Wondering if anyone could help me ID this dress? It zips up the side, and I believe it’s silk. I inherited it, no information apart from Chanel and the size on the neck tag. Thanks!
I need to empty my house quickly, and although I’m sending most of it to Goodwill, I have a couple collections I could really use at least some money from, but I don’t have time to sell them individually.
I’ve looked online for services like this, but I can’t find any reviews about them anywhere and I’m not sure if I should trust them (Sella and WeBuyThat were the ones at the top of my results).
Is anyone familiar with any of these services, or do you have other suggestions for what I could do?
Thank you!
I need to empty my house quickly, and although I’m sending most of it to Goodwill, I have a couple collections I could really use at least some money from, but I don’t have time to sell them individually.
I’ve looked online for services like this, but I can’t find any reviews about them anywhere and I’m not sure if I should trust them (Sella and WeBuyThat were the ones at the top of my results).
Is anyone familiar with any of these services, or do you have other suggestions for what I could do?
Thank you!
I understand why the collective “we” is gunning for Parfumo as the main hub of online fragrance resource, and Fragrantica is rightfully under scrutiny right now. And to be clear, I don’t want a politically motivated perfume site, of all things, any more than anyone else does. I don’t want people to be attacked for being the “wrong” kind of person, in a space that’s just supposed to be about nice smells.
But can we talk about what’s going on with Parfumo’s team?
Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, the Parfumo database is still unacceptably incomplete, if it’s aiming to ever replace Fragrantica. This remains true despite years of high community enthusiasm for trying to get them off the ground. Tellingly, their forum also remains fairly small, lacking enough engagement to support expansion into more subforums — again, despite high enthusiasm.
If our goal is to make them a viable replacement, why is no one talking about the extremely obvious reason why these problems persist?
Every time I have ever mentioned having a bad experience with them, this happens. I get comment after comment after comment talking about exactly the same behavior, even when I never specified precisely what problems I experienced.
People are putting a lot of work into using their frustratingly broken submission form, going as far as to do language translations, sourcing directly from the house, etc, only to have their submission rejected without comment, or sometimes even with snarky, borderline gaslighting comments, and then one of the mods stealing their submission and publishing it as their own.
One user reports that anyone trying to talk about issues they experienced on the forums has their threads deleted.
Another reports being banned for asking for feedback about why their submission was rejected.
They also said another source (which I can’t confirm, but it would explain this behavior fairly well) said it’s because they have a point system on submissions, and the mods/inner circle want their stupid internet points. So they’re just screwing with users who do all this work, taking it as their own, and then insulting or banning them if they question it. To be king of an imaginary hill.
I have a hard time believing that all of these nearly-identical experiences are coincidence. And if people are serious about making an alternative to Fragrantica, that’s never going to happen if the alternative is just being run by a different kind of asshole.
Of course people aren’t migrating over. Fragrantica’s database is complete enough that you can use it without ever having to deal with the assholes who run it. But Parfumo’s isn’t. It’s still missing even some pretty common and basic fragrances, and it needs more community engagement to become a stand-alone tool. But their mods and power users are sitting there just shooting repeatedly into their own foot over internet points, while the community remains unwilling to discuss it openly because saying anything that might go against the rally cry to ditch Fragrantica is unpopular.
I don’t want to switch to a different kind of asshole. I want a perfume site that isn’t run by assholes. And it seems that, no matter what the party line might be on Reddit, most other people don’t want to trade one asshole for another either.
To be honest, I have largely given up on a fragrance site that doesn’t have these kinds of problems. Every luxury-adjacent hobby is full of difficult personalities, power struggles, and pettiness, just like this one is. Hobbies with a wing of people who are only there to class signal at each other are always going to have a problem with big egos and bad attitudes.
But I think we need to stop castigating people for not switching when this is the experience they’re having — either being abused as a contributor, or being unable to fully switch even if they wanted to because it’s too incomplete due to abusing its contributors. At the very least, we should talking openly about these issues on the off-chance they can be solved. People don’t like being treated badly. People don’t like being gaslit, spite-banned, having their work stolen, etc. And this is such a completely ridiculous thing for people to be treated badly over.
These are just nice smells. Someday, maybe we will have a major site run by some of the normal people who are just here for the nice smells. But right now we don’t have any — as far as I can tell, this sub is the most normal fragrance community that currently exists, but we can’t build a database on Reddit. What do we do about that?
ETA: Surprised and encouraged at the amount of love Basenotes is getting here. I thought it was a shame that they lost the popularity contest during discussions of where we should put our energy in light of Fragrantica’s affiliations, but perhaps I counted them out too soon. I still don’t know the solution to this, but personally, I’ve always thought Basenotes was the best in terms of community vibe, and that’s where I’m going to be putting my effort as a contributor.
