Revisiting Lalique's Original Encre Noire

Summer Fields of Vetiver

Encre Noire is often referred to as a "modern" vetiver, and few can get through a sentence about it without mentioning Iso E Super, so let's just get that out of the way first: there's quite a bit of Iso E Super in Encre Noire. There, I said it. Let's move on.

Released in 2006 in a semi-opaque black cube bottle inspired by René Lalique's own 1913 "Biches" inkwell design, the perfume was created by Nathalie Lorson, an experienced professional in her second decade of high-profile designer output. It was a sensation almost immediately; the public embraced the glassmaker's "black ink" as if it were something avant-garde, innovative, or oddball, and its sales were brisk, with every fragrance community personality and blogger having their say. 

Oddly, few dwelled in any detail on Lorson herself, whose history includes her 1994 debut collaboration with Sophia Grojsman on Bvlgari pour Femme. After that, her portfolio gets a little hazy (rumors abound that she worked on something called Wish for Chopard, released in 1997), with her next confirmed fragrances, Dolce & Gabbana pour Femme, Boucheron Jaipur Saphir, and Chopard Casran, all appearing in 1999. Lorson has publicly mentioned that she loves working with vetiver, and yet had no known vetiver perfume to her name until Encre Noire, which I find interesting. While others may consider her contribution to the pantheon of vetiver perfumes to be austere and even a bit severe, I think it's a truly great vetiver fragrance that sits comfortably among its 20th-century predecessors in the genre, most notably the original Guerlain Vetiver from 1959. 

Spray Guerlain Vetiver on one wrist, and Encre Noire on the other, and it hits me: Encre Noire is merely an updated version of Jean-Paul Guerlain's first solo fragrance creation, and in my opinion, an improvement. Guerlain opened his composition with a dry bergamot and coriander accord that was puckeringly bitter-green and pungent; Lorson capitalized on vetiver's natural grapefruit facet, a result of nootkatone, a sesquiterpene ketone that occurs in both the citrus fruit and vetiver root, and used it to amplify vetiver's natural freshness in Encre Noire. Guerlain Vetiver only dwells on citrus for five minutes, after which it segues via tobacco into the main attraction, i.e., unadulterated vetiver, reputedly of the Bourbon variety. Encre Noire bridges its grapefruit fizz to a heart of both Haitian and Bourbon vetivers with what smells like a drop of natural cypress oil, although the effect is fleeting, at least to my nose. I'm sensitive to vetiver, and so even a suggestion of it overtakes my olfactory receptors and shoves me directly into its dense green thicket. 

Encre Noire's vetiver heart, just like Guerlain's, smells uncompromisingly of vetiver, vetiver, and more vetiver. I find that vetiver develops a sour quality with onion-like off notes, and I experience it here. I think the worst example of this is found in Route du Vétiver by Maître Parfumeur et Gantier. There, the onion quality is so pungent, and the vetiver extracts are so natural and concentrated, that it resembles the stink of sweaty, stuck-on-a-bus-for-three-days-in-Rome body odor vetiver, which is to say, not my absolute favorite kind. Fortunately, and unlike both Guerlain and MPG, Lorson's vetiver is fresher, brighter, airier. The root is there, but it's not covered in dirt and left in a wet clay pot. Instead, it's garnished with accents of citrus and evergreen, and the whole crisp affair is only passingly sweaty, which I can abide. The subtle but effective fixatives of base Cashmeran and Iso E Super disencumber the vetiver oils of their natural shortcomings, leaving a pristine, simple, and balanced fragrance that wafts pleasantly for hours at a very low hum that is unlikely to offend, even if overapplied. Encre Noire is, in a word, gorgeous. 

