Review: Arcana - Her Fawn
Perfume: Her Fawn
Brand: Arcana
Format: Oil
Price: $28 for 5ml in an amber glass bottle. Also available in a 15ml amber glass bottle for $84.
Availability: Limited edition, currently available
Description: (From the Arcana Wildcraft website)
Soft brown velvet, skin musk, reindeer milk accord, rich butter CO2 extract, copaiba balsam, white iris, beeswax, maple sap, and a sliver of dry coconut.
Background:
Anyone who knows me knows that the deer is an animal near and dea(e)r to my heart. It's crazy, but I feel a spiritual connection to all varieties of deer, including caribou (which I do know are very different). Obviously, the Christmas season provides me with a wealth of opportunity to deer-ify my life.
When I learned about the Deer Goddess collection, naturally, I freaked out. Upon reading the notes of the various perfumes, I found myself with only three that I was interested in: Her Fawn, Her Antlers, and Her Crown. Tobacco, oud, and patchouli don't play nicely with my head or my skin, which unfortunately cuts the rest of the collection out of the realm of possibility for me. But, I mean, considering how much I love deer, if I had the money for decants of all of them, I'd still get them, because you never know.
Alas, the Christmas and Hanukkah season leaves me with a lot of gifts to purchase and activities to spend money on, so I opted instead to go for only Her Fawn (which sounded the best of the three I liked), Spell II: Divination (which was leaving the shop in a day and had been catching my eye for a while, but ended up being disappointing—more on that in another post), and Krampus Cones (because of the hype) as a gift to myself for the holidays and to qualify for the GWP Riot & Dishonor. In the end, I'm glad I picked up Krampus Cones and Her Fawn (spoiler alert), but wish I'd replaced Spell II: Divination with either of the other two in the Deer Goddess collection and, frankly, I could have gone without the GWP.
All that out of the way, on with the review.
Review:
In the bottle, Her Fawn is equal parts sweet butter and musk. The butter is sort of sugary and vanilla-ish, which is an interesting way to describe something that doesn't smell edible in the slightest. Meanwhile, the musk is a lovely, sophisticated sort of velvety skin musk. Really, the notes description is very appropriate.
Wet, it's very much the same, but perhaps the butter is a bit more prominent here with just the faintest backdrop of the sweet musk. It's not necessarily foody, but as mentioned, a lot more elegant. I'm not even sure it would smell gourmand if you eliminated the musky element, but it would certainly be too suffocating.
In fact, the longer you wear it, the more it toes the line between pleasantly sweet and just completely cloying.
That is, until about ten minutes pass and it's fully dry, where the butter has completely moonwalked out of the picture, leaving us with just a perfumey sweetness of all of the other notes (none of which are particularly discrete to my nose) mixed with a fuzzy, cozy, comforting, and somehow chilly musk. It smells like something a sophisticated older relative might wear—not in an "ew, grandma perfume" kind of way, but a worldly, lived kind of way.
It's interesting that this perfume references children of deer—fawn—when it really smells so grown up on the drydown. It's the butter at the forefront when it's still wet that makes it feel youthful. In fact, it's almost as though the perfume ages on your skin and you get to experience the fawn 'growing up' into perhaps the new Deer Goddess.
Can you tell I care too much?
Throw: Medium. I'd say you're safe wearing this if you work or live in close quarters to other people, because it projects slightly, but it's a very tame-yet-unique sort of scent.
Longevity: Strong for about 4 hours, but still detectable on the skin after 10.
Summary: An innocent-yet-elegant mingling of butter and velvety musk, where the butter quickly dissipates and leaves with it a mingling of all the other notes that becomes its own sweet, sophisticated scent.
Rating: 8/10 because I wish that I could detect some of the notes individually, especially the maple, milk, and coconut, but I think the mingling of all the notes is incredible and the butter really doesn't overstay its welcome.
Song: Tokyo Police Club, "Bambi" (yeah, that's right.)
