rogalal

So here we are. 99 suggestions down. Because this has meandered for way longer than I thought it would, I wanted to make an easy-to-read list for my own sake, but Basenotes won't let me post a blog entry that long, so I guess I can't.

Frankly, I’ve surprised myself. For instance, I’ve never considered Bulgari to be a very notable house, but they’ve made this list three times. Of course, I intentionally avoided getting caught up making a list of the most notable classic feminine perfumes by focusing this project on a men’s point of view, so there are many truly amazing scents that are blatently missing. And I wanted this to be educational and not just a compendium of perfume’s greatest hits (though many notable “hits” did make the list), which has led to some strangeness (yeah, I know – Habit Rouge didn’t make the list, but Fierce did?!?). Guerlain is the unsurprising winner with seven entries, while Comme Des Garcons gets second place.


With 99 suggestions done, what’s number 100? I honestly have no idea. I’ve had many scents that almost made it but that I left off because they weren’t necessarily the best possible examples for the points I was trying to make. Both Acqua di Parma’s Colonia and Guerlain’s Habit Rouge have been suggested in the comments, and they’re both definitely worth a sniff. But, in the end, I think I’m going to go out with another piece of advice:

100. Re-sniff your samples

I have to admit something. There are many scents in this list that I hated when I first smelled. Sure, there are some I still don’t like, but what I found fascinating was how many I had written off when I first smelled them years ago that I really liked a lot wearing them again in order to write about them here, with a better trained and more receptive nose. I’ve learned an awful lot in the past couple of years, most of which I’ve tried to pass along in this blog, and I was surprised at how many things I thought were weird or too girly or that I simply didn’t understand smelled great re-wearing them as I wrote this huge list.

So, my final piece of advice is to go back and try the perfumes you wrote off a long time ago – I can almost guarantee that you’ll be surprised and end up finding a new favorite.


And, with that, I guess I’m done. This turned out to be way more work than I thought it would be. When I didn’t have samples of something I wanted to write about, I had to run to the city to try things on, and I had a lot of fun reading everything I could get my hands on. It’s an old adage: The best way to learn a lot about something is to teach someone about it, and that’s proven true for me, though I’m not enough of a self-important jackass to think I’ve actually taught anyone anything with this silly experiment. Honestly, I’m a little sad that more people didn’t disagree with me, which is my only regret. While my ego enjoys the nice supportive comments, I was hoping that more people would figure out that I really don’t know what I’m talking about and that it would have led to a little more conversation.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and I suppose I’ll get back to doing my little reviews again…