Basenotes is in Deep Doo-Doo. I Have Thoughts.

Recycling the same old thing hasn't worked out.

Grant, in describing how Google's new algorithm diverts searches to its A.I., adds in parentheses that these answers are "often wrong," as if he is somehow capable of that determination. Grant, the guy who has driven his own website into the ground in the span of 25 years. The same guy who takes six months to make basic coding fixes to his website whenever something is on the fritz (perhaps he should defer to A.I. for his patches) is claiming that Google no longer recognizes Basenotes in searches because Basenotes is now considered too "small" to be noticed. He says that if you're a small site now, you won't show up on Google, and you might as well not exist. And he laments that at 25 years of age, Basenotes may not see 26. 

There are a few issues with his assessment. First, the fact that Google no longer recognizes Basenotes in general fragrance queries is nothing new. Google has been ignoring Basenotes since 2018. I don't know if Grant is aware of this, but from 24 months before the pandemic to today, I've literally been typing "Basenotes" at the end of all fragrance searches when I want Basenotes content. Hate to break it to ya, Grant, but that ain't news, except apparently to you. The fact that you're acknowledging this problem now is characteristic of your tech savvy, as it literally takes you a light year to do anything on the internet -- anything except ban members, that is. Banning people . . . that you do without batting an eyelash. That part always happens quickly. So quickly that, well, I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll get to that. 

Which brings me to the second issue with his assessment: Gatekeeping. For a quarter of a century, Basenotes has been the epicenter of Gatekeeping 101. You want to see how it's done? Drop by Grant's crib and hang out for a few days. It won't take long. Stay quiet, because if you rub any one of his prissy oakmoss-worshipping "Institutions" the wrong way, it's off to the Nine Circles of Fragrantica for you. I was banned over a decade ago (I've since rejoined merely on principle) and when I made my way back in on the fourth try, I had to deal with a suspicious "moderator" asking me all kinds of questions for two days, telling me he can see my IP address, as if that would actually tell him anything, and acting like Basenotes is hallowed ground that only the chosen may tread on. This unwarranted and bizarrely aggressive inquisition took place because I argued with something said by Bigsly, the living embodiment of the dyed-in-the-wool Basenoter who has never once, despite years of open trolling, been so much as threatened by a ban.

And this has been the real problem with Basenotes -- its elitism. Yes, it's a great resource for fragheads. Yes, there's a treasure trove of DIY info and fascinating interviews and reviews to be had. Yes, it's a wonderful benefit to fragrance lovers, and to the internet, to have a site populated by intelligent connoisseurs who can actually string two sentences together and use sophisticated multisyllabic vocabularies to boot. But none of this matters if you can't keep up. Fragrantica has been dominating Basenotes since 2011, and their search engine visibility hasn’t been close since. Where the Fragrantica team has excelled in database design and content creation, Basenotes has languished in its stagnant 2000s aesthetic with periods of outages and server crashes literally taking it offline at least once a year. How many times have I clicked a Basenotes link, only to be greeted with a "503 Service Unavailable" page? 

You know which website has never banned me for having an honest opinion? Fragrantica. I've written about Fragrantica here many times. I've criticized it here many times. I know that Fragrantica writers read my content, because they've said so in their articles. So they see me. They know what I think and what I do, and you know what? They let me stay. Because they know that digital elitism is so 2000s. They know that the days of bouncing the "hear-me-out" guys like Mattmeleg while giving gold stars to obvious frauds like Hednic is a recipe for disaster. I'm not saying Fragrantica has never banned anyone. I'm saying they aren't interested in banning people, and if they ban someone, it's for one reason only -- it was that person, or their money. And the money wins everytime. 

Grant would ban people simply for challenging the crowd’s orthodoxy. Think oakmoss isn’t as crucial as his clique insists? Watch out -- the revolving door might just give you a swift kick. Dare to argue with those whose haughty attitudes have you looking everywhere for your religion? Whoever sends Grant a direct message first to complain wins. Rub Hednic the wrong way? That’s a quick ticket out -- Hednic, the very guy who has probably driven more newcomers away than anyone else (one glance at his so-called “buy list” and you realize the lunatics are running the asylum). You can’t tell these people they’re rigid and close-minded for only tolerating opinions on first formulas. You can’t push back against the collective belief that vintage fragrances are inherently better than modern reinterpretations. You can’t demur when told you’re just a newbie who should stay quiet and learn. And you definitely can’t ask about a popular fragrance without first spending eight hours hunting down and reading two or three archived threads on it -- or risk provoking senior members into begrudgingly providing the links. It’s far easier for them to berate anyone curious about current opinions than to simply share their own.

