Battle of the lavender bombs: BIR Extradose vs Purple Melancholia

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10h (edited) • SOTD 🍊

Lavender is one of my favorite notes and I’ve been looking at adding another lavender-forward fragrance to my collection. Initio Rehab was a near miss (I like it a lot but there’s something just a bit cloying about that one) and I’ve kind of always wanted one of those awesome spikey BIR bottles, so tonight I’m battling the new Purple Melancholia vs Extradose to see if one or both are FBW.

Purple Melancholia opens with a wave of smooth, creamy, lightly sweet lavender. There’s definitely some warmth and richness here from the cardamom, and faint creaminess coming from coconut. It’s not a sunscreen coconut, think a can of thick coconut milk or a coconut creme pie, and even then it’s not super coconutty. I don’t typically like coconut in fragrances but it works beautifully here. This scent is very familiar - I worked through a decant of the similarly creamy lavender BIR Ivory a few months ago, and this one feels like they replaced the smokiness with cardamom and somehow made the lavender a bit smoother. Projection was ok - I had to lean in to about 1’ to get it, but it was pushing off strong in that range. I’d say it’s pretty linear for about 3-4 hours, after which it starts to turn into an ambery lightly vanillic with a touch of lavender skin scent. 8 hours into the wear and I could still pick up faint traces of it. I think this can be worn all year aside from the peak of summer, with the cardamom warmth carrying it in cooler months but the light aromatics and coconut creaminess working in slightly warmer months.

Extradose lives up to its name - it opens with an explosion of sweet lavender. There’s definitely some spice thrown in here - like maybe a touch of cloves or something - but the sweet lavender is the star of this show. The lavender here is a bit sharper, like maybe the flowers aren’t quite fully grown yet or you’re getting some of the bitter green stem - it’s definitely not as smooth as Purple Melancholia. But that’s ok - the lavender here is unapologetically in your face and is clearly the star of the show. It’s also pretty linear, projecting a bit more than PM, like maybe 1.5’-2’ for 3-4 hours, then settling into a similar lightly sweet and aromatic but slightly more woody and ambery skin scent. It’s also a bit longer lasting than PM — 10 hours later and I can still faintly pick this up. Even though it doesn’t have the cardamom of PM, this one somehow comes off thicker and heavier, and I don’t think it would be as good a choice in the late spring and early fall - but it’s just luscious in cool weather.

So… are they full bottle worthy? Absolutely! In a large collection I’d defintely get one of them. Which one, you say? Damn that’s a hard one. It would certainly be redundant to get both unless you are trying to collect the full BIR range. I think I prefer the smoothness of the Purple Melancholia and could wear it a few months more in the year vs Extradose. But both are really beautiful. Will I actually get it? I’m still not sure - my small collection has a bunch of lavender forward scents, but nothing creamy like this. So I think the answer is… maybe! I just have to decide if I’m getting over-concentrated with lavender forward scents.

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