I splurged on myself to celebrate the release of Inner Workings. I used some small monies I had sitting in Paypal from selling a crochet thing I’d made, and picked myself up a bottle of Dead Writers perfume oil. I waited and watched, mostly not obsessively checking the tracking, and it came, and of course I opened it and put it on immediately!

I, uh… I don’t like it. 🙁

https://www.etsy.com/listing/108625077/dead-writers-perfumecologne-oil-5ml

The listing says it’s Tobacco, Heliotrope, Vetiver, Black Tea, Vanilla, and that it “evokes the feeling of sitting in an old library chair paging through yellowed copies of Hemingway, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Poe, and more. The Dead Writers blend makes you want to put on a kettle of black tea and curl up with your favorite book.”

This is not my experience of it. It’s very strongly sweet in the bottle, and much more lightly sweet on the skin. I’m not familiar with the scent of heliotrope or of vetiver, but as it doesn’t smell like tobacco or tea or vanilla to me I am guessing those are what I smell coming through strongest. Rather than evoking libraries and classic literature and tea, it evokes interesting old ladies picking through sunshiny antique shops with freshly-picked sprigs of lily of the valley tucked into the band of their hats.

It isn’t at all unpleasant, but it wasn’t what I was expecting and it’s not what I wanted. If you’re looking for something with the evocation mentioned by the seller, I would much more recommend that you check out the perfume In The Library from CB. http://www.cbihateperfume.com/in-the-library.html I have a 2ml bottle of it that, even using sparingly, I’m rapidly running out of.

Dead Writers is billed as being suitable for a man or a woman, and don’t let my assessment of it above deter you from trying it – your skin chemistry is likely to differ from mine, and your experience will be different.