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| Who has the best online fragrance database? |
Recently I partook in a debate on Reddit's frag forum as to which site has the best fragrance database. Naturally there were three contenders: Basenotes, Fragrantica, and Parfumo. For the last twenty years, these three sites have been (to varying degrees) the most reliable go-to resources for information on perfume.
I was surprised to see that a large number of participants in this discussion had major problems with Fragrantica. My unwavering opinion is that Basenotes is the crappiest. Eleven years ago, I was banned from Basenotes because I dared to make one complaint on Fragrantica about how badly the community had been treating me, and so naturally Grant's response to a public declaration of abuse was to further the abuse via a brazenly punitive ban. It was predicated on an unsupportable claim that I had violated his site's terms of use, even though his terms said nothing on the matter.
When I attempted to rejoin, the url redirected me to a page that read: You no longer have access to Basenotes forums. Banned once, banned for good. I never forgot that. The mods made a major boo-bo when they banned someone with a fairly clear voice. Turns out that when you ban the author of a popular fragrance blog, word gets out. How's Grant's site doing today? Not great -- it's struggling. I'm thinking of a word that rhymes with the name of a city located at the coordinates of 44.8015° N, 10.3279° E.
Reddit's thread revealed an interesting animus toward Fragrantica, which its trolls have apparently been cultivating for a while now. We live in strange times. I call it the Age of Funhouse Mirrors. For example, since 2016, we've been subjected to images of masked criminals dressed in black who attack civilians and destroy neighborhoods in the name of protesting "facism." We, the quiet ones, are the facists. Funhouse. Global bureaucrats fly their private jets and ride their limousine motorcades to assemblies where they decry "global warming." We, the folks who commute to work in cars we can barely afford, are held responsible. Funhouse. And Fragrantica, an online fragrance magazine with the most functional perfume database on the internet is "aesthetically stuck in the 2000s" and harbors "bad politics," and thus Parfumo is the place to go. Funhouse.
The charge on Reddit is that Fragrantica's politics are really terrible. That Fragrantica's editors and owners are very awful no-good people who are politically conservative and really really bad. That the site disseminates far-right messages via threads and articles and comments that are egged on by admin and spread by white supremacists who pose as members but are there to peddle hate, and thus the whole atmosphere on the site is "toxic" and very, very, very bad. And we're all just supposed to read these complaints and agree with those who are making them, and also agree that because of its politics, it's best to avoid Fragrantica altogether and go use Parfumo.com instead.
These arguments were further bolstered by claims that Parfumo's database is far superior to Fragrantica's, and here is where I sat up in my chair. Parfumo's database is superior? News to me! Since when? Parfumo, the site with so few reviews that you literally have to advance-search for a perfume that someone has taken more than three seconds to comment on? Parfumo, the site with scads of useless pie charts that ostensibly reveal all sorts of useful info about each perfume? Parfumo, the site that lacks pictures for at least a third of the perfumes in its database? Parfumo, the site that just mimics the notes lists on Fragrantica with smaller pictures? Parfumo, the site that claims to have more than double the number of perfumes as the other sites, yet when you search for something relatively commonplace, it doesn't show up? That Parfumo?
Here's the bitter truth about Parfumo, which the Reddit crowd didn't want to hear: it's been around as long as Fragrantica, and almost as long as Basenotes, and yet it has never taken off in the fragrance community. Go on YouTube and listen to the top reviewers there, and they invariably refer to Fragrantica for note breakdowns and release years. Look at some of the more "indie" writers and reviewers, and you'll find they have extensive reviews on Fragrantica. And if you do a basic search of something on Fragrantica, you'll find the perfume on a page that often has several pictures of the fragrance and enough info to tell you what you want to know. Even if the page lacks a release date and reviews, at least you'll know what the product looks like.
Does Parfumo have a vaster database with more fragrances listed? Possibly. I have seen a discrepancy in the number of hits I get on Parfumo vs. Fragrantica, and often the latter doesn't have a fragrance, or has the fragrance in the wrong place, and sometimes with the wrong year. Fragrantica's database is very far from perfect, there's no arguing that. It has plenty of problems, and often those problems are so basic that they would take admin five minutes to rectify, yet they don't. So that's another valid complaint. But then there's just the practical fact of the matter: Fragrantica is more useful than Parfumo when referencing what a perfume is like. If I look up Coty's Truly Lace on Parfumo, I get one picture of the perfume, four pie charts that tell me nothing (apparently Truly Lace is 10% of everything to everyone, and ranks at 33% for three of the four seasons, whatever that means), and that's it. No reviews. No comments. No user-submitted photos. Nothing.
I hop on Fragrantica, call up Truly Lace, and voila! Two pics of the perfume, plus an ad for it, a clear notes list, easy-to-read bar graphs created by users, and twelve decent reviews, with several written by prolific and experienced members. If I search for Coty's Wild Citrus, it doesn't come up on Fragrantica, and that's a problem. It should be there. I shows up on Parfumo, sure, but when I click on the page, aside from one picture, what do I get? Nothing, not even the useless pie charts! So yeah, Parfumo's database fills in holes for various brands by having pages for more obscure fragrances, but without reviews and basic user-submitted data, what good does that really do me? I may be looking at a page for Wild Citrus, but it isn't telling me anything about it. It's utterly useless.
As for the supposedly terrible and awful and very bad politics of Fragrantica, I'm at a loss. I've been a member there for over ten years, and have been a faithful reader of their articles. I've never witnessed a single political exchange on the site. Not one. When the abortion debate was reignited in American politics, Fragrantica's home page banner read (and still reads) "Free to Choose," which is obviously a feminist reference to a woman's right to choose. Yet the Reddit crowd is going on about how it's code for an issue in the Ukraine war, and Julian Assange, and the Trucker Convoy in Canada, which doesn't make a lick of sense. "Free to Choose" to get the Covid vaccine? That's a stretch.
"Free to Choose" is a center-left mantra, and certainly not a far-right catchphrase. All the flaming going on about how Fragrantica's administrators "spread hate" is typical left-leaning noise with nothing factual behind it. Tellingly, none of the accusations were backed by direct links to pages on Fragrantica where the hate is happening. I guess they don't have a database for that? Funhouse!