Perfume is Prague.

Photo by Zoofanatic, color-corrected by B. Ross in 2024

I briefly stayed in Prague in 2007, from January to July.  I was twenty-five years old, and the last layer of that wonderfully unaffected idealism carried by every college-age person had all but evaporated. That year I had become an adult, a true adult, not some popular notion of what manhood is. I had learned. I had learned that the world is a cynical, mean-spirited place, and that Sartre was correct when he said, "Hell is other people." 

Prague as a physical location is a beautiful place. To walk along the Vltava in the evening is to experience a sense of Europe as it was in the 1900s, its riverside facades having been spared the ruinous ravages of Nazi violence and postmodern blight. Yes, Prague is beautiful, but Prague is also a complete shithole. The casual visitor might not see why, what with all the sparkling lights and colors along the river. But spend more than a month there, and it becomes crystal clear that the city is a magnet for every douchebag in Europe, and perhaps the world. 

Drugs of all kinds are legal in Prague. Prostitution is legal in Prague. Public drunkenness, contrary to what it may say on the books, is de facto legal. This is common knowledge, and draws all the inebriated johns to their very own hedonistic sanctuary city. Try to enjoy a night out on the town in Prague, and unlike most of the other metropolitan locales in the general geographic area (Vienna), you have a fifty-fifty shot. You might get in a few good games of foosball at an underground pub in Vyšehrad, or suffer a conga line of imbeciles who want to fight you and steal your girlfriend. Could go either way. 

There's an additional wrinkle to all this; Prague attracts just as many pseudo-intellectuals as it does asshats. Perhaps that's how I ended up there. Some of these fakers are just as obnoxious as the johns. Spend even twenty minutes in their company, and you'll feel yourself turning into Holden Caulfield. Often they're North American expats with axes to grind about Western culture, which makes zero sense if you've left your air-conditioned flat in Sarasota to live in a former Soviet satellite republic. I had to suffer their prattle about how misunderstood communist China is, and how judgmental and awful it is to try to tell women what they should do with their bodies, as if the thugs in your typical Czech bordello give two shits about bodily autonomy. 

The other day I found myself mentally comparing the fragrance community to Prague. There are clear parallels; perfume is organically attractive and terrestrial, yet the flies that swarm share the same ilk as the expat Praguers. Those who fall into the pseudo-intellectual camp (I raise my hand) offer a wider range of conversational possibilities; some of my acquaintances were actually quite interesting and pleasant to share lunch with, even if their bona fides were suspect. Fragcom peeps typically inhabit the same milieu, and I've had more good than bad experiences. Even if the guy or gal I'm talking to isn't exactly a Luca Turin, if we're discussing perfume, or better yet a specific perfume, I'll enjoy the interaction. My having this site has allowed me to meet some nice people. 

My experience has occasionally veered into unsavory crowds of weirdos and wannabes. Basenotes is, in my opinion, a dumpster fire of sheer crap. While it is certainly a hive of intelligence, the bees are short on honey. How many times has a conversation that could have been productive and polite gone off the rails? Someone has the audacity to start a thread asking about, oh I don't know, Bleu de Chanel, and the immediate responses are persnickety "redirects" to old threads on the subject. Instead of just giving a quick and concise answer, the OP should "do his homework" and first peruse four dozen threads on Bleu, as if adding another one makes a difference. Some of the "hey asshole" responses to these kinds of posters are so well-worded and loaded with sarcasm that the same energy could have supplied a more useful answer to the question. 

There's inevitably the one dubious character who seems to expect me and everyone else to believe him. He posts daily in an ongoing "what did you buy today" thread with pictures of what he expects me to believe that he bought. Invariably he expects me to believe that he spends on single-batch niche fragrances, and that he buys dozens of them every month of every calendar year. A rare Guerlain on Monday. Something from Esteban Parfums on Tuesday. A couple bottles from Poème Parfumé on Wednesday. He expects me to believe that he's amassed roughly nine thousand perfumes this way. He also tells people that he chucks the packaging of everything he buys, potentially exposing these precious elixirs to unnecessary amounts of light. Something any serious collector would do. 

