sherapop's Best of 2013: Betting on the Long Shots!!!!!

While perusing the spate of perfume blog posts entitled "The Best of 2013," I was struck by the convergence of the results. Some combination of a small cluster of perfumes seemed to be showing up over and over again. And yet, I had never had the good fortune of sniffing any one of them! And yet, I review a perfume nearly every single day. I began to worry that there might be a conspiracy in play. So many perfume bloggers converging on so few perfumes? How, pray tell, could this be? 

In my quest to get to the bottom of this mystery, I visited the Parfumo database, where I learned that, lo, there were 2,397 perfumes launched (to date) in 2013! Something very fishy does indeed seem to be going on here... Is it perhaps true, as I have long suspected, that perfume bloggers really do form a cloister of sorts, a small group of self-selected people all of whom test the very same perfumes--and agree upon their worth?! 

We live in the twenty-first century, the epoch of the internet, the age of the democratization of everything, and yet this pernicious holdout to oligarchic days remains unchanged. To counter this nefarious vestige of benighted times, I hereby offer sherapop's Best of 2013, featuring an array of perfumes unlikely to be celebrated by any other perfume blogger on planet earth--or beyond.

Bucking the trend, I'm betting on what you may regard as the long shots, but I'm sure that, on reflection, you'll wholeheartedly agree that these fragrances are much, much more likely to have an impact on the future of the industry and the perfume world beyond the blogosphere than are the "Best of 2013" bloggers' chosen few!

The envelope please ... and the winners are, in no particular order:

Escada Cherry in the Air

Katy Perry Killer Queen

Diesel Loverdose Tattoo

Kenzo Flower in the Air

Lanvin ME

Guess Girl Guess

One Direction Our Moment

Nicki Minaj Minajesti

Justin Bieber The Key

Pink Sugar Aquolina
Simply Pink

Repetto Repetto

Playboy Play It Pin Up

Moschino

Moschino Forever

Sailing

Victoria's Secret Bombshell Forever 

Heidi Klum Surprise

Christina Aguilera Unforgettable

Mark my words: these creations, my fragrant friends, not the haute niche decants of your best blogging buddies (BBBs), will set the tone for the future of perfumery. Stay tuned... Or not! 

Happy New Year!

Best Wishes for 2014!

Entry #18: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Non-contradiction, the Law of Non-contradiction

I have an uncanny knack for eliciting people's capacity to contradict themselves. This tendency goes way back. In sixth grade, I corrected my English teacher's grammar, and she slapped my face in response. That put a real damper on my motivation to do any school work or to participate in any way in any intellectual activity. By the time I reached high school, I was doing no homework whatsoever, having diverted my energies to "other priorities," as former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney would say. It took me quite a few years to muster up the wherewithal to begin applying my intellect to the world once again. What I have found since then, repeatedly, is that lots of people contradict themselves, and the more power they have, the worse their behavior tends to be upon being confronted with their contradictions. My sixth grade English teacher does not hold a candle to some of what I have seen.

Socrates did a lot of this sort of thing, and look where it got him: a goblet of hemlock! To be honest, I believe that Socrates committed suicide, since there is no historical evidence that anyone forced his mouth open and poured the liquid down his throat. We know that he could have simply departed, moved to a different place, but I think that by that stage of his life, he probably realized that his legacy would be best served by a small act of martyrdom: all in the name of the law of noncontradiction.

It cannot be the case both that p and that not-p 

at the same time and in the same way.

or for those who prefer symbols:

~(p &~p)

The law of non-contradiction is the skeptic's best—and only!—theoretical friend. The skeptic can question everything under the sun, but the law of non-contradiction is the basis for all criticism, so it cannot be abandoned without lapsing into complete and utter dysfunctional insanity. No, I have not tried. The law of non-contradiction is an article of faith which I am proud to hold high, as the sole irrefutable proposition in all of space and time.

What are the perfume applications of the law of noncontradiction? Every single act of criticism depends upon this law, and while we may not know whether p or not-p is true, we can be sure that both of them cannot be at the same time.

Has Mitsouko been reformulated or has it not? p or not-p? Since this is an exclusive and exhaustive disjunction, one or the other must be the case. Guerlain and most other companies have not denied that they reformulated their perfumes, but when they claim at one point in time that they reformulated as a result of the need to comply with the restrictions placed on the perfume industry by the IFRA, and then, later on down the line, that they will soon be restoring the former classic to its original state, something has to give. 

I've encountered other self-contradictions in the perfume world as well. The Holey[sic] Book is marketed as a work of criticism, so presumably its authors value criticism, no? The answer, I'm afraid, is "no." Their goons travel to the ends of the internet to quash criticism of criticism wherever it may appear, what on its face is a flagrant contradiction. 

Not so fast, sherapop. Perhaps the authors are not really critics after all. Perhaps they are only masquerading as critics, which resolves the apparent contradiction in one fell swoop! They do not value criticism in the first place, so it is not a contradiction for them to revile criticism of criticism, since they probably think that it is twice as bad!

A third example: a fragrance community website claims to uphold freedom of expression, but then arbitrarily censors at the caprice of some of its members. This would seem to be a genuine contradiction. In order fully and truly to uphold freedom of expression, you have to accept what you take to be the good, the bad, and, yes, the ugly. To claim that one upholds freedom of expression, provided that the expression reflects one's own values and beliefs, does not demonstrate a commitment to freedom of expression. The real test of one's commitment to freedom of expression is how one reacts to expressions of ideas and values with which one disagrees...