Week 5: Finalizing the Build Hey guys, Joe A. here with another one for ya’! Welcome back to Shelf Control, where one man attempts to bring order to a fragrance collection that clearly stopped respecting boundaries! So now the brackets are up, the shelves are in, and the empty shelves are officially in position. In other words, the construction phase is largely done — which is both exciting and slightly terrifying, because now the wall is just standing there waiting for several hundred bottles to show up like it knows something I don’t!! For the shelves, I ended up going with birch panels instead of oak. And no, before anybody starts connecting dots, this was not an Aventus nod. I chose birch because the lighter white wood works beautifully with the blue tones in the room and keeps the whole space feeling clean, open and airy. Since I’m down here in Florida, I wanted the design to have a little bit of that bright, fresh, coastal feel without turning the room into a Tommy Bahama clearance rack. The shelves are roughly 4 feet long and 16 inches deep, mounted on heavy brackets, and you can clearly see the acrylic tiered displays fitting in nicely! Right now, everything looks clean, calm, and suspiciously under control, which means the bottles clearly haven’t arrived yet. The structure is there, the spacing is set, and the garage office wall finally looks like it was designed to become the Joe Average Fragrance Library! Next up is the big one: The Great Bottle Migration, when the collection starts moving from around the house into one central location. The stage is built. The shelves are ready. Now it’s time to see if Shelf Control can survive first contact with the actual collection. #EnjoytheJourney Week 6: The Great Bottle Migration (Part 1)!

Rasasi is one of the older and more established Middle Eastern fragrance houses, and to me, they sit in a slightly different position than houses such as Armaf or Lattafa. Rasasi definitely makes fragrances that are inspired by popular designer and niche releases, but I do not look at the entire house as just another clone company. They have been around long enough, and their catalog is large enough, that they have also developed their own style and identity. That does not mean everything they release is original, refined, or worth buying. Rasasi is still a very hit-or-miss house. The Good When Rasasi gets a fragrance right, they can offer excellent performance, strong projection and sillage, and a scent profile that smells more expensive than the price suggests. La Yuqawam Pour Homme is probably the best example. It is clearly connected to Tom Ford Tuscan Leather, but it does not come across like a cheap copy. It is dark, smoky, leathery, fruity, and powerful enough to stand on its own. Hawas is another fragrance that helped make Rasasi recognizable to a much larger audience. It is fresh, sweet, aquatic, youthful, and extremely easy to wear. It has similarities to fragrances from the Invictus style of perfumery, but Hawas became popular enough that it developed its own reputation. Rasasi also tends to perform better than many modern designer fragrances. When I talk about performance, I am mainly talking about projection and sillage—not simply how long something remains on the skin. Many Rasasi fragrances create a noticeable scent cloud and are designed to be smelled. Their stronger releases usually have more substance than the average inexpensive clone. They may not use the most luxurious materials, but they often feel fuller, darker, and more developed than fragrances that are only trying to recreate the opening of something popular. The Problems The biggest problem with Rasasi is consistency. One fragrance can smell rich, smooth, and surprisingly high quality, while another can smell sharp, synthetic, overly sweet, or dated. Buying from Rasasi based only on online hype is risky because the quality can change dramatically from one collection to another.