Welcome!

[synecdochic]

Welcome to smellsgood! Please read the community rules in the profile.

I have a good idea for the tagging scheme that I will start to implement as we get posts in the comm, so for now the ability to create tags is set to admins-only. I also want to do a post about common vocabulary items and the like for people who are newer to the perfume world.

My background also comes entirely from the essential oils and perfume oils end of things: I worked in an apothecary for a few years during the summers when I was a teenager and young adult, and got to both smell a lot of things and play around with how various oils blended. Then I ignored scent for a long time, with the exception of a few BPAL oils I got from other people, and thanks to rydra_wong's curation of perfume discussions on DW, have recently gotten back into things with a vengeance -- mostly BPAL again. So, I'm nearly entirely ignorant of the mainstream perfume world, but that doesn't mean we can't talk about those perfumes here! Pretty much everything goes.

To start off some discussion: what are you wearing today? I am wearing BPAL's "413 US 15 / Miller vs California", usually shorthanded as "obscenity caselaw" (as in, "you smell like obscenity caselaw today!" or "The cat smells like obscenity caselaw, did she rub up against you?"): "Leather, cognac, fig, ripe berry, and cream, stuffed into a plain brown paper bag." It's a limited-edition scent from 2009, and I am heartbroken that I'll never be able to get another freshly-made bottle. About a month or so ago, one of the ingredients turned a touch sour-vinegar due to age (I think it's the 'cream' note) -- fortunately, the sourness in the bottle dissipates once it's on my skin, and the overall effect is still very nice on me, but it's no longer as long-lasting on my skin (which eats oils and scents like whoa) and the "chords" of the perfume have morphed so that the notes shake out differently as they wear. Not in a bad way, but I miss the old version already.

How about you?

nowsmellthis -> smellsgood

[synecdochic]

rydra_wong called my attention to a popular perfume blog called "Now Smell This" that I'd missed, so nowsmellthis is now smellsgood instead! (All of my other clever username ideas were taken, alas.)

Just so you don't get confused when you see a community you don't recognize on your list :)

Apricots!

[kaberett]

Hello all. I feel the need to kick this off by getting you all to enable me some ;)

I turn out to really like scents containing apricot. Really a lot. I currently have BPAL's Grand Guignol (nice when I want booze-preserved apricots), Katharina (white musk + apricot, which goes incredibly spiky on me), and their discontinued March Hare (apricots+clove), which I adore in the apricot-heavy versions and am less keen on in clove-heavy incarnations.

I also have Etat Libre d'Orange Noel au balcon, which I am similarly very fond of - especially in the first five minutes, where it is gorgeous apricot.

In general I tend to dislike florals (and absolutely can't do anything with lily or hyacinth or heliotrope in) and be very fond of leathers, vetivers, woods, etc. (... in which my mouth starts watering at the idea of a leather-and-apricot scent, whoops!) Recs gratefully received. :-)

Community administration: feedback for the rules?

[synecdochic]

I wrote the first draft of the community rules (in the community profile) based on two things: my experience with being the admin for other communities (and seeing what sort of problems come up and what kind of misunderstandings are more likely than others), and my experience being on the LiveJournal Abuse Team during various previous waves of perfume-discussion revival on LJ and seeing what kinds of things came up there.

In particular, that's why I decided to completely ban all forms of selling, and restrict trading/swaps to being an incidental thing rather than a main focus of the community. Over the past decade+ of involvement both personal and professional in comms that are discussing a physical item with heavy collectability, I've definitely seen every single possible way that selling and trading could go bad, from people walking off with hundreds of dollars of other people's money to people setting up a bunch of trades, collecting the stuff sent to them, and then disappearing without sending out their half of the agreement (usually to discover later that they never had the thing they promised to send out). I'm definitely not saying that's guaranteed to happen here if that sort of thing were allowed, but all it would take would be one case of it happening for the lovely friendly vibe we've had going on in the more ad-hoc discussions to evaporate, not to mention the admin(s) of the community to have to spend a ridiculous time cleaning it up. I also don't want the community to start as a general-discussion comm and wind up full of nothing but "in search of X" and "here's my list of stuff for sale or trade" type posts.

So, I wrote the rules to be very restrictive on that sort of thing, but if people think they'd rather we be a bit more lenient, tell me! For instance, we could do a weekly post for people to post their in-search-of lists and their willing-to-swap lists in the comments, that kind of thing. I still don't think we should allow sales of any kind or put any sort of official comm stamp on money changing hands, because that's a very quick way for things to get out of hand, but as long as people understand that trading/swapping is entirely at their own risk, I am less adamant about banning it.

Likewise, if there are any rules/guidelines you think are missing and should be added, or any rules you think should be revised or rephrased, let me know. Or, if you read the list of what's allowed and not-allowed, and think something should be added, clarified, or revised, let me know that, too!

Meanwhile, I do have many many ideas on how to usefully tag posts to help build a comprehensive database, and the community itself is paid (and will remain so) so people can search for both posts and comments. (The search box is part of the community's layout, too.) Give me a few days to finalize my thoughts and I will make a bunch of tags and write up the tagging guidelines. Once I do that, I'll probably be on the lookout for somebody to help manage the tagging, but working up a tagging system is a prerequisite there.

And finally: What kind of "useful resource" type posts do you think would be a good idea to have? I'm thinking things like building a dictionary of "what we mean when we say X", "here is the master list of blogs that talk about perfume", and "here are links to places to buy all the things that people talk about", and I don't know if it will make more sense to do them as DW posts (advantage: discussion can happen right there; disadvantage: only the poster can edit them) or as Google Docs (advantage: multiple people can edit, disadvantage: reliance on third party provider) or, I don't know, a version-controlled Github repository (advantage: multiple people can submit changes, but there's still oversight and version control so there'd always be backups and we could always recover something deleted accidentally; disadvantage, harder for people to jump in and contribute without going through somebody who knows how to use version control) or something.

My review collection

[cyprinella]

Since I basically liveblog my experience into the entry window and then edit multiple times after initially posting, I don't want to cross post. But you can see what I've talked about here, including tonight's disappointing L'Occitane Eau des Baux (which, in the end, goes surprisingly well with the wine we had for dinner at least).