Vetiver will never be a "love" for me, as it isn't my favorite note by any brand or in any incarnation, but I accept Lorson's 2006 update to the traditional, straightforward vetiver genre, something that had, rather amusingly, gone extinct by that point in time. Guerlain Vetiver had always been the main reference for the material, and while I think it remains a very good fragrance, it smells of its time. Encre Noire, on the other hand, nods to that classic format while nudging the inherently dated olfactory profile of vetiver a few feet closer to the future. I like that Lorson did not try to reinvent the wheel here; she took advantage of vetiver's numerous facets and used a few key synthetics and naturals to highlight them and give them their time as her perfume develops. She extended the grapefruit/nootkatone facet on top, enhanced vetiver's woodiness with Cashmeran and Iso E Super in the base, and tickled the transitions with nuances reminiscent of green cypress needles, and to quote The Brownsville Herald, "That's all she wrote." 

Grape Raspberry Eau de Parfum Spray (Al-Rehab)

Smelling Al-Rehab's Grape Raspberry fragrance is like experiencing my own version of Stephen King's The Langoliers. I've accidentally stepped through a time rip into a past that sits empty and devoid of life, with every molecule of this past world lingering in a forgotten state. It's November 12th, 1988. The week of my first flu. I spent the whole day in bed, and at 4:30 pm, mom entered my room with a big bottle of Dimetapp Elixir, which she duly unscrewed and administered to me via tablespoon. Just as memory recalls, a bottle of Dimetapp Elixir is there on my nightstand, and the spoon rests beside it. Except mom and the child version of me are nowhere to be found. Feeling nostalgic, I unscrew the Elixir and pour it into the spoon, marveling at how closely it resembles alien blood. As I bring it up to my lips, I catch a whiff of its radioactivity: fakey-fake "Great Grape Taste."  

Grape Raspberry EDP spray is that exact flavor in fragrance form. Every sniff gives Dimetapp. There's no sense in trying to parse "notes" with it. There are none. It's just artificial grape with an acrid sugary aftertaste, diabolically potent and difficult to stomach. And yet I'm strangely drawn to it. It smells like my childhood, specifically the ailment-ridden part of it (I wasn't often sick, but when I was, I was sick sick). Perfumers usually overlook that sort of thing in favor of happier recollections. The impulse is to attempt romantic or adventurous angles, with all sorts of gourmand, fresh, dusky accords meant to evoke happy summers at the beach, or huddling under a baseball dugout during a rainstorm with someone who wears a totally normal cologne. But what about being a sick kid and ingesting a bizarre purple pancake syrup for a low dose of phenylpropanolamine (PPA)? Which, by the way, is now restricted due to young women developing hemorrhagic strokes from a much higher dose of PPA in diet pills. Good times!

I'm not sure if the rest of the world also used Dimetapp Elixir, or if it's uniquely American, but my guess would be there are massive swaths of Europe that would be horrified by both the texture and flavor of it. Likewise, the scent of Al-Rehab's Grape Raspberry is the stuff of nightmares, a dense, syrupy-sweet onslaught of synthesized methyl anthranilate, petroleum-based chemical byproducts of synthesized methyl anthranilate, and refined white cane sugar in a concentration high enough to kill a man. Jacques Bogart's Silver Scent eschews this level of crude bombast by allowing the orange blossoms from which its methyl anthranilate is derived to peek through and lighten its load; don't expect that level of care here. Al-Rehab has always been a garbagey brand that isn't worth the $5, but with this fragrance they've out-niched the topmost echelon of esoteric niche and given me, perhaps the sole inhabitant of this niche, exactly what I needed. 

Bogart (Jacques Bogart)

The house of Jacques Bogart was established by Jacques Konckier in 1975, many years before its acquisition of Balenciaga in 1986, and Ted Lapidus in 1998. Konckier's stated vision for the brand was "I create only for men." Bogart's 1975 eponymous debut had been, until recently, their flagship scent; it is apparently discontinued. Jacques Bogart has always been a European concern, with its main distribution channels snaking through the central and eastern regions of the old continent and across the Middle East, only appearing in the USA via the secondary grey and eBay market. Bogart, dubbed "Signature" after the pen-and-ink graphic on its box, is often likened to another major European export of the time, Paco Rabanne pour Homme (1973), but I think it's a little more accurate to view it as the European progenitor to a popular American mainstay of that groovy era, Halston 1-12, which was released the following year. 

