I really like these leaves, they taste quite sweet and look very pretty.

Rowan leaf tea. Not quite as sweet as white clover or lady's mantle but still a pleasant mild herbal tea.

Fireweed leaves and flowers.

Fireweed tea (leaves and flowers). This is one of the prettiest of herbal teas! The milky color is just gorgeous and the flowers turn from dark purple-blue to sheer and delicate white in the hot water! Tastes very good too. fresher and greener than white clover or lady's mantle.

Hibiscus flower tea. Rather cool purple color isn't it? Doesn't taste very much or very good though. 

Meadowsweet flowers and leaves (Filipendula ulmaria).

Meadowsweet flower and leaf tea. I have always loved the sweet, almond like, scent of this plant and that scent translates into taste too! The taste is sweet with an almond undertone, absolutely delicious! And don't they look pretty!

Pansy flower and yarrow leaf.

Pansy flower and yarrow leaf tea. These yellow pansy flowers give the tea an intense yellow color but the taste is quite subtle and frankly not very interesting. I am more fond of the stong herbal taste of yarrow but yarrow tea isn't very pretty... So the combination of pansy and yarrow gives both mouth and eyes pleasure.

Orange pansy and raspberry leaf tea. This orange pansy is also rather pretty, but it doesn't give the tea as intense a color. Raspberry leaves are a classic herbal tea, they taste sweet and lovely and are supposed to have medicinal effects (though I haven't noticed any).

Linnaea flower and leaf tea. I really like how these tiny flowers look in my tea cup, but unfortunately the taste is a bit too subtle for me. Just a hint of sweetness and not much more. I will have to use these in combination with something of stronger taste or when I'm in the mood for something subtle.

Finally a picture of my favorite tea. Labrador tea! I love the strong herbal taste and scent of this one! I store this tea in the freezer rather than dried as I have found thet the taste isn't really preserved well in the dried plant.

Other plants that I have harvested:

• Rose petals - Give a subtle scent and taste of rose.
• Cornflower (Centaurea cyanus) - Are pretty and blue but not much else.
• Red clover flower - Not as sweet and not as pretty as it's white sibling.
• Veronica (esp. Veronica chamaedrys) - Traditional tea plant, tastes nice and sweet.
• Blueberry leaf - Tastes wonderful, quite fresh and green!
• Lingonberry leaf - Tastes virtually nothing. Said to be a cood treatment for urinary infection though.
• Strawberry leaf - Sweet and tasty, quite similar to raspberry or lady's mantle.
• Violet flowers - Look pretty and have a subtle sweet taste.
• Mint and peppermint - I love to blend these strong flavored herbs with something pretty but boring!
• Hops - Really interesting, rather beer like, taste. Supposedly good as a sleep-inducing evening tea.
• Black currant leaves - Really strong and unique flavor! I love blending with blander but prettier herbs.

Those are the plants I have harvested and tried as tea! I have tried a lot of different blends too but I suggest that you experiement and find your personal favorites. Feel free to ask questions, I am sure that I have forgotten something...

Perfume mini reviews - BPAL

These are some of the BPAL samples I got from Su a while back. (You can view the whole awesome package here.) I have chosen to only review those BPAL oils that I enjoyed.

Velvet - Notes are stated as sandalwood, cocoa vanilla and myrrh. On me it starts out as a large burst or dry cocoa powder with a sandalwood and vanilla background. On drydown a sweet and fruity note emerges for a while before it turnes into a lovely but rather generic sandalwood/vanilla. Neither sillage nor longevity are terribly good with this one. Lasts maybe three hours and is quite discrete.

Vixen - Notes are supposed to be orange blossom, ginger and patchouli. At first I strangely get a strong note of lavender. The patchouli is also quite sharp, definitely not very aged. I don't smell any ginger, but it is possible that it contributes to the sharpness of the patchouli. After a while this turns sweet. It is not quite floral but I will attribute this sweetness to the orange blossom for now. I confess that I don't quite know what orange blossom smells like. The drydown is still sweet but now with notes of vanilla and chocolate I believe. The patchouli is still going strong. This one is possibly full size worthy. It is interesting with good sillage and about an above average longevity.

The Dodo - Notes for this one are red musk, lemon peel, sugar cane, cassia, white sandalwood, mango, and agarwood. I have heard said that BPAL's red musk is something special but I don't know, to me it smells like quite ordinary musk with a cassia background and hints of the agarwood. The musk soon turns quite powdery and I can smell the sugar. After this the mango emerges for a while. The drydown is musky and woody with some lingering hints of mango. I like this a lot at times, but on the whole it leaves me unimpressed. It seems somehow disjointed... Sillage is good, longevity is about average.

