Thursday, August 6, 2015

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab: Ded Moroz

purchased and reviewed by ThoraSTooth

BPAL Scent of the Day:   Ded Moroz (Yules 2009):  Light, darkness, kindness, and malice: golden amber, white amber, redwood, teak, bois du rose, sage, tree moss, and snow.

It's going to be a really hot day today, so I reached for one of my very best hot-weather scents.  Awe and mystique surrounded Ded Moroz six or seven years ago.  For a lot of years, there had been only one known bottle of prototype, which was resold on eBay for around $800.  But happily it finally came out as a Limited Edition so we could all partake of the mystique.

In the bottle, my now well-aged Ded Moroz smells like leaves -- not the sappy green leaves of a Hallowe'enies scent, but more mature and with a decided wood note along with the leaves.

Fresh on my skin there's almost a fennel note to this, a greenish licorice-type note.  Overall it is light and almost minty, definitely evergreen but not thick or pitchy.  There's some light balsamic wood and a breath of sage too.  Strangely, the golden amber is not to be noticed, but the white amber is.  White amber is also cool and greenish in impression, so it really works well with the herbal and evergreen notes here.

As it dries down there's some of the snow note.  Usually I don't do well with the snow note, but there's just enough of it here to make itself known, like a dusting atop a hemlock tree, barely weighting the branches.  I still don't get any golden amber, but the white amber provides some lovely resinous top notes to what may be the best evergreen scent in the catalogue.  It is complex, balsamy, restrained, refreshing, and very cool.

As it ages the greener, more herbal overtones of Ded Moroz fade down into the general balsam-amber base, without ever quite relinquishing their cool qualities.  I never get any hint of the heavy teak note, but the redwood one smells a lot like Muir Forest to me.

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