The other day I was saddened to find that Shamu, a fragrance blogger known for the twice-retired pourmonsieurblog.blogspot.com, had deleted his blog. He hadn't posted in over three years, but had kept the content up, and I had taken it for granted that it would always be there for me to peruse at my leisure. Now it's gone, likely never to return.
Another blog, bigslyfragrance.wordpress.com, is also defunct, with its author neglecting to post in almost thirty months. And yet another blog, peredepierre.com, went extinct sometime after 2010. Men's fragrance blogs are gradually drying up, as the written word is supplanted in the online social media space by video content on YouTube and Instagram, and the community drifts ever more into the "fan-bro" mentality of religious adherence to wearing anything Aventus/Aventus-adjacent, or Parfums de Marly. The question is, why?
On a case-by-case basis, perhaps there is less mystery; bloggers get tired, lose enthusiasm, shift their attentions to other things, and what was once a fun little side gig is quickly abandoned for other pursuits. Shamu was an old-school "powerhouse" fragrance lover, into stuff like Paco Rabanne Pour Homme, Z14, and Quorum, and he excelled at reviewing obscure pre-niche masculines, things released between 1960 and 1995, which were often modeled after Brut, Azzaro Pour Homme, Drakkar Noir, or Zino by Davidoff. The material was great while it lasted, but by year four (2015) I could see that the steam was running out. Shamu's personal collection was near exhausted, and his reviews had begun to scrape the barrel; there are only so many derivative throwbacks you can case before redundancy quashes novelty and everyone's eyes start to glaze over.
In regards to Bigsly, I think the blog (and its interactions with From Pyrgos, which I found largely constructive) was generally good. Sure, the writing wasn't the greatest, and I suppose one could argue that the author had the wrong hobby, given his openly aversive sensitivities to perfume, which I think were unintentionally hilarious, but I thought the blogger would continue on indefinitely. His abrupt departure in 2021 signaled an end to his obsessive scrutiny of "cheapies" and his compulsive habit of chronically sampling every fragrance he encountered. Bigsly claims in his last post that prohibitive swapping options, the disappearance of free samples, and an increase in prices led to his retirement, but I suspect another issue was at fault: boredom. When you review hundreds of fifteen dollar frags, you confirm what I said in my review of Mancera's Silver Blue -- there is nothing new under the sun, especially in masculine perfumery. Smell twenty, you've smelled them all.
Boredom was key with peredepierre.com. Its lead author (I think it was Dane? Or maybe it was Mark. Eh, can't quite remember) titled one of his last posts, "Perfume is Boring." He wrote that (around 2012), new releases had been growing more and more repetitive, with fewer and fewer interesting ideas being introduced, and thus it no longer served a purpose to discuss fragrances. The post was short, hastily written, and light on details, and the impression I got was that the author had simply lost interest in writing about perfume, and had never been super interested in it to begin with. Peredepierre.com was a collaborative effort, with at least four contributing authors, and I think several of them had also lost interest, so they decided to close shop, and deleted the blog.
Those are individual reasons for blog deaths, but what about the big picture? What does it mean when bloggers write for several years with great enthusiasm, only to suddenly lose their passion and erase all traces that they ever existed? To stop writing is one thing, but to delete a blog entirely is quite another. In Shamu's case, I wonder if political correctness stymied his efforts to keep pourmonsieurblog.blogspot.com online? He spent a lot of time talking about "manliness" and "no-nonsense masculinity," while also working a full-time white collar job as a lawyer, if I'm not mistaken. It's entirely possible that someone noticed his little side effort, read it, and disapproved of the definitively gendered language he used to describe masculines and the culture around them.
Was he a victim of a "woke" brigade that threatened to put his head on a block if he didn't renounce his fealty to manly colognes? Is our postmodern culture killing men's input on perfume, simply by robbing them of their ambition, or their courage, or both? It's tempting to think so, especially in light of all that's happened in the last ten years, but I believe the answer is far simpler: people don't read anymore.
Look objectively at the community, and it's no mystery. People have turned to video content for their perfume fix. YouTube has spawned dozens of reviewers and "influencers" who take the latest stuff and wave it around while bumping their gums about packaging and "performance." I feel that precious few of them are worth watching, but occasionally there are standout channels, like those by Varanis Ridari and Dan Naughton. Varanis Ridari's content, labeled "The Unlist," is particularly good, because he simply talks about fragrances and their provenance, with nothing else embellishing the videos. It's refreshing to watch someone just stand in front of a camera and talk about perfumes, be they vintage or contemporary, and even talk about abstract topics, like how individual materials were developed, used, and perceived by the public.
Varanis Ridari also has a blog, which is simply written reviews of perfumes, with no stone left unturned. It appears to be alive and well, so that's a plus, but it wouldn't surprise me if his videos got more attention than his written content does. I've been doing this since the autumn of 2011, and to date my average daily views are 350. Sometimes I get over 500 views in a day, and those are the good days. I don't have a huge audience. There are maybe forty or fifty people who read my blog every day, and the rest drop in occasionally, with search engines sending a dozen or so one-timers by the hour.
I've never been approached by Fragrantica to write for them, probably because of the sacred unwritten rule that forbids heated debates between perfume bloggers, which I've broken several times in past years (we are all denizens of Snowflake Land, where the mere thought of disagreement, no matter how intellectual in scope, is disqualifying). I could look in the mirror and ask myself why I even bother to write. Why, when YouTube is eating my lunch, do I sit down at a keyboard and tap-tap away for hours on end?
I'm not sure. I enjoy doing it, that's all I know. From Pyrgos isn't really a "Blog" in the standard sense of a blogger site that acts as a diary for brief personal jottings. Blogger is its platform, but the content is not dissimilar from regular fragrance magazine material, like stuff found on Fragrantica's home page, where reviews and musings are posted by various authors on a weekly basis. I write because it's my contribution to our community. I've been told countless times that I should start a YouTube channel, and I did post a video many years ago (we're talking 2010 or 2011), which I deleted. I'm just not into the whole YouTube setup. I don't want to shill. I don't want to come across as just another "frag bro." I don't want to spend my days making colorful photoshopped thumbnails with huge fonts, and invest four grand into proper lighting and sound.
I just want to write. Perfume blogs vanish when their authors die or lose the will to write, for a shortage of readers is not enough to stop a true writer.
Update 1/19/24:
Bigsly has updated his blog to further explain why it is defunct. He holds that the landscape has changed in undesirable ways and become more expensive, and adds that he has been experiencing medical issues that preclude him from writing about perfume, as spraying fragrance on paper makes him feel ill. Here's to hoping he recovers.