Al Azif - This is a strange one! BPAL doesn´t provide me with any notes on this one apart from the vague term of incense. And I don't smell any incense. I get a dark smoky sweetness, it is resiny but a very creamy sweet resin. There is amber in here I think, and maybe honey. Something here smells like that deliciously fragrant kind of plastic and there are hints of sun tan lotion and makeup. This might actually be full size worthy! It is definitely interesting and smells beautiful on my skin. Sillage is about average, longevity slighly less than average.

Miskatonic University - Notes are stated as Irish coffee, dusty tomes and polished oakwood halls. This one is creamy and sweet from the start. I can't quite tell what it is I am smelling but on wet it does remind me a bit of Cake or Death. I will have to compare the two side by side. I can smell no coffee, no boozyness, no dusty books... Just that strange creamy sweetness, somehow nutty, together with a strong note of oakwood. There are hints of the same sun tan lotion as in Al Azif and some discrete spices. I swear I pick up some kind of while floral, a nice white floral, could be tuberose, but it is very faint. This one stays about the same on my skin the whole time. Slightly more woody on the drydown.  I am a bit disappointed that I can't smell those dusty tomes but the rest of this scent definitely makes up for that! When I read up on this scent I found lots of talk about the coffee, it is strange that I can't smell that at all! But I do have one other coffee scent, and I can's smell any coffee when I wear that one either, so maybe my skin just eats coffee notes. Anyhow, Miskatonic University is my absolute favorite of this lot! Definitely full bottle worthy! Both sillage and longevity are well above average.

On the whole my first meeting with the famed BPAL was positive. These are interesting, and rather unique, oils! Concentrated too, and long lasting! There were other BPAL imps in my package from Su, and some of them were absolutely terrible but I did end up liking five out of ten! :) I can't quite understand the BPAL hype but I'll probably end up ordering from there at some point!

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 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 Review - Miel de Sauvage et Tabac

Miel de Sauvage et Tabac by Alkemia.

I have had Alkemia among my favorites on Etsy for a long time, but never ordered. Miel de Sauvage et Tabac (otherwise known as MdSeT) was the reson I finally ordered some samples from Alkemia. I had read many rave reviews about this scent and it sounded so intriguing, I just hade to try it. (If you want to read some of the reviews that influenced me there is one here and one here.)

I love this one, but i also HATE it! Even now as I prepare to review this I hesitate to put it on my skin... I can smell it as soon as I open the film canister where I keep it... It overpowers every other scent in that film canister. So far it is a lovely scent though. Then I take a deep breath to master my nerves and open the vial...

In the bottle it is still quite lovely. The tobacco is muted, a resinous and sweet tobacco, covered in honey. Then I put it on my skin.

Something scary happens when this is put on my skin, it was mild and sweet in the bottle, on wet it is a monster!! The sillage is unbelieveable, I cannot escape this scent even with my hand as far from my nose as possible. And at this stage I do want to escape. Right now this smells, no stinks like my grandmothers house where she has been smoking indoors for 40 years. It smells musty and stale. Is it supposed to smell like this? I don´t know, it might be my skin. My skin does strange things sometimes...

Unfortunately this first stage does not go away for a couple of hours. The power if this is impressive, I just wish I loved it. When it finally does calm down it is wonderful. When the tobacco softens and the honey gets to bloom it is gorgeous and the amber in the background is warm and beautiful. Truly awesome drydown! Oh, and the longevity is immense! 24 hours on me!

Tobacco is usually a very comforting scent to me as my awesome mother is a smoker, but this tobacco does not remind me of her... it reminds me of my grandmother, and that is not as positive. I´ll still be keeping this sample though, I will try to layer it with other scents as it is intriguing and might add interest to a boring scent. But I don´t think I can stomach wearing it as is, the wet stage is just too unsettling and overpowering. Perhaps if I scrub it a little after putting it on, maybe I could skip the whole wet stage completely... I will have to try!

Still, I recommend everyone to try this one, it is the most unique scent I have tried to date! You might just love it, or you will hate it, but in any case you will have had a memorable experience!

Perfume Review - DarlingClandestine Part 2

Okay, so a few of weeks ago I recieved a wonderfully generous package of perfumes and samples from DarlingClandestine. I did a review for three of the scents a while ago (you can find that review here) but three of the scents I din´t feel familiar enough with yet to sufficiently describe. You could say I had not gotten to know them yet or decided what my relationship was with them. I sometimes need prolonged contact with a perfume before I can decide if I love it or not. But as long as a scent works well on my skin it is mostly only a matter of time and adjustment before I fall in love with it!

