Finally received my travel size fragrances about a month late. 1st one is Victor and Rolf Spice Bomb Extreme. Not really summer fragrance but it's nice. Definitely different the the original. Decent longevity!

Today I received my discovery set from Cursed Fragrances. Eight 3ml scents, four male coded and four female coded, split with my wife. The house leans heavily into the gorgeous gothic trope, with kooky spooky names and notes, and all their marketing and correspondence committing heavily to the bit. Letters in black envelopes with wax seals, florid communiques about crypts and darkness, beautiful graphic design that screams Twilight. Even the pictures accompanying the notes are tinged in melancholy. It’s absolutely charming. I’ll do a write up of the scents once I’ve tried them. Particularly looking forward to Ritual Spirit, with its base note of Infernal Smoke. 😀

I am probably going to piss off some clone warriors with this one, but so be it. I can say this because I have been there. I chased everything. I owned hundreds of dupes and clones. I chased every new “95% identical” release, every beast-mode version and every $30 alternative that supposedly made the original obsolete. But I also chased every inexpensive designer brand I could find. Rack-store bargains, discounted designers, cheapies that somebody on YouTube said were hidden gems — if it was inexpensive and getting attention, I wanted to try it. Then I started doing the same thing with niche. I chased niche brands, affordable niche, hyped niche and whatever house everybody happened to be talking about that month. For a long time, the hobby became about the next bottle. And eventually I had to ask myself a question: Do I actually love perfumery, or do I just love collecting bottles? Because those are not necessarily the same thing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with buying affordable fragrances. There is nothing wrong with clones either. Some are excellent, some perform better than the original, and some are incredible values. But if your entire collection is built around copies of fragrances you have never even smelled, I have a hard time calling that a deep appreciation of perfumery. Especially when those same people turn around and say: “Why would anybody pay $300 for the original?” “The clone is better.” “It smells exactly the same.” “The original is a ripoff.” How do you know? You never smelled it. Watching a YouTube reviewer tell you something is 95% accurate does not mean you have experienced the original. And this is one of my biggest problems with clone culture. Somewhere along the way, price and performance became the only measurements of quality. If a fragrance costs $25 and lasts 12 hours, it is automatically considered better than a $250 fragrance that lasts seven. That makes absolutely no sense to me anymore. Perfumery is more than projection and longevity.