A few days ago I dropped a simple, pseudo-anonymous question into r/fragrance:
“Which Fragrance Blog: From Pyrgos or Varanis Ridari?”
The post was deliberately short and neutral. I wanted unfiltered opinions on two long-winded masculine-fragrance blogs. Anyone with two minutes and Reddit’s post-history feature could figure out it was me, as my handle is easily recognized on Reddit. That was the point. I wasn’t hiding; I was testing whether the answer would stay about the writing or drift somewhere else. Knowing that Redditors would self-censor and pass on commenting at the mere sight of me, I hoped that a clueless few would step into my room and take the test. After all, it's a fair question.
One lone commenter stepped up almost immediately: electrodan. His verdict:
“Varanis Ridari by a long shot.”
Strong words from Dan. When I politely asked what specifically made him prefer Derek’s site over mine, he gave a measured reply:
“FP is fine I suppose… I prefer VR’s demeanor and I think his knowledge is as strong or stronger than most, especially about traditionally masculine marketed scents.”
Fair enough on the surface. But when I asked for even one concrete example of what he meant by “attitude” or “comments I strongly disagree with,” the tone changed. He ran the post-history search, realized who I was, and the response became:
“Well, I find the fact that you’re pretending you’re some rando… disagreeable. You posted a way too long screed about a conversation you had on Reddit about Olivier Creed on your blog…”
Talk about a non sequitur. He was referring to my November 2024 piece, “The Trump Anomaly: How Olivier Creed Accidentally Harnessed the Unfortunate Power of ‘Orange Man Bad.’” In that post I simply noted how both Creed and Trump get misquoted, misconstrued, and misrepresented by false narratives convenient to the "progressive" class. I also pointed out (with photos, here and on Reddit) that vintage Creeds in larger flacon sizes have their Royal Warrant printed on the boxes, which is the detail a different Reddit troll had wrongly claimed was missing entirely from Creed's story.
That was the trigger for Dan. Suddenly the “by a long shot” preference wasn’t about prose, depth of experience, or scent knowledge anymore. It was about the fact that the From Pyrgos author has expressed conservative views that support the current President of the United States of America. How dare I?
Here’s why I ran my test and why I’m writing this now.
Fragrance appreciation is supposed to be about the perfumes, their notes, their history, the craft in creating them (not the art, wink, wink), but it is not, or at least it should not be a loyalty test for political tribes. When someone says “by a long shot” about two blogs that both deliver thousands of words on masculine scents, then pivots to politics and "Hey, no fair!" when pressed, that tells readers the recommendation was never about the writing. It was filtered through an external lens, and in this case the lens of a pugnacious NPC who had difficulty reading a room with one other person in it.
I’ve been at this for over a decade. My readers know exactly where I stand on everything because I’ve never hidden it. They keep coming back anyway, not because they agree with every aside, but because my fragrance analysis holds up. Derek’s blog is newer and also excellent; I’ve said so publicly many times. But the moment a reader’s preference flips from “by a long shot” to “you’re pretending to be a rando” after he remembers my politics, the mask slips and the truth becomes clear: the left will say anything.
The pernicious part isn't the politics alone; people are allowed their views. What’s corrosive is when those views quietly become the unspoken filter for “which blog is better.” It turns a community of scent enthusiasts into another battleground. I’ve watched it happen in other pursuits; once it starts, the actual subject matter (perfume writing in my case) gets sidelined, sometimes out of sheer necessity. My 2023 post about Reddit trolls and the decline of Parfumo/Basenotes was written for exactly this reason. This test just supplied fresh evidence.
If you’re reading this and you like Derek’s writing, great — keep reading him. Derek is a fantastic voice in the fragrance community, and deserves everyone's readership, including mine. If you like my blog, stay here. If you like both, even better. Just know the difference between a recommendation based on the actual writing and one that arrives with an invisible asterisk attached. My readers have always been here for the scents, not the scoreboard, and I’m grateful for them every single day.