I get it. I know why St. Valentine’s Day is in February. It is an example of the Catholic program of replacing pagan holidays with their own. In this case, replacing the Roman festival of Lupercalia with St. Valentine’s Day. The problem is that unlike Italy, most of the Western World is kinda chilly in February. Not the best climate for a sexy holiday. When the powers that be were repackaging this for own modern consumer age, why didn’t they move it to June?
[ad#longpost]Think about it: you got the summer solstice, which is widely interpreted by many cultures to be a time to celebrate fertility and growth (i.e. sex). June is also a favorite time for weddings and weddings are about sex. We all know the happy couple are going to be doing it hardcore on their wedding night and a lot of the guests are inspired by their example (not to mention alcohol and desperation) to engage in carnal activities. Because of the heat, we’re all dressed in either sundresses or T shirts and shorts. So it’s just that much easier to get naked and get down to some lovin’. So it seems an appropriate time to talk about Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s sexy lines for St. Valentines Day.
(This is has nothing to do with the fact that I got super busy with graduate school and couldn’t find the time to write this until now. Nothing at all)
First off, we have the main line of Lupercalia scents that ranges from the airy heights that love can bring you to the moist depths that lust drives you. Dolce Stil Nuovo is Florentine poetry that extorts courtly love, of knights and maidens engage in chivalrous shenanigans. This scent is full of blooming flowers given poetic structure of crystalline white musk and warm passion of golden amber. Mixing the sacred and the profane, you have Khajuraho, named for the Khajuraho temples in India. Famed for its erotic sculpture, it shows that there are many paths to transcend this mundane realm, either through contemplating the divine or in the arms of someone locked in passion. It also shows that these paths are not mutually exclusive and need not be separate, but can complement each other like the bodies of lovers. The scent is a potent sample of the bounty of India: rich honey, date palm, tuberose, davana blossom, amber, white sandalwood, vanilla bean, Damask rose, and champaca flower. Definitely in the profane camp, you have Olisbos. Olisbos is ancient Greek for dildo. I doubt you would learn this in a regular classics class. Unless it’s being taught by the notorious Lady DinDin. This scent what you expect: polished wood, leather, and olive oil. Olive oil is ancient Greek for Astroglide.
Showing remarkable stamina, BPAL presents the fourth year of Novel Ideas For Secret Amusements. We are presented with another delightful and decadence batch of perfumes based on Shunga or erotic art. Please be warned, these pictures are explicit, but not what I would call exploitative. Some of these Asian-inspired scents leave nothing to the imagination like Gods Of Intercourse and Couple Engaged In Lovemaking not to mention Copulating Mice. Others are a bit more obtuse like Young Pine Saplings and Springtime Playfulness and also Biwa. For those not familiar with Japanese terms, biwa is a short necked lute. So playing the biwa is old Japanese for scratching the record.
Another line that Black Phoenix has put out is Venustas, scents inspired by the nudes of painter William Etty. Again, be warned, there are naked people. But the art explores the beauty of the human form without exploitation. For example, Wrestlers is a heady mix of sensual musks and oriental resins that evokes the masculine potency while locked in physical struggle. Male Nude, Arms Upstretched is also a musky scent, but less intense as the nude is restrained and is vulnerable to whatever is in the viewer’s imagination. In fact, I got all the male nudes in this series. I wonder why?
