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(Original post here.)

A sad truth in the fragrance world is that the public, by and large, has awful taste. Mainstream garbage like Acqua di Gio is regurgitated endlessly by the media, the marketing teams, and the public itself. A fellow Basenoter once commented on the fact that he was once locked in a meeting with 10 Indian men; 6 of the 10 were wearing AdG. Nothing against Indians either way, I do find the demographics to be very interesting on this stuff (maybe the subject of a future ...

It’s been a while since I posted and that’s mainly been due to the blogs being down for awhile and the server issues. It was also due to me being without reliable internet service, too.
I thought it was time to talk about my SotW number crunching. I’ve been doing this for 12 weeks now and almost every time I put the stats up someone mentions what a crazy endeavor this is. I thought I might explain what my rationale is for doing it. I’m a big believer in understanding what people do versus ...

(Original post here.)

Happy was one of the initial three fragrances that started me on this journey (along with Unforgivable and Armani Code). Happy and Code were on the Amazon Top 20 in men’s fragrance and me, not knowing where else to start, took that list and started hitting up stores and crossing fragrances off the list.

My thought process at the time was that Happy was unlike anything else I’d tested; that is, it was much more subtle. The orange juice gives you a ...

(Original post here.)

In the fragrance world few scents are as hotly debated as Yves Saint Laurent’s 1981 classic, Kouros. On Basenotes it’s more or less a constant stream of asinine chatter. People repeat what they’ve heard, or take a mindset going in to smelling a cologne before actually trying it. For Kouros, the buzzword is “urinal cakes”. Whoever was…clever enough to come up with this association has skewed a lot of people’s opinions.


See, I look at the ...

I needed someplace to post random musings about fragrance, since I don't think my friends who read my general blog would really appreciate them, nor would they probably actually read them. I don't really have time to make a full post right now (laundry is calling), but let me say a few things by way of introduction.

I became vigorously interested in fragrance as an outgrowth of an interest in Hermès. I was voraciously reading everything I could about the company, and at some point ...