Brand: Arcana
Format: Oil
Price: $28 for 5ml in an amber glass bottle. Also available in a 15ml amber glass bottle for $84.
Availability: Limited edition, currently available
Description: (From the Arcana Wildcraft website)
Soft brown velvet, skin musk, reindeer milk accord, rich butter CO2 extract, copaiba balsam, white iris, beeswax, maple sap, and a sliver of dry coconut.
Background:
Anyone who knows me knows that the deer is an animal near and dea(e)r to my heart. It's crazy, but I feel a spiritual connection to all varieties of deer, including caribou (which I do know are very different). Obviously, the Christmas season provides me with a wealth of opportunity to deer-ify my life.
When I learned about the Deer Goddess collection, naturally, I freaked out. Upon reading the notes of the various perfumes, I found myself with only three that I was interested in: Her Fawn, Her Antlers, and Her Crown. Tobacco, oud, and patchouli don't play nicely with my head or my skin, which unfortunately cuts the rest of the collection out of the realm of possibility for me. But, I mean, considering how much I love deer, if I had the money for decants of all of them, I'd still get them, because you never know.
Alas, the Christmas and Hanukkah season leaves me with a lot of gifts to purchase and activities to spend money on, so I opted instead to go for only Her Fawn (which sounded the best of the three I liked), Spell II: Divination (which was leaving the shop in a day and had been catching my eye for a while, but ended up being disappointing—more on that in another post), and Krampus Cones (because of the hype) as a gift to myself for the holidays and to qualify for the GWP Riot & Dishonor. In the end, I'm glad I picked up Krampus Cones and Her Fawn (spoiler alert), but wish I'd replaced Spell II: Divination with either of the other two in the Deer Goddess collection and, frankly, I could have gone without the GWP.
All that out of the way, on with the review.
Review:
In the bottle, Her Fawn is equal parts sweet butter and musk. The butter is sort of sugary and vanilla-ish, which is an interesting way to describe something that doesn't smell edible in the slightest. Meanwhile, the musk is a lovely, sophisticated sort of velvety skin musk. Really, the notes description is very appropriate.
Wet, it's very much the same, but perhaps the butter is a bit more prominent here with just the faintest backdrop of the sweet musk. It's not necessarily foody, but as mentioned, a lot more elegant. I'm not even sure it would smell gourmand if you eliminated the musky element, but it would certainly be too suffocating.
In fact, the longer you wear it, the more it toes the line between pleasantly sweet and just completely cloying.
That is, until about ten minutes pass and it's fully dry, where the butter has completely moonwalked out of the picture, leaving us with just a perfumey sweetness of all of the other notes (none of which are particularly discrete to my nose) mixed with a fuzzy, cozy, comforting, and somehow chilly musk. It smells like something a sophisticated older relative might wear—not in an "ew, grandma perfume" kind of way, but a worldly, lived kind of way.
It's interesting that this perfume references children of deer—fawn—when it really smells so grown up on the drydown. It's the butter at the forefront when it's still wet that makes it feel youthful. In fact, it's almost as though the perfume ages on your skin and you get to experience the fawn 'growing up' into perhaps the new Deer Goddess.
Can you tell I care too much?
Throw: Medium. I'd say you're safe wearing this if you work or live in close quarters to other people, because it projects slightly, but it's a very tame-yet-unique sort of scent.
Longevity: Strong for about 4 hours, but still detectable on the skin after 10.
Summary: An innocent-yet-elegant mingling of butter and velvety musk, where the butter quickly dissipates and leaves with it a mingling of all the other notes that becomes its own sweet, sophisticated scent.
Rating: 8/10 because I wish that I could detect some of the notes individually, especially the maple, milk, and coconut, but I think the mingling of all the notes is incredible and the butter really doesn't overstay its welcome.
Song: Tokyo Police Club, "Bambi" (yeah, that's right.)
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