I am normally drawn to scents that are of a wood/spice/gourmand variety so a few of the scents I recieved were a bit out of my comfort zone. Vardogr, reviewed in part one, was described as a "dark, damp, herbal fragrance" and that was close enough to my tastes that I felt compelled to try it. Dark, damp, mossy I can handle, even like, maybe even adore, though I haven´t quite reached that state yet. Gram Negative was fresh green, dark floral and damp moss, not something I would expect to enjoy. Most florals fit somewhere on a scale between abhor and dislike for me, the only notable exception being iris, that I adore! Green or fresh in a scent description is also something that will usually turn me off. But there was that moss, and it showed in the scent as well, it wasn´t at all as frightening as it sounded... Of the scents I recieved, only one was really definitely true to my normal tastes. That was Big Top Train, spicy, loud, creamy and just gorgeous!

Out of the remaning three scents, one was a love at first sight that has since waned a little bit. The other two had elements I liked and elements I disliked... Of those one is still not quite a scent I love, while the other has grown substantially in my regard.

Aragon is a mystery for me, the description says lavender, sea salt, wine, leather, caramel and chocolate... on me it is SAFFRON (where did that one come from?) with some lavender and a drydown that is a comforting sweet gourmande, that might be the caramel and chocolate. From the description I also got a rather masculine vibe (not that I really care much about perfume gender, I much prefer unisex and masculine scents to feminine florals) the leather, the wine, the sea salt... but as I don´t smell any of those notes... um... Well let´s just say that I feel as if Evonne of DarlingClandestine describes one scent to me, but the one I smell is another altogether. I like this scent a lot, saffron is definitely among my favorite notes! But lavender has never really worked on my skin, and turns just slightly soapy. And however much I love the powerful saffron there is still something that I feel I´m missing about this scent... I feel like I don´t quite "get it"... It is sweet, comfortning, perfect for Christmas, but somehow I don´t think that was how it was intended to be. It also fails to develop on my skin, there are no curious complexities, no changes, and it fades after just a couple of hours. I´m blaiming my chemistry for this failiure, there must just be something in this that disagrees with my skin...

Another type of perfume I have a problem with are oceanic scents. They tend to be very sharply fresh, almost metallic, on my skin. Step Right Up is described as "a clean, oceanic, very unisex fragrance with notes of wood and spice". That sounds like a precarious balance to me, the clean and the oceanic on one side and the woody and spicy on the other. On my skin it IS a precarious balance, because my skin does dislike the clean sharp sea in this scent. On first application it is harsh, salty and slightly acidic (citrus in here somewhere or is that just an olfactory hallucination?). The middle of this scent is nice and the drydown is beautiful, woods and lovely spices. The oceanic nature fades quite fast, so I really just have to get trough that and then I can enjoy the rest of this scent. But as I can´t really appreciate the oceanic element much of the complexity of this scent is lost for me. The parts I can appreciate are nice and lovely, but not very complex. Again, I´m blaiming this on my chemistry, I know that it doesn´t handle clean and oceanic very well.

The last perfume in my package, Fisticuffs, has really made a stunning recovery after it made some really quite bad first impresions on me. My first thought was "ughh... fresh... soapy..." and then I moved on and rather forgot about this scent for a week or so. This scent is described as "wine and honey and hot blood and concrete, with the green rush of the thrill of the fight", so maybe it is supposed to give a rather harsh first impression, like a punch in the face. But the thrill of the fight did catch up with me! This scent is so unique and fast turning into somewhat of a signature scent! Where gourmand scents make me feel relaxed this scent empowers me! All the notes mingle so beautifully, and the complexity is stunning! This is a scent that really changes a lot during the time it lasts (which on me is 12 hours or more), sometimes it is wine at the forefront, sometimes the sweetness of honey, at times it is sharp and green (but in a way that works on my skin, just like with Gram Negative)... I don´t know quite how blood or concrete smells in a perfume so I cannot quite tell you if this smells of either, but this perfume would probably not smell this unique with just honey, wine and something green, so I guess they are there somewhere, hiding and adding something sinister and unsettling. Something I love with this perfume, that I lack with the other two, is the images and associations that come to mind. The complex story that unfolds! I´m glad I got a whole bottle of this gorgeous stuff, now I can try some layering, this stuff probably works wonders with anything slightly booring!


Do any of you have specific types of pefume that you love and any surprising crushes on scents that are really not your type?