Sunday Night Chilling with BBW Pink Petal Tea Cake

Sometimes when I'm home alone on Sunday night, it's the perfect time to dig into my stash of candles and wax melts. I have so much stored away that it's easy to forget what's sitting at the back of the cabinet.

Earlier I discovered a half-burnt tumbler of Pink Petal Tea Cake from Bath & Body Works that I was nuts for when it just launched. This isn't one of those candles that I can leave burning for hours though. It's VERY sweet. Imagine one gigantic, intense, rose-flavored macaron. Beautiful in small dozes but potentially cloying on hot days or in small spaces.

I left it burning just long enough to get an even wax pool and then blew it out. My living room is still smelling of rose macaron right now. Lovely end to a weekend.

P.S. Yes that is my Innisfree Sleep Well candle, alive and well. I decided not to burn it last week. I usually have a bunch of very different scents sitting out and then I'll look at them and decide what I feel like burning most.

Lolita Lempicka Le Premier Parfum

My journey with Lolita Lempicka's eponymous house fragrance, Lolita Lempicka (now called Lolita Lempicka Le Premier Parfum) is a long and winding one.

My first memory of it was the ad campaign which showed a magical fairy-like woman in a sheer lavender gown, legs and arms sparkling in the twilight as she languishes in an enchanted forest.

That was the age of Cool Water Woman and Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue. To my untrained nose at the time, the mish-mash of dark syrupy-sweet herbal licorice (something I never developed a taste for and which still appalls me today) and medicinal cherry liquour that is Lolita Lempicka was off-putting.

Around 2003 I really started getting into fragrances for the first time, and was seduced by the sweetly toxic Dior Hypnotic Poison, which was my induction into the world of gourmands. After I discovered Angel, Lolita Lempicka (ironically created by Annick Menardo, the same parfumeur who created Hypnotic Poison) would repeatedly come up on the beauty boards as its more modern, avant garde successor. It was only a matter of time before I sought it out in a perfume store.

My forgotten bottle of Lolita Lempicka; over 10 years old. The juice is still pristine!

I bought it, wore it several times and gave it a good go, but finally decided I hated it; couldn't stand the cherry syrup note and the black licorice, so I tucked it away in a dark cupboard. It smells beautiful when you catch a whiff of it from a distance; the powdery violet and iris, mixed with the tonka, patchouli and praline smells like a gorgeous confection with icing sugar dusted over it. But on hot days or if I smelt it close up, it was too sweet and rich in a heavy and medicinal way to me.

Then early last year, when I was packing up to move to a new apartment, I finally rediscovered my old bottle hidden away. And it looks and smells as good as it did.

Oddly enough, I like it now.
And I liked it enough that I placed an order for the l'Eau de Minuit edition, which I actually prefer since it doesn't contain the cherry note, is softer on the licorice and sugary praline, and more fuzzy and grown-up with lots of myrrh and benzoin to accompany the dark vanilla.

Funny how tastes change. I still only wear it on occasion. Licorice is not a note that sits easy with me because I didn't grow up eating it here in Asia, and frankly it's a taste that I have not acquired. It's just a very odd and medicinal/herbal spicy-bitter smell to me. In scents where it's very faint, like Serge Luten's Jeux de Peau, I love it.

But where it's quite dominant, like in Lolita Lempicka, I spritz very sparingly, sniff from a distance, and reserve it only for cooler temperatures.

• Top notes - ivy leaf, pineapple, lemon, rosewood, sour cherry and anise
• Heart notes - lily of the valley, rose, jasmine, licorice, violet and iris
• Base notes - sweet almond, vanilla, heliotrope, tonka bean, musk, praline and vetiver

YSL Black Opium Eau de Parfum Review

The original YSL Opium perfume was launched to great fanfare and controversy in 1977. And it's a spice-bomb of a scent, laden with incense, coriander, citrus, pepper, cloves, bay, jasmine, carnation, patchouli, cinnamon, orris root, peach, lily, rose, labdanum, tolu balsam, opopanax, vanilla, and tons of other ingredients. It's a complex fragrance that wraps around you like a boa constrictor, and you really need a certain personality to pull it off.

Even the watered-down modern incarnation is still extremely strong and heavy by current standards, and even though I consider myself adventurous as far as scents go, it's still not a perfume I can really wear.

YSL Belle d'Opium and Opium Vapeurs de Parfum

The brand has launched several variations in the last few years, including notable releases such as Belle d'Opium and Opium Vapeurs de Parfum. Each successive Opium has been much softer and more mainstream than the original, to the extent that I can't really say any of them even resemble the original at all.

• Belle d'Opium is a tobacco- and patchouli-centered, with a smoky herbal sweetness. Like a beautiful girl lying in a harem smoking a hookah.
• Opium Vapeurs de Parfum is a very translucent, mildly spicy pink-pepper and amber scent. More like a trace of soft oriental incense lingering in a boudoir.

Black Opium is the newest of the lot, and unlike all its big sisters, it doesn't have any trace of that enigmatic exoticism in its DNA at all. In fact, I feel YSL just decided it had to create an accessible new perfume to appeal to the younger masses, and decided to place it under the "Opium" franchise simply to add the impression of edginess that the scent actually lacks.

For some that's bad news.
What's an Opium that's not exotic??!

YSL Black Opium eau de parfum

On the other hand, it's a lot more generally accessible and I daresay will sell a lot better than most of the other Opiums. 

Despite the fact that the official press notes claim this is a rock'n'roll, dark, and mysterious interpretation, with dark coffee a major note, it really isn't.

This is a candied vanilla-jasmine with maybe a trace of sweet coffee (more a vanilla latte than gourmet black coffee). The pink pepper, cedar and even the patchouli - which is in all of the Opiums - are not even all that apparent.

If you like sweet warm girl-next-door scents like Katy Perry Meow, Taylor Swift Incredible Things, or Jessica Simpson Fancy, I daresay you will like this quite a lot. I do actually own all of the above listed scents, and I also wear Black Opium quite often because it's so gosh-darned easy to enjoy even when I'm pottering around the house. 

But it's FOR SURE not a scent I wear when I want to feel chic. And it's certainly not something I'd reach for if I want to feel mysterious and grown-up. If you're looking for complexity, mystery, and exoticism, look elsewhere!