One of my recent contributions was my review of Layton by PDM - which I enjoyed but kept feeling like I had in my collection - well when I wore this today I realized that this and the Elixer ( which I wore yesterday) sort of fill that niche for me. This one is deep rich and kind of smoky with lots of resin and intense and a dry sweetness that isn't dominant. Dark patchouli feels apt with intense and resins the Absolute has more leather Elixer slightly more sweetness perhaps from hints of sandalwood. Thieae were ones that got me to confront my preconceptions about Boss based on being a 90s kid and Hugo Boss. I actually bought them together because I couldn't decide which one I liked more. One day I plan to layer them to see what happens. Glad to have these two and sorry Layton. With kindness

Nowhere near ready for our market, but this could completely change our fragrance discussions. https://www.reuters.com/science/new-scentronic-technology-can-detect-transmit-aromas-remotely-2026-10-23/

I'm not making any statement about what's popular everywhere, but around me, everything is going vanilla. My youngest daughter wears a vanilla bomb every day, and lots of it. At work, anyone who's wearing a fragrance is all in on vanilla. Young or old, female or male, it's all vanilla, all the time around me. All various versions and spins on it, but vanilla is the one constant. Anyone else feeling this way?

The deeper I’ve gotten into perfumery, the less importance I put on a published note list. And owning and smelling a lot of originals and clones really drove that home for me. Take Creed Aventus and Armaf Club de Nuit Intense Man. You can put their note lists next to each other and see a lot of the same ideas—citrus, pineapple, blackcurrant, birch, woods, musk, amber. Now take Louis Vuitton Imagination and Zara Sunrise on the Red Sand Dunes. Again, you’re dealing with that same general citrus, ginger, amber, clean and fresh territory. But here’s my point: A note list isn’t a formula. You can duplicate every note somebody publishes and still not duplicate the fragrance. “Pineapple” isn’t necessarily pineapple oil sitting in a bottle somewhere. “Leather” doesn’t mean somebody squeezed a leather jacket into the formula. A lot of what we call notes are accords or simply the perfumer’s interpretation of an aroma. Give two perfumers the same list—bergamot, pineapple, birch, woods and musk—and you can end up with two completely different fragrances. The materials matter. The aroma chemicals matter. The quality matters. The proportions matter. The construction matters. And most importantly, the perfumer’s interpretation matters. This is one reason I think people get too caught up in Fragrantica note pyramids. Most of us can’t smell a fragrance blind and accurately identify 12 or 15 individual notes anyway. We smell the overall composition. We might say it’s citrusy. Woody. Smoky. Sweet. Green. Spicy. Creamy. Fresh. Then we look at the note breakdown and suddenly we’re smelling Sicilian bergamot harvested on a Tuesday morning. 😂 Come on. I’ve owned hundreds of clones, and that’s actually taught me to pay less attention to whether the clone copied the published notes and more attention to whether it captured the actual fragrance. Because that’s what a clone is really trying to reproduce. Not the note list. The smell. And even when a clone gets extremely close, it’s still an interpretation of somebody else’s composition. Maybe the opening is sharper. Maybe the woods are rougher. Maybe the original transitions better. Maybe the clone projects more. Maybe one ingredient is emphasized differently.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DecmNgdpXJT/?rpxt=anZhcHlyYjh0NTY0