Carefully blended and infused by me in small batches in vintage glass wine bottles, this fragrance begins butter candy sweet and mellows on the skin to resiny wood and honeyed nectar. A multitude of different scent elements and weeks of methodical alchemy make Carny Wedding no ordinary scented oil mix-it’s a truly inimitable fragrance.

Carny Wedding was one of those fragrances from Darling Clandestine that I really wasn’t all that keen on upon first sniff, but over time it has attracted me. I remember one of my first few samples from DC was of Carny Wedding, and it was much sweeter than when I remember it, compared to the soil and perfume oil I have of it. The second brew seemed to be rather heavy on the smoke and it didn’t have that much of a sweet edge. I’ve had both the oil and solid since either late 2011 or early 2012 and they have aged beautifully! The smoke has really mellowed out, and the perfume has rather amped up it’s almost caramel like quality.

The thing is, there appears to be a difference in the way the perfume has aged in the solid and the oil, so it at times seems like maybe it’s a different perfume in both formats! The oil version has the stronger smoke note and smells a wee bit on the green side. The dry down is quite light and it eventually does wear down some of the smokiness to reveal its sweeter side, but the smoke does seem to carry through to the end. With the solid it’s a very creamy, thick sort of caramel sweetness to it, with minimal smoke. I knew that perfumes in solid forms will smell slightly more different than in its oil counterpart (usually because it’s much more concentrated in the solid) so I’m thinking that in the beeswax it’s helped to diffure the smoke and amp it’s creamy caramel side. I’m not very good with explaining perfumes that are sweet, because they’re not my forte so I don’t have many reference points to go to for them, so I apologise for the overuse of certain a “S” word ;)

I really enjoy wearing this to bed, because it tends to have a rather comforting and enveloping feel to me, and it helps put me in a better mood before sleep. The silage for both the oil and solid is high at first, but it burns down to something moderate. If I was standing next to you, shoulder to shoulder you would probably notice it. Standing a few steps away, not so much, unless I had *just* applied it.

Carny Wedding really helps, for me, to demonstrate in how a perfume can age over time and how that in different formats it can take on different forms!