Halston 1-12's resemblance to Bogart is obvious from first spray, as they share a similarly bombastic opening accord of desiccated citrus, green galbanum, lavender, pine needles, and mastic resin, but Bogart's notes are filtered through more than just the soapy linalool of Roy Halston's scent. Max Gavarry and Vincent Marcello's collaboration on 1-12 was a unification of Marcello's mastery of the agrestic chypre (Lauder's Private Collection) with Gavarry's unique take on lavender and vetiver (Puig's Estivalia), which resulted in an erstwhile barn burner of a chypre-fougère hybrid. Their other Halston chypre, Z-14, was an early "clubber" (Studio 54) frag, while 1-12 competed with "mature" colognes like Royal Pub, Kanøn Man, and Grey Flannel to win over the Republican Wall Street types who quietly bankrolled these brands and demanded something in return. 

Perfumer Maurice Maurin nodded to this conservative segment of American fragrance culture with an aromatic fougère body on a rawhide leather chassis. The distinguishing feature of Bogart is a finessed accord of phenylacetic acid (dank sweetness), Atlas cedar oil (fetid woods), and trace isobutyl quinoline for an unassertive animalic base under otherwise clean greens. Bogart is like a cool breeze through a wilderness in late summer, after the funk of high heat has dissipated, with traces of deer and beaver gently lingering on its trail. Some reviewers mention the inclusion of dimetol, but Maurin may have also tinkered with trace amounts of dihydromyrcenol, which is perhaps why many link Bogart to Paco Rabanne pour Homme. Combined with dimetol, DHM creates the same nuanced herbal freshness found in Acteur, Maurin's 1989 brief submission for Azzaro. Bogart is unusual for the brand in that it is the only Bogart frag that lacks bombast; it smells demurely green, leathery, and dry, and recedes instead of reaching out. Patchouli and oakmoss complete its far drydown, with cedar-centered woods growing only slightly funkier, and I appreciate the somber woody-green aura of this stuff.

That said, I actually prefer many of Bogart's contemporaries over it, and find its staid personality a little too reserved for my liking. If you were to ask me which is better, Bogart "Signature" or One Man Show (1981), I'd have to point to the latter. It's cruder, yes, but it's also crisper, grassier, muskier, and all around more distinctive and, frankly, more fun. Still, Bogart "Signature" is a worthy olfactory callback to an era when men in suits and ties commuted by train to New York City for twelve-hour workdays, indulged in expensive martini lunches with their attractive female secretaries, then boarded the seven o'clock express home to their wives and young children in Groton.

Silver Scent (Jacques Bogart)

Grapes, Gum, Orange Blossom, Bacchus

I've done my best to ascertain why they named it "Silver" Scent, but I've come up empty. I'd like to say that it was their "silver" anniversary, but 2006 is not 25 years after 1975, so that doesn't wash. There's nothing silvery about the smell of Silver Scent, so its name and the story behind it remains an impenetrable mystery.

Methyl anthranilate is a naturally occurring chemical in Concord grapes, and I love how grapes smell. Additionally, MA is found in oranges and neroli, two things that also smell great, so finding it in such singular abundance in a fragrance is interesting. When I was a small child, I was briefly obsessed with a pearlescent black plastic necklace that my grandmother gave me to play with. I'll never forget one particular summer afternoon of fidgeting with the beads and marveling at how their colors shifted depending on their angle relative to the sunlight. Silver Scent is the olfactory incarnation of that necklace. It's a blast of black grape soda in the first fifteen minutes, followed by the neon of an expensive grape-flavored bubblegum from the 1990s. But then, an hour in, it shifts to subtle nuances of Joop! Homme, a distinct shimmer of off-white orange blossoms that add a retro floral glow. Bend down to tie my shoe, and it's purple candy again. 

I've seen some reviews that denigrate Silver Scent as simplistic, linear, one-note. It does play one simple tune, but it plays it with an affecting innocence that lingers long enough (and loudly enough) to elicit suspicions of disingenuousness, like the chronically-caffeinated coworker who always blurts "Awwwww!" when someone gets engaged. At its core, this is a decadent fragrance, steeped in the richness of amaranthine fruits and the cheap dessert wines rendered by them. Only a person who has achieved enough in life to enjoy it could wear this and understand what it's saying, a trait typical of the most seasoned among us. Perhaps that's what they meant by "silver" after all.

