Scentzilla!

There’s really no polite way to say this, so I’m just going to come out with it: Lola fragrance oil is sex. Some scents are flirty, some are sensual, some are sexy. This is S-E-X. In a bottle.

Lola is quite randy. This is the smell I would have if I happened to be a nymph who’d gone for a romp in the woods with Pan. Animal-like, earthy and sweetly piquant, it doesn’t smell directly of Pan himself, but rather more that I’d been unmistakably in his prescence, raunching it up gaily.

I find Lola to be one of those scents that improve with a little aging. When I first got my bottle, the opening tended to have a strong pine blast, but ten months later, this blast has disappeared. Moreover, musk and patchouli overrode all other notes to a large extent when my Lola was new, but time has given the oil a more developed melding of notes. The musk is still dense, but the patchouli now serves to prop up a sweet high floral note, and the nutmeg I considered overwhemed earlier has seemingly emerged from the shadows. Lola reminds me in feel of much older fragrances, such as Weil’s Secret de Venus oil, with its smooth density, though it’s not exactly old-fashioned.

The closest I can think of to a real-life comparison for this scent is of the night before Thanksgiving. I tend to prepare what dishes I can ahead of time, including pies. All that baking makes for a hot kitchen, a sweaty me, and a cloud of warmed spice wavering around the room. (Not really my sexiest moment, however, since I hate aprons, and end up in grubbies spilling ingredients all over myself.)

Lola is a deep dark fragrance oil, and not one I’d ever consider to use as my daily choice. Partly this is out of consideration for choosing the appropriate perfume for each occasion. And mostly? Because it sets me in mood. As Monty Python would say, nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

This oil would wear wobbly-in-the-knees sexy as a masculine scent, but… If like me, you have a husband with a very loopy sense of humor, and who is prone to bursting into song apropos of nothing, do NOT ask him to try this on. He will look at the name on the bottle, and proceed to belt out the Kinks. “Looooooh-LAH! L-O-L-A, Lola! Girls will be boys and boys will be girls!” And then the song will stick in your head, at which point you will become annoyed, so he will sing it every time from then on when you wear it. In other words, some men may be entirely too goofy to wear this scent.

Image: Nymphs and Satyr by Wm. Bougeareau