All of these bad vibes have driven people away from Basenotes. The community has shrunk tremendously over the years, and since Grant foolishly decided to sequester paying subscribers away from the rest of the site (where they can literally foul-mouth the civilians with impunity), the appearance of growing community cohesion has been much harder to generate. In short, Basenotes helped Grant drive itself into the ground, merely by refusing to open up and accept the masses. Derek, a.k.a. "Varanisridari," often snidely calls Fragrantica the "cafeteria" of the fragrance community, and makes it ever-so clear that he is not a member. I like Derek, and subscribe to his YouTube channel. But on this particular point, he embodies everything that's wrong with the Basenotes mentality. You can't look at the place that attracts all the people, sane and insane, smart and dumb, experienced and novice, and liken it to a teenage watering hole. This is the internet, Derek. Traffic is everything. You should know this -- you've increased your output commensurate with increased traffic to your channel.

The weirdest thing about Grant's statement on this issue is that he claims Google won't recognize a site's content if it's too "small." This is an obvious lie. My teeny-tiny little site has enjoyed a steady increase in Google-directed traffic over the years, to the point where I don't even need to keep content current to hold readers. Let's face it, I took a year off and saw a minimal decline in traffic, and that was seven years ago, when I had a smaller readership. I'm not a big site by any means, nor is my traffic anything spectacular, but it's more than enough to drive my ambition to keep writing. I don't get consistent search visibility, but it happens more than I thought it would. Now, it’s true that my site is directly affiliated with Google, since it’s hosted on the free Blogger platform. But Blogger doesn't self-feed. Your content has to drive its own traffic to render search results. It doesn't hurt to have Google tied in, but I wouldn't classify it as a built-in advantage, either. 

Basenotes isn't failing because of Google, or because Fragrantica is too big and too mean, or even because the community is exclusionary. It's failing because it asked the internet to keep it small, and thus keep people away. Grant's draconian policies, the community's legless habit of pissing off newcomers, and the pay-to-play system all hurt its chances in the face of a rising Fragrantica, but the real problem with Basenotes is bad karma, and poor technical prowess on the part of its tech team. When glitches arise, you get on them like white on rice and have them sorted within hours, not weeks. And you invite, you don't ban. After almost twenty years of membership, I've never once witnessed an exchange that warranted a ban, yet I've seen countless people get disappeared for random reasons. I was banned for complaining about the site's foibles on Fragrantica, and was then told by senior members that expressing my negative opinion on another website was grounds to be expelled. Well, mission accomplished, people. 

Fragrantica, so nice to call you home. 

What Makes a Perfumer a Perfumer?

I watched a brief documentary on Pierre Bourdon in which he described his mindset as a perfumer, describing his love of travel and the arts, and came away wondering about him. What kind of mind creates Kouros and Cool Water? He was clearly obsessed with the latter. Throughout the film, he was shown sniffing the bottle and scent strip, staring out his study window with his mind's eye doing all the observing. What was he thinking about? What drives his inquisitive mind? 

I have recently gotten into formulating my own perfumes using artificial intelligence as my guide. I'd feel stupid admitting this if it weren't for another documentary that I watched about Calice Becker. In it, she describes being the Director of The Givaudan Perfumery School in Grasse, and intercut with her monologue are scenes of perfumery students formulating their accords in front of a massive touch screen that allows them to tweak proportions and have their ideas blended right on the spot. The perfume world has gone fully digital, and that is exactly how they're training perfumers.

If perfumery were simply a digital art, school wouldn't really be all that involved. But it takes years and many hurdles to actually become a perfumer for a big company like Givaudan, and apparently much of that time is spent cultivating a perfumer's personal philosophy. Pierre Bourdon describes the importance of reading In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. It is your assigned reading if you wish to study under him, as Jean-Christophe Hérault discovered. Why was this required reading? The novel, which spans seven volumes, depicts someone who connects scent to memory, and describes being transported back to childhood at the whiff of a food item and the air near the sea. 

