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.

Trying to get some organization going. I bought these tiered shelves off Etsy. I haven’t organized them yet. But I’m thinking about 1 shelf for colder months and 1 shelf for warmer months. I’d love to hear your thoughts please.

Picked up a sample of the new Explorer release yesterday afternoon, and I’m trying it out today. I’m a big fan of Explorer, and am happy to try this one out. There’s a decent citrus blast at the outset that leans directly into lemon moreso than the OG. It’s still flanked with an earthy green core that grounds it in the DNA of the line, and it develops into a more rounded and smooth blended Explorer experience. It’s nice, likely a little more mature than the predecessor, but it feels more intimate and closeted as a result. Better than Platinum (I own) not as good as the OG, not as good as Extreme (I will buy at some point). I like it, probably enough to pick up a bottle when it inevitably hits a discounter, but if you tried it and labelled it a redundant buy I couldn’t fault you. Needs a couple more wears before my judgment calcifies.