Love Potions reviews:
Messalina's Passion Potion
In vial: a soft, creamy, smooth, floral-fruity-incense scent.
On skin: interesting! This is a complex but well blended scent. Apparently this contains about 100 notes…the notes I smell now are ylang ylang, some fruits like pears and peaches, maybe some berries, and maybe lychees, a soft white musk, some other sweet floral notes, and an intriguing dry base of spicy sandalwood incense. It's mainly fruity-floral for now with woody incense and musk. Very pretty and very well blended for all it's myriad notes-nothing seems to clash for now. it gets smoother and fruitier, with a nice soft lychee-pear-peach scent accented with velvety white flowers, ylang definitely, but I think there's also plumeria or gardenia here too. There's a lovely woodsy base to it, dry and incense like. It's a very exotic scent, that's for sure! Almost like fruity incense smoke with a hint of incense-scented cloth to it, it reminds me very slightly of the likes of Mama-Ji but with fruit instead of spicy roses, and it has a different feel to BPAL. It gets a little less exotic-incense like at drydown and becomes more powdery, a tad dusty and pale, I think there's a dash of orris in here. It's also more floral at this point. It's decadent and feminine and voluptuous though and I really like it-I was wondering how a perfume with so many notes would work out on my skin and it actually smells very well balanced and smooth. Not a favourite but I like this one…I prefer it for the first couple of hours in it's peach incense stage.
Love Potion Pink
In bottle: buttery sugar with vanilla and apricot, and something sweetly pink to it.
On skin: whoa, this is sharp! it seems to have lost it's initial sweetness and now has an unusually sharp note to it, almost like sharp fruit, like strawberries and lemon juice. There's still a hint of caramel around the edges, apricot jam with a feel of candy floss, but the sharpness is a little puzzling. Though this sharp scent almost reminds me of Pink Moon 05 or Pink Phoenix, both pink scents with an almost sour bite. There's also a feel of fairground sweets, candy floss and fried doughnuts, and an unusually dry, slightly burnt woodsy note at the base (also reminiscent of Pink Moon 05). I swear I smell pepper too-probably pink pepper. It's not what I expected, but it's not bad either. Maybe the tart note will tone down a little at drydown…and I think it does. the sharp strawberry note doesn't disappear but the scent seems to settle into an interesting scent of strawberry flavoured candy floss surrounding a funnel cake filled with apricot jam, with a hint of spice! Then I start to notice the honeycomb, this could be what's making this scent slightly sharp and Pink Phoenix-like. It's very fun and light hearted, and indeed, very pink, but this sweet pinkness does have a cheeky, mischievous bite to it. And it's also a great substitute for Pink Phoenix, I think. I like it, but I wish that the pink sugar themed scents were sweeter on my skin. A lot of those pink sugar themed scents-be it Pink Sugar dupes, or BPAL's Pink Moon or Phoenix, this scent, and a few others-have a surprising sharp note to them and aren't as 'pure candy floss' as I hoped they would be. This one's not a favourite, but this pleasant girly scent is very pretty and cute, so I think I'll keep it.
Athena
In vial: very herbal! I don't smell amber yet but I smell rosemary and myrrh (I think?)
On skin: rosemary, and lots of it! This is a really nice balmy herbal scent. it reminds me strongly of those warm summer evenings in Greece (very fitting), it brings back wonderful memories of holidays there, the smell of herbs lingering in the warm, gentle air, a hint of salt from the sea breeze, the golden tones of sunset…I smell it all here. I smell a gorgeous myrrh and resin base which is soft and dark yet with a golden shimmer to it, it reminds me of the Sugared Frankincense and Myrrh scent, but without the sugar and with less frankincense and without the smoke I got from that scent. I don't really smell very much amber even after a few hours-it smells more like ambergris to me, slightly salty, not as sweet as the amber I'm used to. But the herbal resin scent I get, that wonderful Mediterranean evening smell with a sacred undertone of reverential incense, is very nice. It also feels meditative and calming too. I never got much amber in this scent at all which was a shame but I did have a beautiful drydown of a gorgeous golden myrrh (smells just like the resin I have) with dried herbs on top. This is really nice-I'm keeping my big sample!
Winter Snow Blossom
In vial: lychee! I love lychees so much, and this smells like frosty lychees with a hint of icy citrus and pine.
On skin: lychee and an interesting pine-lemon note at the back. When dry I can actually feel my skin tingling and cooling, and indeed I smell a little mint to this, maybe a touch of eucalyptus? It's a very unusual scent…it is fruity and incredibly sweet, smells like it's coated with sparkling white sugar and syrup, and lychee leads the way, but I also smell grapefruit here, a bitterness cutting through, but it doesn't detract from the sweetness. I also smell something that may be pine or fir, some sort of dark green evergreen note, a winter forest scent. I have no idea what dogwood smells like so I can't say if I smell it here. The 'ice notes' that Mara uses are very different in feel from Beth's (no bad thing), they are sweeter and darker and a little less ozoney as well, maybe a tad more perfumey? They share the same citrus-pine-cool feel but the ice in here feels differently structured from the ice notes in BPAL…not as cold smelling, it's more slushy? But then the scent gets a little too sweet. The ice seems to melt as the scent becomes warmer in tone, but it also becomes a lot more cloying, like overripe, over-sugared fruit. I don't smell as much lychee now but I smell sugar-saturated plums and strawberries, even a hint of banana. But the sweet fruits aren't fresh and a little bit sharp, but too cloying and sickly. And there's something about this scent which reminds me of air freshener. But after a few hours it actually tames down a bit and becomes a very pleasant pink fruity-sugary scent with plums, grapes and berries, sparkling and crystalline, almost like a sorbet, but warm. I like this but there are times when the sugar will be too much to handle, and I do prefer BPAL snowy scents, so it's being sold/swapped.