Review of Bread and Butterfly by BPAL

[lunabee34]

The Catalog Description

Bread, lightly buttered, with weak tea, cream, and a lump of white sugar.

The Forum Reviews

Most reviewers like this scent with the vast majority thinking it smells like bread or cake with a tea note underneath. Some reviewers mention smelling vanilla or cinnamon as well.

However, a small minority report smelling something plastic in the scent. Voodoocatwoman wins Best Non-Recommendation with the comment: "This stuff is noxious. It smells like early 1960's plastic baby doll head." LOL But Delirium1009 has a reaction that is eerily similar to my own: "The initial phase is very plastic-y, but that's also when it smells the most like bread." More on that later.

Our Reactions

Emma: cinnamon toast and sugar; very much a like

Josh: doesn't like it, but it doesn't make him feel ill or headachey

My mom: vanilla candle; immediately washes off

Me: Here's where it gets interesting. This perfume smells exactly like cinnamon toast to me. I smell buttery, sugary cinnamon toast that's just shy of being burnt around the edges. At the same time, I smell that waxy vanilla smell (that I think some reviewers are describing as plastic) my mom smelled and disliked so much. I do not know how these two scents can exist at the same time, but they do. it lasted a fairly long time and had pretty good throw for the amount I applied. I didn't hate this perfume, but I didn't love it either.

I am starting to develop a sense of how I'm going to react to some of the notes that BPAL commonly uses. I've tested several perfumes with mint in them, and I have trouble picking out the mint. Either my nose is just that bad or my skin eats mint oil. I think I probably do not get along well with ambergris, but further experimentation is necessary to speak definitively on that point. And I've noticed that the lighter the perfume oil is in the imp, the more likely I am to enjoy it. I wonder how I'll react to other foodie scents from BPAL given my reaction to this one.

I ended up giving Bread and Butterfly to Emma to have as her very own which made her day. :)


The Fic

Have 400 words of AtS: Fred Burkle gen

Bread and Butterfly

Many of Fred’s favorite childhood memories—the ones she loses herself in when she’s being shocked by the collar or later when she’s trying to figure out if a person can survive on the lichen that grows on her cave’s walls—are of baking with her mother. She remembers slathering salted sweet cream butter on thick slices of homemade bread and sprinkling them liberally with sugar and cinnamon. They’d toast into buttery, crunchy goodness with crusts that were almost, but not quite, burnt. Fred remembers baking cakes from boxes and muffins from scratch and rolling out dough for pizzas that were always too loaded with toppings to bake properly. And always while the goodies were baking, she and her mother would drink tea from the good china like fancy ladies, pinkies out.

Fred loved history as a child and knew what she wanted to be when she grew up before most of her playmates were even contemplating growing up. She’d be a historian and figure out the secret lives of ancient people, and maybe she’d write books or teach at a university or make documentaries about what she’d learned. But Fred has always loved science, too; she loved it long before Professor Seidell convinced her that physics is her true calling.

When she is curled up on damp stone and so weak from hunger and cold that her hands shake, she remembers her mother’s kitchen—sunlight filtering through white gauzy curtains, a bowl of lemons on the counter, the sweetness of vanilla and sugar and the warm yeasty smell of bread in the air. She remembers reading her mother’s cookbooks like novels, and she remembers the day that she realized exactly what the two of them were doing in that kitchen. “Mom,” Fred said, looking up from The Joy of Cooking. “It’s not just cooking. It’s science. We’re doing science!”

Her mother laughed. “That’s right, Winifred. We’re doing science.” Then she poured them both more Earl Grey, the liquid hot enough to scald Fred’s fingers through the teacup if she wasn’t careful.

Fred has forgotten many things. She can’t remember what being clean feels like anymore or what she felt like after pigging out at Taco Bell with her friends. She can’t remember a time when she wasn’t afraid. But Fred remembers baking with her mother—licking the batter off the backs of wooden spoons, sprinkling sugar on cookies cut in the shapes of stars, her mother’s hands on top of her own as they kneaded dough together.

Comments

[musyc]

This perfume smells exactly like cinnamon toast to me.

Okay, that doesn't sound like something I'd want to wear, but I think that could be a fabulous room-scent oil. The sort of thing I'd sprinkle on lightbulbs or whatnot.

[lunabee34]

*nods*

If it had smelled to me the way it smells to most reviewers, it's exactly the way I'd love for my kitchen to smell pretty much all the time. LOL

[umadoshi]

That sounds delightful to me! Mmm, cinnamon.

And I love the ficlet! It's charming and Fred is so FRED.

[lunabee34]

thank you! *blushes*

If all I had smelled was the cinnamon toast, I would have really liked it as well; I wish that waxy vanilla hadn't intruded. Emma loved it, though. :)

[umadoshi]

One of my Casual Job coworkers sometimes makes raisin bread toast for breakfast and it smells exactly like cinnamon toast, and every time I start craving it.