78 Vintage Green (Banana Republic)

Whenever I stop at Burlington, I try to find a 75 mL bottle of 78 Vintage Green (I once saw a 5 oz bottle and passed on it, years ago), and I've had no luck. I suspect the original Icon line of Banana Republic fragrances is quietly being discontinued, as grey market stock on several of them has dried up considerably since their first appearance in 2017. 

There are a handful of 30 mL bottles floating around store shelves, however, and the other day I paid the $13 for one. (I could've purchased two, but I'm stupid.) My take on the fragrance: This stuff is nice, but weirdly redundant in my collection. Everything I'd read about it suggested it was a bright, vegetal-green hesperidic scent with a hint of fig leaf and a surprising amount of galbanum. Instead, it's a soapy and overwhelmingly synthetic rehash of Versace Versence in the first 3 hours, with a woody fig note for 2 of them that recalls Salvatore Ferragamo, before settling at the 6-hour mark on Linen Vetiver's mossy-musky base. The far drydown is identical to Linen Vetiver's. 

Worth having? Not for me. There's an astringent green tea note tucked in the opening accord of 78 Vintage Green that strongly resembles the tea in ck One Essence, but Gino Percontino's composition never quite convinces me that it's better than any of the aforementioned releases. While I'm not a huge Versence fan, Versace's scent smells more balanced. Essence is more natural. Ferragamo is more focused. And Linen Vetiver is softer and more dimensional with its warmer greens undergirding a summery floral bouquet. I simply don't need this particular Icon fragrance. A 1 oz bottle is too much. 

Pino Silvestre Black Forest (Parfums Mavive)

No release date. No promo copy. No promo, period. A perfume that was nonexistent one day, and everywhere online the next. No reviews. No conversations. No mention of it anywhere. Until now: I own a bottle of Pino Silvestre Black Forest so you don't have to, and I'm here to tell you about it.

Except there isn't a ton for me to say. Do you remember Green Generation Him ♂ with the opaque black bottle that came in a silver cylinder? Of course not. Nobody does. Parfums Mavive releases these things to five "farmacias" out in the backwoods of Italy and then discontinues them a few months later because, surprise surprise, they don't sell. GGH was released in 1998 and is a watery-herbal thing with fennel and orange blossom over a pallid derivation of ck Eternity for Men. It's an extremely rare fragrance. How rare, you ask? So rare that the bottle and packaging shown on its Parfumo page is my bottle and packaging. Literally my photo, cropped out. Nobody can find the stuff, and they're not missing much, although I do like it, and it does smell pretty good. 

Black Forest reminds me of it. Same sweet orange blossom over lavender 1990s fresh fougère underpinnings, except a denser and sweeter accord to reflect the cavity-inducing times we live in. A hint of cinnamon, a very light sprinkling of amaretto, but then minutes later, minty herbs, woods, "dark" greens that refuse to fully elucidate their intentions, or their identities. Lush coumarin, a mossy texture that smells entirely synthetic, and some musk, perhaps after the brand's own Black Musk? That one also comes in opaque black glass. Black Forest is interesting but challenging and reminds me of a Zoologist scent I can't quite place. I rarely wear Green Generation Him ♂ but I really don't foresee myself wearing this much either. It's not terrible. It's wearable, and I guess I could see maybe wearing it for kicks now and then, but Jesus. Talk about oddball. 

I imagine this will be discontinued in a few months, and prices will skyrocket on eBay in the next five years, after whatever limited production run gets exhausted from grey market sellers. Mavive's inspired-by nineties scent is better, easier, much more accessible. But what do I know? Somewhere in Naples is a guy in a Ferrari rocking Black Forest while his buxom squeeze rocks him. Let's hope he reviews it, so I'm not the first and last word. 

