Thursday, July 23, 2015

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab: Pluto

purchased and reviewed by ThoraSTooth

BPAL Scent of the Day:  Pluto (Celestials 2004) -- no description given.

The Lab released an early line of scents devoted to astrological takes on the planets.  They haven't been available for a long time.  I like testing early Lab scents because I enjoy seeing the changes in an artist's development over time; accordingly, I have kept my eyes open for those early blends.  From time to time the Lab finds a really old bottle in their 
oubliette
dungeon storeroom and puts it on their Etsy site.  That's how I got ahold of a bottle of Pluto just in time for the culmination of NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto. 

In the bottle this is mostly a light tart resin with maybe a fillip of patchouli.  Wet on my skin there's a sudden rush of patchouli and a menthol impression that might be wood or might just be the red patchouli note.  Ethereal high notes of lavender and something citrusy, perhaps lemon verbena, mingled with a definite dragon's blood note, the stemmy rather than the floral kind.

This one took a long time to dry down and get stable.  For a while it was amping an extremely high floral I never did identify, but that eventually went away.  That menthol impression blended down smoothly into something light, citrusy, herbal, and indistinct.  At maturity Pluto is clearly a resin scent built around opoponax; after about two hours the opoponax went from the dry, tannic, woody version of itself to the expansive, warm, sweet but still very dark version of itself.  That's the note I love in Schwarzer Mond, Minotaur (as "bisabol myrrh"), Earth Phoenix, and Event Horizon, so I am happy to encounter it here.

Hello, Pluto!  Nice to meet you!

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