All items mentioned in the review were purchased with my own funds.
Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has a series of officially licensed perfumes based on the works of Neil Gaiman. The perfumes based on the book and movie Coraline have had three groups of scents released so far--here are the two perfumes from the first group of scents in the series, Mouse Circus and Butterscotch Balls and Black Beetles.
Price: $26 for 5 mL of perfume oil in an amber glass bottle. The Coraline perfumes are charity, not-for-profit fundraisers--the proceeds go to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
Samples: Not available for these scents.
Warning: review may contain spoilers for the book and/or movie.
Mouse Circus
Description from website:
"In the flat above Coraline’s, under the roof, was a crazy old man with a big mustache. He told Coraline that he was training a mouse circus. He wouldn’t let anyone see it.
“One day, little Caroline, when they are all ready, everyone in the whole world will see the wonders of my mouse circus. You ask me why you cannot see it now. Is that what you asked me?”
“No,” said Coraline quietly, “I asked you not to call me Caroline. It’s Coraline.”
“The reason you cannot see the mouse circus,” said the man upstairs, “is that the mice are not yet ready and rehearsed. Also, they refuse to play the songs I have written for them. All the songs I have written for the mice to play go oompah oompah. But the white mice will only play toodle oodle, like that. I am thinking of trying them on different types of cheese.”
A toodle oodle of pink cotton candy noses, vanilla spun sugar fur, scattered kernels of popcorn, and a touch of polished golden wood."
This smells very much like popcorn flavoring when first applied. Not exactly like real popcorn, but like buttered popcorn-flavored Jelly Bellies, for instance: an unmistakable, rather evocative smell with hints of salt and plastic. As it starts to dry, it goes from smelling purely like popcorn to smelling like caramel corn, or possibly kettle corn: a sweet, rich, vanilla-tinged note rises from the buttery, grainy popcorn background.
The scent thins out a bit as it dries down. If it's possible to have an airy perfume that smells like popcorn, I suppose this would be it; it doesn't feel very substantial or strong. It gets less sweet as it wears, too, smelling more like butter and wood, as odd as that sounds.
A strangely bitter, almost celery-like undertone comes out of the perfume about an hour into its drydown on my skin. I get this with certain musks sometimes, and it may be something specific to my skin.
It's not a strong or long-lasting perfume; my skin seems to drink it up, leaving behind just a vague creamy vanilla sweetness with that odd, bitter undertone after a few hours.
This is a very kid-friendly perfume: sweet, happy, innocent, foodie. On the other hand, though, it does smell a bit like a novelty scent you could buy at Claire's alongside the rhinestone headbands and 12-packs of cheap earrings. If it didn't have the $26 price tag and fancy nerd branding, would I be reviewing it to this level of detail? A comparison with Demeter Popcorn might be interesting, but I don't enjoy smelling like popcorn enough to add another popcorn perfume to my arsenal.
Butterscotch Balls and Black Beetles ([sic]: the label spells "black beetles" as two words, while the copy spells it as a single word, "blackbeetles")
Description from website:
“The other mother sat down on the big sofa. She picked up a shopping bag from beside the sofa and took out a white, rustling, paper bag from inside it.
She extended the hand with it to Coraline. “Would you like one?” she asked politely.
Expecting it to be a toffee or a butterscotch ball, Coraline looked down. The bag was half filled with large shiny blackbeetles, crawling over each other in their efforts to get out of the bag.
“No,” said Coraline. “I don’t want one.”
“Suit yourself,” said her other mother. She carefully picked out a particularly large and black beetle, pulled off its legs (which she dropped, neatly, into a big glass ashtray on the small table beside the sofa), and popped the beetle into her mouth. She crunched it happily.
“Yum,” she said, and took another.
“You’re sick,” said Coraline. “Sick and evil and weird.”
“Is that any way to talk to your mother?” her other mother asked, with her mouth full of blackbeetles.
Butterscotch candies flecked with dirt, encased in a shiny black shell of myrrh, patchouli, and anise seed."
Note: there was a limited number of bottles of BB&BB produced, and this scent has sold out and been removed from the website, but may be available second-hand on sites such as eBay.
This scent blasts you in the face with butterscotch when wet. It smells like the shiny yellow Brach's Butterscotch Disks my grandma used to keep in a candy dish, incredibly sweet and buttery rich.
As it dries on the skin, a weird, herbal, woodsy bitterness comes out from behind the sweetness, making it an apt characterization of Coraline's Other Mother, the main antagonist of the book. Although vetiver isn't listed in the notes, the bitter notes smell strongly of vetiver to me (a dry, woodsy, almost peanut buttery or nutty smell) with myrrh, just a slight hint of patchouli, and cedarwood. Anise gives it an herbal coolness without it smelling explicitly of licorice.
By the time it's dried down for perhaps 20 minutes, the scent has morphed from cloying, caramelized candy to a dark, dirty, mysterious, almost smokey concoction with a smear of velvety-soft butterscotch and myrrh sweetness behind the dirt. I think it would be a great unisex scent at this point (well, I think anyone can really wear any perfume they want, but I guess my point is that it could be construed as "traditionally" masculine) and although I'm not usually a huge fan of patchouli or resins like myrrh, I really enjoy the earthy, sinister aspects of the perfume because of how they're softened and smoothed out by the sweeter notes.
It is strong, with great sillage and great lasting power. I'm not sure I'd want to wear it every day, but it feels perfect as a scent to dab on in autumn, around Halloween: a gust of dark but sweet incense you might wear to stroll through the cool air, under the changing leaves.
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