Jungle Vibe (Rayhaan): Nineties Vibe

Using Forbidden Words

If you were to ask the folks at Estée Lauder, I think they'd say "jungle" is not politically correct enough to include in a fragrance name. Synthetic Nature was once called Synthetic Jungle, but a decade after Lauder's acquisition of Frédéric Malle, one might suppose that a combo of market testing, possible trademark infringement (Kenzo Jungle), and distaste for the perceived "cultural appropriation" of jungle-adjacent communities led to the decision to delete "jungle" and pretend it never happened.

Rayhaan does not possess the same scruples. Jungle Vibe, released in 2025, celebrates the jungle in its vibe. Green bottle. Leaf patterned glass. Bodoni Poster font in all-caps. The fragrance smells at least a little wild and green, and everything it puts out alludes to that. But having taken a closer look, I've concluded that the fragrance is a victim of an even wilder and painfully shortsighted influencer campaign. Apparently every YouTube and TikTok broccoli head out there is saying Jungle Vibe is a clone of Dries Van Noten's 2022 Santal Greenery, as if Santal Greenery is the only other green-woody fig frag. 

I hasten to proffer a contrarian view: Jungle Vibe is instead a first cousin of Salvatore Ferragamo pour Homme (1999). My evidence? By the way, do not confuse evidence with proof; many complain of a dill pickle smell in the Rayhaan, but if you refer to the reviews of Ferragamo pour Homme on Fragrantica, you find immediate references to dill pickles there as well. Jungle Vibe smells like a carbon copy of the older perfume, but with blatant embellishments tacked on to give it its own identity. For example, Ferragamo predates Rayhaan's crisp fig and sandalwood structure, but Rayhaan modified this scent profile into something grassier and vaguely herby, and with salty Ambroxan in the base. 

Jungle Vibe is enjoyable, not because it smells like another green fig scent (it does), but because I relish it as a late 1990s throwback. That Bodoni font with the script over it, that color fade on the box and bottle, that abstract fig in the fragrance, all are reminiscent of the artistic and cultural styles of 30 years ago. Refer to Chopard Heaven as the starting point for the packaging aesthetic, and work out from there. The "pickle" problem is really a matter of personal perception, i.e., how an individual nose smells Javanol. Some perceive smooth creamy woods with accents of green twigs and rose, while others smell brine. I smell a good perfume, green, a little herbal, sweet with fig, and woody, with pickled Javanol that doesn't bother me in the slightest. 

My partner remarked more than once that Jungle Vibe smells intensely green and bitter-grassy, which is interesting because my nose picks up way more of the sugary fig and grapefruit. But there's no denying Jungle Vibe smells good, and is well made. Why all the video-reviewing midwits are hellbent on claiming it's like one particular niche scent is beyond me. It's not like Dries Van Noten's scent profile is "original." The late 1990s were littered with fig scents, including numerous masculines, so when you smell this type of fragrance, you can really take your pick of what it most resembles.

Ithaque (Memo Paris)

Ithaque is a Greek mythological isle said to be the home of Odysseus. Well, Ithaca is the reference name for it, and Ithaque is the French translation. Memo is interested in French flourishes, and contrasts the name with stylized ancient Grecian imagery on the bottle of their 2023 fragrance, luring in the fat wallets with an admittedly striking package. You'd be forgiven for assuming this scent has a direct connection to Greece, when in fact it bears little to no resemblance to anything from Pyrgos. 

Instead, Ithaque (the fragrance) smells rather like a minimalist interpretation of the dead-horse Aventus DNA. It's also an "ignore the official pyramid" perfume. The market copy says little about what's really going on here. Ithaque opens with one of those weird, contemporary-luxe "fruity" accords that bears a glancing likeness to citrus/fruits (grapefruit, pineapple, red apple) yet smells anything but natural. This weird Franken-citrus also reads as slightly floral, with tartness, crispness, greenness. Eventually it dusks up and resolves into a recognizable shape: blackcurrant, paired with Texas cedar-like woodiness for a dry-smoky profile that lingers for the duration of the fragrance's 12-hour lifespan. Eventually, it fades out to a discreet, low-dose laundry musk. 