This scent memory is likely what Bourdon wanted Hérault to absorb, and judging from the success of Aventus, he did. His compositions speak to people, just as his teacher's did decades before. But Bourdon strikes me as being a bit of a philosopher; his ruminations on life, on art, on nature, all seem thoughtfully abstract, as if you'd never truly understand them without getting to know the man in full. I imagine it would take several years to unpeel the onion of Pierre Bourdon. But then again, I may not need to -- perhaps I am a perfumer also. Maybe that is who I am.

So, what is my philosophy? What am I striving for in life? How do I view life? I consider age a requisite for success in this domain. At 43, I am still relatively young, but now old enough to recognize all the cruel limitations life imposes on me, and mature enough to accept them. Life is long, but life is also hard. Get up. Go to work. Get beat up for eight hours. Brave the increasingly crazy traffic home, and then take care of a dog and a partner, all while maintaining an inner zen. I felt uninspired for many years, unable to connect my imagination with any real beauty in nature, and thus incapable of processing natural beauty into scent. Being a perfumer wasn't in the cards for me.

Then I accompanied my partner up to her hometown in central Maine. Her parents own an ancient farmhouse up there, built on a hill sometime in the 19th century, and the property it sits on is a little piece of terrestrial paradise. Acres of meadow, some of it partitioned into a closed flower and vegetable garden, some of it open flower garden, and all of it lovely. There are patches of iris and daffodil, peony and wild rose, gladiolus and echinacea, crab apple blossoms and phlox and lilac trees on a sprawling expanse of green grass ringed with pine. They have several man-made ponds and bird feeders, which draw all sorts of little feathered wonders. To simply stand on their property is transformational. 

I come away from it believing something new: to be in nature is to be surrounded by the divine. What peace is found in lying under a blackberry bush, away from its nettles but close enough to watch raindrops filter through each layer of greenery until they patter around me, smacking into my cheeks? To not move for an hour, and observe each passing bee, each fluttering moth, each caterpillar nibbling along the stems overhead? Life and death are so cyclical there, in the proximity of divinity, that nothing corrupts their flow. One could imagine that blackberry bush is eternal. Yet nothing is, and eventually everything crumbles into the soil, becoming the soil itself, which in time yields new growth. 

After spending some time there, I came away inspired by nature. The scents of the flowers were vibrant and fresh, products of clean earth and good tending. The lemony lift of the wild roses, the dulcet sweetness of the lilac blossoms, and the grape-like purr of purple iris flowers all filled my lungs with a sense that there is simplicity in beauty, and much complexity in rendering it all secondhand through a perfume. It isn't that the formulas need to be lengthy and convoluted, no -- one must simply acquire the knowledge needed to ensure they avoid that fate. There are things that you can learn in school, perhaps by being one of the lucky that gets plucked from a pool of several thousand applicants each year to study at Givaudan. Then there are things that you can learn from years of reading and appreciation, by simply immersing yourself in the language of perfume, year after year, until eventually reaching a stage of intellectual Nirvana. 

I may be at that stage. I now view the possibility of formulating a masterful perfume as not out of reach. Artificial intelligence plays a role here, perhaps larger than would be considered "respectable" by professionals, I will admit, but still central enough to success regardless of how it is perceived. Through lengthy discussions and formulations, A.I. has rendered several formulas for me, formulas that I have viewed critically, knowing what the materials are, and what they're capable of. I've asked my digital friend to replace bergamot EO with bergamot FCF to avoid photosensitivity issues. I've queried it about including things like Helvetolide and Ambrettolide to enhance the quality of a base accord. I've investigated the radiance and power of high-dosing Hedione into a floral accord. I've looked into making a perfume "pulse," using irones, and not just sit there. I want movement. I want Creed-like intensity and quality. I don't want flat notes that smell stale and heavy and unbalanced. I want nature in a bottle, but using 90% synthetics. 

I'm starting with a marine rose perfume. It will contain extremely expensive rose absolutes and rose otto materials. It'll also contain a bunch of "booster" materials that will lend longevity and complexity to the rose, adding an ethereally modern element. The top will be citrus and tea; the heart rose and violet, the base salty-marine with a bit of melon. I know it doesn't sound original, and it isn't. But originality is overrated. What I value isn't originality of concept, but quality of construction and clarity. I want this to smell like a garden in Maine, and I will work on achieving that. The fragrance should transport me to that garden up north, where one can stand and breathe in the saline-saturated air, clear and clean, and use it to filter the bright glow of dewey roses. The perfume should smell rich and full, but also bright and fresh, and I want it to be of the sort of beauty that makes people pause and go, "Oh!" Their next move should be to ask for a bottle. 

