Montagne Buko intense @Raymond Reeves you were right. The opening to me is slightly different but the drydown is 1:1. After im done with my VIW ill be getting this one. Performance, unfortunately, is equally bad around 5 hrs. 9.5/10 Versace Man eau fraiche (retry) Better than last try. Fresh, light, clean and the poor performance of around 2-4 hrs is great for gym. If i find it sub £30 I’ll pick a bottle up. Nasamotto Pardon Dark chocolate, synthetic oud and sharp patchouli. Super high quality and distinctive. Dont know if i like it. Its fairly simple and there are much better options. Ill give it another try under different circumstances. Good performance at 6-8 hrs. 7.5/10 for now. Riifs freeze If you get a chance, buy a Rin detergent bar and give it a sniff. 1:1 similarity. If you cant think of what a off brand detergent powder from a dollar store would smell like. Some might like it but personally its trash. 4/10

This showed up in my feed this morning. To steal from Princess Bride ... I don't think that means what you think it means.

Last week I posted about what to do about all of my samples and how to store them. My relationship with my sales associates have proved to be so beneficial. Not just because of “free stuff” but I have posted many times about why relationships matter. But for the purposes of this post it’s about the enormous amount of samples that I have accumulated from them as well as on my own. At some point you reach a point where you just “give up” for a while trying to organize and actually try them as they are spread out everywhere! Then a few months go by and you decide to try your samples again. I reached out to the brotherhood last week for storage ideas and received several that made sense. I decided to try @Craig Stevenson idea of a pen portfolio!! For less than $20 this seemed like a great thing to try. Here are some pictures loaded. I still need to potentially do some more labeling. But right now they are all in alphabetical house order. Hopefully I can now go through these in a way that doesn’t send my OCD into overdrive 🤣 This is why the brotherhood is so great!! Like @Lon Chaneyfield has been saying to us all. We NEED to engage!! Ask questions and try something. But more importantly follow up with what you’ve learned or tried. You never know it might help someone else in the process!!

I'm not going to get into my fragrance journey here. I've touched on bits and pieces of it over the past few years on this community. I'm just going to touch on what knocked me out of neutral and back interested in finding the next perfect fragrance. It started with two things; covid and my imagination. We all had too much time on our hands when we were locked down during that early time. While others may have embraced sourdough starters and banana bread, I looked at it as the perfect time to reinvent myself. I began working out again and I decided it was a great opportunity to explore the world of fragrance and see what my next signature scent would be. I already had a picture in my mind of what I wanted to find. This should have been my first clue that, even though I live in the south where it's warm nine months out of the year, I'm a sucker for a winter fragrance. Here's what I was hunting - let me set the scene. It's night. There's a winter storm outside. The wind is whipping and the cold is trying to find its way into the room I'm in. It's a big, classic, masculine study, just like you'd find in the movies. Dark wood everywhere. Bookcases filled with classics. A roaring fireplace. And a big, plush, well worn leather chair, where you smell not only the quality leather, but the history of generations who sat there contemplating life before you were born. You can still pick up the faint scent of the cigars and pipes that were used decades before by those who were there before you. On the stand next to the chair, a favorite book and a glass of bourbon. The only light in the room came from the fireplace, a lamp back in the corner by the big executive desk and the occasional flashes of lightning in the windows. That's what I was hunting. I wanted all those smells and all that vibe in a bottle that I could spray on me. I wanted the leather and the wood and the smoke and the books and the tobacco and the bourbon and the chill from the wind and the sweat and the history and the darkness. That's what set me on my journey.

“My creativity is attached to my emotions and I always say that whatever triggers emotion is a source of inspiration.”— Honorine Blanc Emotion is not a distraction from meaningful work; it is often the spark that gives the work its purpose. Pay attention to what moves you today, because inspiration usually begins where something feels deeply personal. Enjoy the #Journey. Love to hear from ya’!