There's clearly Hedione HC and Iso E Super here, but there's also a few fancier chems that flesh out the juniper-like fruitiness that lingers in the periphery of that massive blackcurrant accord. I happen to love anything blackcurrant, so despite my misgivings about Ithaque smelling 99.9% synthetic, which is troubling at Memo's price-point, I actually really like this stuff. At the 45-minute mark, the cedar element pushes past the fruity tones to give Ithaque a similarity to Banana Republic's equally fruity-woody Cypress Cedar, but only until the smoky currant fully kicks in with marginal sweetness.

Another pleasantly clean, transparent scent indebted to Aventus. 

Violette Eau de Toilette (Molinard)

Molinard is a house whose name echoes my own; I find the "Miller" of Italy to be quite the interesting fragrance house. Fragonard, Molinard, and Galimard are all Grasse firms whose lineage stretches back into the 18th and 19th centuries, with Molinard citing 1849 on the purple boxes of its "Les Fleurs" range. As a violet fan, I've always wanted to own the now-discontinued Violette EDT, and finally got a chance to purchase an unsprayed specimen in its "tombstone" bottle, brand-new old stock, still factory cello-wrapped. 

Les Fleurs Violette was first released in 1910, then re-released in 1994 as the fragrance reviewed here, alongside a handful of other floral reissues (a couple of which were released in 1993), including Rose, Mimosa, Muguet, Lavande, and Jasmin, with Fleur de Figuer arriving very late to the party in 1999. Looking at these, I really wonder what their angle was. The 1990s was largely about spiced fruitchouli/ambery things, yet Molinard reverted back to very spare and simple Victorian and Edwardian soliflores, eschewing the bombastic, Angel-fueled trends of the time for a demure sensibility more suited to lace-collared dowager duchesses than leather-chokered glam-rock ingénues. Violette is exactly that: demure. It's as shy as it gets, with little more than a bright and semisweet Parma violet note, the requisite sharpness of violet petrol, and a soft, subtle, and very powdery base of some understated white musk. The whole affair is direct, dry, and one-note. There isn't even violet leaf to add any aquatic or spicy tones. It's 100% chalky-petrol violet flower, with only the shadow of a hint of juicy sweetness in the first two minutes. 

I'm not gonna lie: I expected more. But then again, I didn't expect very much more, because I wanted a pure violet soliflore in this conservative style. I'm not even sure my expectation being crushed by reality is a bad thing; what more could this kind of fragrance do? Yes, my $10 bottle of Violetas Francesas cologne smells pretty much identical, at a lower concentration, but if I splash that on and follow it with a healthy spritzing of Molinard Violette, I'm about as violet as a violet-lover can be. Yardley's April Violets offers coy suggestions of stone fruits and watery violet leaf with a tingle of botanical pepper, and feels downright Rococo in comparison, but if I'm in the mood for that kind of violet non-soliflore, I know where to go, and it isn't here. Like Yardley, Molinard's material quality isn't mind-blowing, but it's very good, and maybe a little better. Its ionones and irones are delicately balanced upon their powdery undercarriage, which says "competent perfumer." Longevity is 12+ hours. You want a solid, no-games, no-frills violet? This is it. You can still find a few bottles on eBay for not insane prices if you apply yourself, so I recommend looking there first, and/or perusing the frag-forum swap boards. 

April Violets (Modern Classics Version, Yardley)

April Violets is getting reviewed in June. Sue me. 

I wanted the vintage version of this one, but Yardley is plagued by a downmarket vibe that makes spending $100 on a bottle feel wrong enough to not want to do it, so I shaved a zero off and grabbed the "Modern/Contemporary Classics" version instead. 

My bottle is the "90% Naturally Derived Ingredients" formula. On Yardley's website, the copy on the newest bottles reads "94% Natural" because I guess British regulators asked that the company push their claims to the absolute limits. Add "Vegan & Cruelty Free" on there, and you can hear Keir Starmer fart with every depress of the atomizer. 

