Blackbird Broken Glass ~ fragrance review & a quick poll

Posted by Jessica on 13 August 2015 17 Comments

Blackbird Broken Glass

I’ve never met my fellow Now Smell This writer Kevin “in real life,” but I feel as though we’ve been friends for years — not only because we’re familiar with each others’ fragrance tastes and we’ve read each others’ writing for so long, but because we share other, non-perfume interests and opinions as well. One of them is a background in art history. Another is a strong dislike of hot summer weather. Kevin’s recent post on two fragrances for heatwaves suggested one scent-strategy for coping with soaring temperatures: “merging” with the oppressive weather by wearing intense, vivid scents. As I was testing Blackbird’s Broken Glass this week, I thought of another: wearing a fragrance that foreshadows autumn…

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The scent wafting from inside

Posted by Robin on 31 January 2015 2 Comments

The scent wafting from inside, a mix of ceremonial resins, smoked spices, burnt citrus, dry ice, quarry stone, seaports, old flower petals, overripe fruit, spent fuel, yesterday’s coffee and minty tea, gives this whole block in Seattle’s North End an aura that rocks the visitor forward and backward.

— That's the scent wafting from inside Seattle's Blackbird, one of several brands mentioned in Seattle’s indie perfumers bottle nature’s mysterious, sexy scents at The Seattle Times.

Blackbird Triton ~ fragrance review

Posted by Jessica on 4 July 2014 17 Comments

Neptune and Triton via NASA

I wrote about the Seattle-based business Blackbird last winter, when I posted a review of their incense cones (which are still favorites of mine). At the time, none of their personal fragrances really captured my fancy; the names were memorable and provocative (Tinderbox, Pipe Bomb), but the actual scents just didn’t fit my personal taste. But you just never know: Triton is the latest release from Blackbird, and I’ve been happily wearing my sample for the past few days.

Triton includes notes of violet leaf, iris root, cedar, aldehyde, incense, mimosa, carrot seed, dry amber, vetiver, styrax and black pepper. It was “named after the moon of Neptune that was in turn named after the son of Poseidon,” and “its scent carries the nose to the icy surface of its namesake moon. . . . It’s about finding and relishing the beauty of a frozen landscape.” It’s a tricky fragrance to classify: I’d call it a unisex mineral-earthy-woody scent…

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Blackbird Incense ~ home fragrance review

Posted by Jessica on 13 December 2013 9 Comments

Blackbird incense cones

The summer I turned seventeen, I had a new friend who liked to scent her room with incense sticks and cones, which she burned in an assortment of small pottery vessels that she had crafted in a ceramics class. I was impressed by her bohemian style — she also had wonderfully eclectic taste in clothing and music — and I soon adopted the incense-burning ritual for myself, at home and then in my college dorm room.

The incense we used in those days was run-of-the-mill stuff purchased at record stores or from street vendors, either heavy and harsh with synthetic sandalwood or sickly-sweet with fruit scents or soapy lavender fragrance. I later made the switch to candles, and I haven’t used incense cones for longer than I can remember. When I found out about the Blackbird Incense line, I remembered my teen years (and my strongly scented dorm rooms) with fondness, but I wasn’t sure whether I could pick up the incense habit again…

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