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Okay, so after placing my order with Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, I found out that orders are taking 2 months and up (!) and I couldn't wait that long. So I bought a couple of samples off the Livejournal group. It's an active group of people selling and swapping samples (and sometimes full bottles) they tried but didn't like. You can only get what people are offering of course, and if you're grossed out by the idea of pre-owned perfume then this isn't the way to go. But that doesn't bother me, especially if they only tried it once or twice. It seems like a great system to deal with the company's difficulty meeting demand.

I don't know if everyone is this fast or if I just got lucky, but I sent a few bucks via Paypal on Saturday, and I have the imps today! My first BPAL purchase ever turns out to be Cold Moon and Wanda. I tried on Cold Moon first, so it's my first review. It's part of a limited edition series from a few months ago, and wasn't sold in imps. So the person who sold it to me (or someone who sold it to her) must have bought a 5ml bottle and decanted it into sample vials.

Cold Moon: "The Full Moon that shines over the frost-rimed heart of winter. Traditional lunar oils combined with glittering snow flowers, soft breezes and frozen ferns. (Gender neutral)"

In the bottle: Very sweet. Reminds me of bubblegum?

Wet: Whoa. It's a pretty smell, but much more perfumy than I was expecting. Well, duh, it is perfume. But the people on the review forum are always talking about how different BPAL is from commercial perfume, so I was kind of expecting it not to smell like perfume. It seems strong to me, but I put it on while Georg was in the room a few feet away and he didn't seem to notice. So I guess it's not too overwhelming.

Drydown: It's nice and light, a pleasant smell, but still more sweet and perfumy than I would prefer. I don't see a man wearing this. Maybe it's the floral that I'm not liking. Which would be bad, since I ordered several florals in my big order from BPAL. Well if it turns out I don't like floral, I can always swap them.

A bunch of reviews described this as "watery," which appealed to me, but I have to say I don't get it. What is water supposed to smell like, anyway?

If I smell like perfume, at least I don't smell like stinky perfume. I sat down right next to Georg and even kind of draped my arm over him, and he didn't say anything until I asked if he noticed anything different about the way I smelled. He said that he had noticed it, but had figured I had changed shampoo. For someone (like me) who's fairly hesitant about the whole concept of perfume, that's a pretty good response. He said he couldn't really smell it from three feet away, even when I waved my arms in the air. But then he could smell it distinctly when he stepped into the area where I had been waving my arms.

Lasting: Almost five hours and I can still smell it faintly on the left wrist, strongly on the right. The left wrist smells like what I wanted from the start: not a perfume smell, just "wow, I smell good!" The right wrist still smells like perfume, but not as sweet now.

Overall: Georg's response pretty much matches mine: "It's not my favorite thing in the world, but it's nice." Pleasant, but it didn't send me into raptures like the people on the BPAL forum. I'm not going to relegate it to the swap pile immediately; I may find that after trying out different scents I can better handle the sweetness of this one. But my first impression is that this is not something I would wear every day.

[ETA: Midnight, both wrists smell great. Just the effect I was hoping for: me, only better. Too bad it took seven hours to get here.]