Poe's Tobacco

This was my first or second purchase of a Tokyo Milk scent--I was torn between this and Gin and Rose Water, and bought them consecutively on sale at the local boutique the summer of 2014. Tokyo Milk had been sold at a different boutique in my teenage years in my hometown, and I was always intrigued by the scents. Poe's Tobacco is not a conventional tobacco based scent, and it does not carry that gentlemanly (or rakish) hedonistic element. To me, it smells like a Victorian front room, late afternoon sun filtered through lace curtains and dappling the old wooden floor and furnishings. Fruity fragrance hangs in the air from the autumn's apple harvest, but the sharpness of pipe tobacco that lingers on clothes and sinks into wood from the filthy habit ground the sweetness. The raven on the bottle perhaps should not invoke the notorious raven from the poem, but call to the season's avian inhabitants cawing outside embraced by the last warmth of the soon-disappearing sun. This isn't the perfume of the Rue Morgue, of Ligeia, or of Berenice. More so the Philosophy of Furniture and Poe's shorter poems, those that prompt an image of Poe writing his tales during the day, resisting the vices that plagued his life. The bottle I purchased on sale that summer wasn't quite full, but it was the only one and I always missed those extra millilitres. I purchased what seemed to be the very last available bottle only shortly after, and it is the scent I miss most of all. I have half a bottle that came with a leaky lid and remnants of a horribly placed price sticker on the glass that I cherish, reluctant to use all but for the most special occasions. Tokyo Milk perfumes aren't the most long lasting or powerful, but I think their subdued power is part of their experience. However, I accidentally spilled some (leaky cap) on a volume of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, and the scent lingered on that cloth-bound book for half a year.

I sell this perfume at a boutique and I have never heard anyone make a compliment like the one she said when she tried this on... She was a 70 something yr old lady, when i sampled this on her I saw her eyes get lost to a memory long ago. She told me a story of how this scent reminded her oof a young man she knew in the 1940s. I could see tears in her eyes as she told the story of how she would sneak away to take car rides with him. She described him as a long lost love ( things movies are made of). Due to the small size of the bottle, she bought 3. The scent It's self is very light and mild, I agree with others when they say they would use it as a linen spray. I would use it to spray my lingerie.

I'm not sure why other reveiewers are smelling such wildly differing scents... maybe their samples went bad? What I smelled was a light, aromatic fruity tobacco. Though I had hoped that this tobacco would work on my skin, but alas... I think that is what I was supposed to smell within the first 5 minutes. it is a greener tobacco; more like when the fresh picked leaves are drying, versus the dark smokier cured version. then it went all musky on my skin. Curse my dang skin! Try before you buy, but if it works you cant go wrong!

This perfume is very different than anything I've smelt. I want to say it's a mature smell, but as a 22 year old, I love and wear it. It reminds me of an old library, incense... spices. Very luxurious, but I can see it being too much for some people. I feel like I'm in an old antique shop (in a good way) when I spray this on my pillow.

So strange. When I first got this is smelled completely fresh and green to me, not really something I'd normally wear, but revisiting in now it smells smokey and dry and more how I would have expected it to. Not sure if it changed or I did, but I like it very much now. Maybe it just works better in an autumnal setting.