r/Perfumes

Hi all!!

my first perfumes were all 75ml or 100ml bottles. edp concentration, so two sprays would last the whole day. but i like rotating scents with the seasons and my mood. So after two years my summer bottle was still 80% full. The worst thing is that i was getting bored of them

This summer I decided to buy a 5ml travel spray instead. It feels great as I can switch whenever I want

I've been testing a few houses this way, sampled Diptyque, Zielinski & Rozen, and Le Labo in travel sizes. lets me really live with a scent before committing. the home lab method works, just seal test strips in bags and evaluate over days.

Anyway, if you're sitting on half-empty bottles you're bored of, give travel sizes a try. you might end up with a rotation that actually feels like yours.

I don't believe in spending hundreds for perfume that doesn't last forever!!, so I was wondering what everyone else likes that's considered "cheap" to you?

and would love recommendations! I love fruity to floral smells!!

The other day I was talking to someone and said that was wearing my new perfume. She paused and kinda looked at me like I was stupid. I didn’t realize why she was acting like that until she started laughing and said “ you WEAR perfume?” Like I had said it incorrectly.

I started laughing too because it was kind of awkward and just brushed it off by saying “oh haha yeah I mean spray perfume.” I’m just a little confused and embarrassed because I’ve literally always said that I wear perfume and I could’ve sworn that it was just what people say when using a perfume. Have I been saying it wrong this whole time? Does anyone else say that they “wear” perfume??

For other perfume and cologne lovers, have you realized you spend all of your time reading these names/brands/notes but never actually hearing them? I’m not on TT or YT, so I’m reading information, not hearing it from influencers (nor do I have friends into perfumes, sadly). Whenever I go to the store or I try to talk to my husband about fragrances, I realize I need five minutes of preparation to learn the pronunciation of all the words I want to talk I about 😅

Pour, homme, eau, gourmand, parfum, fougère, insert any note with long chemical compound names, L’Imperatrice, Guerlain, Spiritueuse, Lattafa, Lait, etc…

Am I the only idiot struggling out here? 🥲

I think I’m buying the idea of a fragrance more than the actual scent lately. I recently blind-bought Glossier You because of all the hype, and honestly, the bottle is pretty, so I fell for it.

But now that I have it? It’s just fine. It didn't do anything for me, and I’m realizing it’s just a basic smell.

Has anyone else had a major letdown after a blind buy? What’s the last perfume you blind-bought that turned out to be a total disappointment?

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.

Hello!
I am looking for perfume as a very picky specific person, mostly in the market to buy samples to test for this reason. I have a very (very) specific idea in mind and thought you all could help. I know very little about perfume (comparatively lol) but I am looking for something feminine, soft/ powdery, not overtly(strongly) sweet or strongly floral and dusty. I want to smell like the visual of an antique music box or vanity set delicately engraved in cursive and beautiful details but abandoned and covered in dust. Like a very lovely ghost lady from the 1910s haha.

Not necessary but possibly helpful, I love the smell of spices like cloves, day old soft flowers, freshly washed linens on a clothesline or curtains on an open window, old books and hot vanilla chai.

Anything that even kind of fits this vibe I would love to hear it, thank you!

I’ve been struggling to find anything I like with no florals. I’m a big fan of cedar, amber, musky stuff, and I really love cherry scents (not so much an artificial cherry). I just can’t seem to find anything like that that doesn’t lean too sweet, or end up being floral as well. Any recommendations?