Saturday, August 22, 2015

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab: Eisheth Zenunim

purchased and reviewed by ThoraSTooth

BPAL Scent of the Day:  Eisheth Zenunim (Carnaval Diabolique IV, Ladies of the Grindhouse) -- Honey, ambergris, neroli, white peach, patchouli, and cocoa absolute.

Sometimes I wake up smelling the perfume I want to wear that day.  Today is such a day.  It's time for my favorite "I can't believe these notes work together on me!" perfume, Eisheth Zenunim.

In the bottle this one is salty, aquatic, and floral.  The neroli is deep and rich, not high and sharp like some of those orange blossom notes.  I can tell this has aged since I bought it in 2008, because the bottle used to smell more like peach and chocolate.

Wet on my skin the peach shows up to pair with the floral.  The salty aquatic note is still there; that'd be the ambergris.  The honey is very restrained, hard to make out apart from the neroli.  The dark chocolate is just a whisper of its former self; when the bottle was new the chocolate was a lot stronger.  It used to be a lot like a salty peach bonbon!  However, even though the balance has changed I still love this one.

As it matures there's this period when it suddenly goes very light, and I always worry that my bottle's gone off.  But then the full scent develops, and wow!  Is it worth the wait!

This is a fruity-patchouli scent, that much is certain  The white peach, which sometimes has a tendency to be sugary, is not so in this iteration.  The honey is sweet, but it's also restrained and clean, not foody or powdery or floral.  The neroli fine-tunes the peach and honey into something really beautiful, with a goldy-orange feel against the background of herbal (not rooty) patchouli.  The little fillips of cocoa and ambergris shape the scent, keeping it in check with their surprising presence.

The Lab's scents from the Carnaval Diabolique period represent some of the finest patchouli-oriented work in the entire catalogue.  This quirky, WTF scent (peach ambergris?  honey patchouli?  chocolate neroli?) is a one of a kind, and I adore it.  I look forward to Eisheth Zenunim's re-release as the Carnaval Diabolique returns from the dead.

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