It's no secret that I'm a lover of violets. The problem is, there's a dearth of violet fragrances on the market, and finding a daily-driver violet is no small task. My violet collection is sadly limited to Grey Flannel, Aoud Violet, Love in Black, Fahrenheit, Violetas Francesas, Royal Violets, Tres Nuit, and now April Violets, and of those, really only Grey Flannel, Fahrenheit, Violetas Francesas, and Love in Black are true dyed-in-the-wool violets. 

There's a reluctance among manufacturers to produce violet fragrances because ionones are notoriously difficult on the nose, sometimes overpowering the senses, but more often fading into anosmia-induced invisibility, which then deceives the wearer into believing the perfume is off. I can see this as a problem for April Violets, which smells sturdy enough after first spray (brisk violet leaf and apple, with hints of peach, mimosa, and green leaves), but after five minutes the ionones and natural violet leaf extract take over, and the composition flickers in and out of perceptibility. 

With that said, I can smell it if I focus on it, and it smells great. Delicate greens, pert fruits that aren't juvenilely sweet, and a tender, transparent violet bouquet against a dewy backdrop of aquatic violet leaf—a sanguine purple study in olfactory watercolors. I've seen reviewers bitch about it being "harsh," which raises the question: do you people also think deep tissue massages are harsh? A watery floral that lasts four hours with zero projection and fades into literally nothing is harsh?

If so, then Fahrenheit is obscenely abusive, and Grey Flannel is 60 grit sandpaper for the nose. I can't think of a gentler scent in my catalog, which says a lot, since I'm always seeking meditative green fragrances like this one. Bet it's a hit in Japan!

Cancelling GoDaddy, The Worst Blog Hosting Company in the World, & Starting From Scratch

I'll make this brief; I'm no longer using GoDaddy as my web hosting servicer, and am cancelling frompyrgos.com in that iteration. Rather than go on a long ramble about my problems with them, I'll make it as short and sweet as possible. The reason I'm cancelling my deal with them is simple: GoDaddy broke my trust. 

I spent months trying to configure their absolutely pathetic blog features to allow mobile and desktop users the smoothest experience. All I wanted was three pages: a home page (they couldn't even manage that), a "reviews by brand" page that was extensively linked to each individual review that I've written, and a blog page that simply linked directly to GoDaddy's awful-looking blog, which is only customizable three ways, none of which are user friendly. This was too difficult for GoDaddy, and after spending months creating links on the "reviews by brand" page, one day they just randomly erased all of those links, and erased my entire blog. Even on the dashboard, they simply said, "your blog hasn't been published yet," when it was published almost a year ago. Truly insane. 

One can argue that I should've called customer service to straighten it out, but no. I'm not straightening it out. If they can erase months of work with a technical glitch, a random screw-up, for no clear reason, straight out of the blue, then I see no point in continuing my work with their hosting service. I'm not going to spend another month toiling to make my blog functional (it shouldn't be that difficult), only to have another random glitch come up and erase everything again. With GoDaddy's virtually nonexistent blogging features, its non-intuitive creative dashboard that takes hours to figure out (sometimes for things as measly as simple links), and its incessant glitchiness, I see GoDaddy's expensive hosting service as a liability, and have no further interest in doing business with them. 

I'm done.

As I mentioned in earlier posts on this topic, my goal was to cobble together a modernized blog that at least got readers to my content without confusion or technical issues, after which I would eventually utilize GoDaddy's rather good merchant features to promote my own products. While I haven't ruled them out as a hosting service for my future commercial endeavors, attaching the blog to them has proven to be a complete and utter waste of time, and I strongly discourage anyone from using them as a writing platform. I can see now why Blogger and Wordpress are so highly regarded in this space—after 16 years, no problems with frompyrgos.blogspot.com, not even a single issue. Wordpress has just as good a reputation, if not even better, and I'm considering transferring my content over to them, but will weigh my options. 

Meanwhile, continue enjoying the content here uninterrupted, as I will continue posting, and will keep you updated as to Plan B for using a more 21st-century site, something attractive and user-friendly. Of chief interest to me is to find a site that is mobile friendly, and I suspect Wordpress will be the place for that . . .