Gibbon's Boarding School (Foxcroft's Autumn Festival)

GIBBON'S BOARDING SCHOOL PREMIUM FRAGRANCE
Dusty Wooden Desks, Paper, Carefully Hidden Tobacco Pouch, Dying Fire, Dried Leaves, Leather Chairs, Autumn Breeze - 5ml


Gibbon's Boarding School is the scent of a refined institution of higher learning. Feel the crunch of scattered dried leaves underneath your feet before crossing the threshold. Inhale whiffs of embers smouldering in the fireplace at the entryway, begging to be stoked and tended. Walk down well-traversed hallways and trace your fingers along extensive woodwork over a century old before coming to a pause before the grand library which contains many original works from when the school first opened. Vacant leather chairs await tenants at strategically placed tables lit by green glass banker's lamps. Breathe in the faint scent of autumn air permeating throughout the building from open classroom windows. Dappled sunlight illuminates crisp paper sitting atop dusty wooden desks. A pencil case contains a carefully sealed tobacco pouch hidden within. Steal away to the boiler room during lunch for a secret smoke.

Thirty-two notes were selected to evoke the atmosphere of the sprawling brick school. Gibbon's is composed of a variety of woods, leathers, smoke notes, light spices, ambers and vanillas with tobacco, dirt, leaves, black musk, frankincense, moss and hint of apple.

Gibbon's leans masculine but it can be enjoyed by Women who enjoy our darker woodier fragrances. It has a smooth and rounded feel on the skin. When first applied, you can detect a hint of the autumnal notes of leaves and air. This gives way to a very sophisticated high-end fragrance that does not morph to the extent our other blends often do. It is fairly linear but it also has a multitude of layers and complexity carefully crafted to create this unique sensory experience.

Application tip: If your roller ball runs dry during application, remove black cap, hold your bottle vertically with roller ball pointing to the ground and forcefully shake/thrust the bottle down one time to replenish the oil in the well. Now it is ready to reapply to your skin.

It takes about one full minute of settling down on your skin before the true nature of this fragrance is revealed. Intellectually there are parallels between Gibbon's Boarding School and Library, Attic, Riverside Hayride, Solarium and like fragrances, where Angela uses fragrance notes to paint a picture of the surroundings. Such are her strengths and gifts with this ability that again she effortlessly takes us to this old fashioned school drenched in history and memories. Hardly surprisingly, wood is a dominant note used to describe the woodwork. Yet there are also the darker notes of of dry leather and the dusty waft of vanillin from old paper. There an air of smoke and leaves clearly setting this fragrance in autumn. An apple note is used to lift and warm the fragrance - again hinting at the practice of giving an apple to the teacher in such a subtle manner that many people may miss it. As the dry down begins it becomes impossible to tease out individual notes, but a pleasure to smell. Unique and strangely compelling, Gibbons Boarding School again reminds us all of Angela's artistry and skill. Wonderful.

I didn't think I would like this scent much, (c'mon, where's the food???) but for some reason this is comforting and when I wear it I just can't stop smelling my wrist! I can detect every note, particularly the dusty wooden desks and the leather chairs. The dying fire also stands out to me in a better way than I imagined; there's little smoke in this, it really smells like the dying embers of a campfire, and it's glorious. I've never been to a boarding school, so I can't say it reminds me of one, more like a men's club where everyone wears smoking jackets and drinks fine bourbon and smokes the finest cigars. Weirdly, none of those things actually appeal to me, but somehow I still really like this one!

This place is abandoned for sure. Tobacco and leather makes me feel like I've broken into a condemned building with a rebel in a leather jacket. Kind of that naughty, I'm someplace I shouldn't be vibe. Very complex and totally unisex. This doesn't lean towards either masculine or feminine for me. Musky spicy air. Not obvious fire smoke. More like how the wood in church smells after enduring years of holy smokes.

When I first wore this, I couldn't remember the list of notes and wrote down - "sour, soapy, dry. Dryer sheets. Powdery wood. High pitched and a bit chemical." I guess it's the ozone/autumn breeze that doesn't agree with me here and turns sickly and soapy. It smells like dust, laundry soap powder, dryer sheets, a spritz of hairspray... over dry wood. Dirty/dusty and sickly-cheaply-clean at the same time.

My skin chemistry doesn't play nice with this blend at all.

I went to a high school in the northeast that was public/private. If you lived in the area, it was your public school. But there were also dormitories so that folks from out of town could pay to attend. The main building was old-fashioned brick and granite.

In the late summer, before school started but after practice for fall sports had begun, the wooden floors of the main hallways would be re-varnished. Gibbon's reminds me of walking those empty hallways, trying not to scuff the newly polished floors. The varnish/wax had a characteristic chemical woodshop smell, and Gibbon's has something similar. The same accord is in Library and Devil's Tongue. I believe it to be the house's leather accord, perhaps along with the dusty, paper, wooden notes. That part does not smell natural to me.

Most of the classroom doors were closed, but you could peek through the glass and see chairs stacked on desks and textbooks piled on the bookshelves. GBS, at least in the oil, feels even mustier. I recently acquired the EDP of Headmaster, and it smells similar to GBS, but with the addition of an "apple" note that reminds me of the artificially-flavored zebra chewing gum whose flavor lasted all of several chews. In GBS, I don't notice the apple. If there is fall air in this, a la Foxcroft, it is fleeting and occurs when the varnish smell is strongest. Unisex. I like it a medium amount; I find it interesting, but rarely feel the urge to wear it.

For a reference of whether your nasal inhalatory preferences are similar to mine, my favorite solstice scents are Old Havana, Vanilla Pipe Tobacco, White Fox, and High Noon. My least favorite are Pinyon Truffle, Sacred Vow, and Devil's Tongue.

I was not expecting to like this scent as much as I did. Normally I love the "gourmand" types, and I have a few of them. But Gibbons Boarding School is my favorite so far. I can't describe the scent any better than the reference does, but to me, it smells "intelligent" somehow. And it's unlike any other scent I've ever worn. In my case, the perfume oils work better than the eau do parfum sprays. I have year-round allergies, and the perfume oils do not trigger them.