Twelfth Night (Holiday no.2)

Not just for Christmas anymore. Don't be put off by the holiday theme here, or all the forest notes. Dawn needs to update her description. This is one of her earlier perfumes, maybe as early as 2004 or so; I can't remember exactly when she started the Holiday series. But it was years before the current woody perfume bonanza of the last 5 years or so, when those of us who love them marvel at the differences between them, not always so subtle. Twelfth Night is everything SchopenhauersNose says it is. It's all those woody, patchouli, frankincense and myrrh notes you pay hundreds for in Armani or Tom Ford or whatever; you're just not buying it at Saks or Neimans and/or getting a pat on the back from your snobbier friends. No glitzy bottle; just good juice belting out the notes. I need a bigger bottle of this stuff to tell, and I need to wear it sometime than winter, but I think it will even hold up on a cool summer day, if you temporarily disassociate the name with the scent.

Frankincense, myrrh and cypress. That’s mostly it, a slightly sweet mix of these three very persistent notes. It smells a lot like the frankincense/myrrh burning incense you get in hippy shops, but very good quality. This is a great winter scent especially for the holiday season. I particularly like frankincense, which is just as well - it is the main note, and with these ingredients the scent stays put all day. Dries down to a very pleasant, slightly spicy myrrh musk.

Dawn’s website describes this as “a dense and foresty oakmoss-rich design that is also a mildly spiced, conifer-woody” and “in the deepest woods on the darkest night ... the scent of the Solstice.” I don’t get a lot of what you would call freshly cut wood here, but there’s enough resin and balsam here to engage in hours upon hours on winter daydreaming. Note include: brown oakmoss, East Indian patchouli, frankincense, juniper berry, laurel leaf, and myrrh. When I told Dawn “Here are dozen notes I love, send me what you think I’ll like the most,” it came as no surprise that she has a preternatural sense for what I would adore. This is a frankincense and myrrh bomb – and I don’t mean to say that it lacks subtlety. This is exactly what I would have imagined the manger to smell like on Christmas night 2,000 years ago after the three Wise Men arrived – rich with spices, hay, warmth, and of course myrrh and frankincense. This really smells extraordinarily expensive – but it’s one of the least expensive scents in her sizeable line of perfumes. What makes this scent so good, as if there needed to be anything else, was that it comes in a variety of different products, including a body lotion, a body oil, and an organic Shea butter lotion. Can you imagine applying the body butter on a bitter cold winter night after a steaming hot bath? That’s my idea of luxury.

Musk, metallic, incense, oakmoss, and citrus. I keep on sniffing that metallic oakmoss with few woody notes and a tiny bit of honey for the sweetness. The colder it goes the sweeter & oily it gets. If it wasn't for that metallic note it would have been superbly alluring.