Sometimes he'll field questions and elaborate on how he manages his humble collection, usually claiming that his grandson or nephew curates it, and that he keeps everything on mirrored shelves in a climate-controlled custom-built structure, presumably the size of a Walmart. Yet whenever anyone starts a random appreciation thread, he suddenly gets weird about it, and "respectfully" asks the mods to lock it. He's been doing this for as long as I've been a Basenotes member, racking up anywhere from forty to eighty perfumes per month, and once mentioned that he has four backup bottles of Marc de la Morandiere's Gengis Khan, which he purchased over three decades ago. Anything named Gengis Khan requires a little extra backup, after all.

This is all very believable, by the way. I believe everything he has been telling me and the rest of the community for the last twenty years is one hundred percent true. I believe it the same way I believed it when my roommate in Nové Město told me that he hadn't left the gas stovetop lit when he left for work, even though, upon my arrival home at two in the afternoon, the flames had turned the grate white. I believe it the same way I believed it when a Romani guy tried to to lure me into a herna bar by shouting, "You getting rich!" 

There are the "laughing hyenas" of the fragcom, specifically the individuals who scoff when you express affection for an older fragrance. In their view, admitting a liking for something seems to be a request for them to diminish your appreciation of it. They passive-aggressively mention that the only version of your new favorite they've ever worn is "vintage," and then proceed to elaborate on how superior their formula is compared to the newer stuff. They find it funny if you say that you don't care about reformulations that much, because apparently it's the mark of a philistine to disregard such things. 

They remind me of my North American expat companions, two young college dropouts who thought Norman Rockwell's paintings were "high art," even though neither of them had ever actually studied art. Norman's work, according to them, was superior to anything by the Abstract Expressionists, because of his classically-trained and representational style. When I pointed out that Norman's work fell squarely into the category of illustration, and was not highly intellectualized by modernist theory, I was the asshole. It was rude of me to mention that the old Saturday Evening Post covers were not "must haves" for me, and that the more modern and avant-garde versions of the same American iconography by Pollock or Warhol were preferable. My background in art was disqualifying, especially after a few pints of Braník. (My teetotaling ways only cemented their judgment.) 

Likewise, if I point out to fragcom folks that vintage formulas are a paradox, they reach for the tap handle. If I dare mention that a new formula, if left to sit for a few years, will eventually mellow and mature into something akin to vintage, my understanding and experience with this flies right out the window. The more I know, the less I know. How could I be so naive? How could experience and knowledge ever give me the moxie to supply an argument built on either thing? Everyone knows that simply piddling away my savings on vintage after vintage after vintage is the way to go. Look at our friend with the nine thousand perfumes! He's living proof. By the time he gets around to wearing the last fragrance in his collection, the first will be vinegar. 

Lastly, consider the rules. The fragcom is, at its core, a bureaucracy. You mustn't have an ongoing and heated intellectual debate with a few angry words flung to and fro, even if it is substantive and helps shape public opinion on something as particular and esoteric as in-bottle maceration. Do this, and you are "persona non grata" in the publishing world, where it's okay for paid Fragrantica writers to praise you and link to your writing, but not okay for Fragrantica's editors to invite you to actually write for them. You can have people in threads link to your blog with praise for your reviews, but on Basenotes this could mean private messages are sent to the uninitiated. So, no debating, no coming across as anything but a paid shill on YouTube, unless you've turned in the proper paperwork and paid your taxes in full. Bland and forgettable mediocrity, the kind that is unwilling to risk offending anyone, is the only way Creed sends you free bottles of new releases.

I came home because I didn't want to deal with the bureaucratic process of staying abroad legally. All the paperwork and fees. The processing of visas and insurance premiums. The risk of having something unearthed that I couldn't explain. It wasn't worth it, not for Prague. I returned in 2011 to visit a female friend from Poland, and after a few days of arguing and bad sex, I decided it still wasn't worth it and left again. I often look back and wonder how different my life might have been had I done the whole thing in Vienna instead, but then remind myself that there was another reason I returned to America: I missed it.