Unlike Pierre Bourdon, I don't put much weight on a worldview that favors "the arts," nor do I think that traveling the world is a prerequisite. I don't need to go around with a notepad and scribble down every impression. I need to think about what I'm smelling, and simply remember it, and that isn't as difficult for me to do as many other things are. Surprisingly, my scent memory is pretty great. When I smell something remarkable, I remember it, and when I smell it again elsewhere, it takes me to the place where I first encountered it. I will know my fragrance is successful when I smell it and think, "That's it . . . that's the garden where I was reborn." 

Black (Kenneth Cole)

Some fragrance note pyramids I take seriously, while others strike me as marketing ploys, packed with alleged notes that don’t exist in the composition, serving only to mislead or confuse. Black (2003), in my view, falls into the latter category. I won’t bother listing its pyramid (“watermint,” etc.), as I find it largely fictitious. I also disagree with peers who see Black as a forward-thinking precursor to Bleu de Chanel or the standout of the brand’s lineup. Notably, despite its success as a mainstream masculine fragrance in the early 2000s, Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez omitted it from Perfumes: The Guide (2008).

My theory on this omission ties to my perception of Black: it’s essentially Davidoff Cool Water (1988), reimagined as an ozonic rather than aquatic scent. The resemblance to Cool Water is striking from the outset, surprising given how rarely this connection is noted. Black features a bold aromatic fougère accord of aldehydic lavender and green apple, with synthetics like Aldehyde C-12 MNA, Floralozone, and Helional creating a vague “fresh” profile that settles into a white musk aftertrail, dominated by the heart’s overpowering green apple. For six hours post-application, apple is nearly all I smell. It’s as if perfumers Harry Fremont and Sabine De Tscharner took Pierre Bourdon’s fougère formula, tweaked it to emphasize ozonic notes per their brief, and left the core unchanged. In 2003, Black may have felt trendy, but it always triggered a sense of déjà vu, as if I’d smelled it before.

In their book, Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez dismiss fragrances that mimic Cool Water without adding originality, and consider them to be olfactory complications to Bourdon's simple plot. This likely explains their refusal to review Black. Coles's scent echoes Cool Water but swaps its minimalist elegance -- marked by neroli, tobacco, and mineralic sea-spray notes -- for a heavier blend of soapy apple, wormwood (the base here is clearly the inspiration for Steve DeMercado's Guess Man three years later) and musk meant to evoke a woody amber. While Black appeals to fans of apple-forward fragrances, its reliance on Cool Water’s template feels dated and redundant. Why choose Black when Cool Water offers a purer expression of the same idea?

Panda (Zoologist)

Christian Carbonnel is the nose behind this one, and I have to say -- he nailed it. I’m talking about the 2017 formula here. Technically, I should call it Panda 2017, since the original was done by Paul Kiler around 2013 or 2014. But at this point, this version is Panda. It’s easily the freshest and most easygoing of Zoologist’s gender-neutral, masculine-leaning offerings, and I like it. A lot.

It opens with a cool burst of green tea and grassy, leafy florals. Nothing stands out individually, but they’re blended with just enough texture and nuance to give the air a soft, glowing greenness. Then comes a green apple note -- crisp, a little bitter, almost like a crab apple -- tempered by a hint of sugar. It’s not candy-sweet, more like the scent of just-picked fruit. There’s an earthy thread beneath the apple, never dominant, but present. Imagine a ripe apple resting in damp soil. That’s the vibe. Nothing here smells loud or synthetic, and despite civet being listed in the base, I don’t detect it at all. Maybe it’s there just to deepen the earthiness. If you’re an apple note lover, this is paradise. 

Of course, I have one caveat: you can get your apple fix for a lot less. Donna Karan, Hugo Boss, even Cool Water and Nautica Voyage, plus the fragrance in my next review -- they all do great apple-adjacent scents without the Zoologist price tag. So why splurge on Panda? Well, because Carbonnel’s take smells luminous, natural, and unusually lifelike. It’s a crisp-fruit reverie, bottled. If that’s your thing, and your wallet agrees, then by all means, go for it. I just don't have the scratch.