Spellbound Woods by Solstice Scents

The Official Product Description Sez:
A Soft, Incensy Blend of Vanilla, Sandalwood, Cedar & Amber

Spellbound Woods is magical blend of alluring vanilla, sandalwood, amber and cedarwood. It is amazingly soft, light and sensual…not overpowering at all. It is softly sweet from the vanilla, but not in a buttercream foody kind of way. It is a nice unisex scent and smells like a light, very mild incense without smoke notes. A soft vanilla is the strongest note, laying on a bed of very mild and delicious woods. This scent is pure magic. Contains sandalwood essential oil. A top seller!

This is one where the name is so wonderful that I was actually leery – I so VERY much wanted it to be as good as it sounds, that I was terrified it would fail me. Dear self: Stop placing so much importance on smells and words.

(Dear self: Are you kidding? You know who you’re talking to.)

The track. I’ve gotten off it.

….I blame the Spellbound Woods. 😀

So I opened the bottle, and for quite possibly the first time since I started doing these reviews, I had trouble picking out any singular notes on first whiff. It was too rich, too complex. Rich woods and heavy lilies and other exquisitely fragrant florals blossomed out from under that tiny cap like the spring kiss of a druidic goddess. There was dampness to it, dank vanilla, and an ever-so-faint hint of something fruity.

I HAD to get this onto my skin to see what it would do.

The first flush of scent was pure, dark vanilla, shot through with a note that was part soft rubberball, part decaying vegetation, and part wet crumbling wood. It was strange, and rather wonderful, and a little concerning. I was afraid that entrancing in-the-bottle spell was fading.

A short while later, as it dried down, the scent was sweetly rubbery, like a powdered bouncyball of my youth. Yet there remained, doo, the sweetness of a dark and decaying vanilla tree, succumbing to the dampness of a deep wood. Yet it was still intriguing. As time went on through the morning, the scent faded, and much more quickly than I anticipated. Come lunchtime, it was nearly indistinguishable, and I was thoroughly saddened.

Then the day carried on, and I found myself catching hints and wafts of scent here and there. A tease of vanilla, a brush of glimmering deepwoods flowers, a dash of old wood would catch my nose at the most unexpected moments. Come evening I found myself sniffing deeply at my wrists again, eager to discover what the Spellbound Woods were up to. They did not disappoint; vanilla flowers and dark woods, while now muted, dance together upon my skin.

Spellbound indeed.