Is that "out loud" or "out (l)oud"? Seriously, this post is more for my benefit than for the group's, but I'm happy to hear comments and/or observations if you wish. Yesterday I posted a video from a YouTube guy that stated a bunch of facts and figures about the industry, the state of market, its future etc. See https://www.skool.com/bos/im-starting-to-understand if interested. To summarize, he cited that there is a marked increase in frag interest from users of GLPs, and being diabetic, that includes me. I placed my frag first order about 12-13 months ago on that big Canadian site and since then I've bought hundreds of frags of various kinds, qualities, etc just in an effort to learn about them and to determine what I liked. Every single person in my life has asked me what was the trigger for this sudden interest, but I had no idea. Not a clue... I've been playing golf for over 50 years and it took me 20+ years before I bought my first brand new set and about 30 years before I took my first golf trip (you know... on an airplane.) Now within one year of this frag thing, I have no clue what I've spent on this stuff and I'm going to Dubai in two weeks just to learn about oud, the industry and anything frag related. I got the House of Dubai on my speed dial for god's sake. Everyone sees this new obsession but nobody is really concerned. Anyway, this post is more therapeutic for me.

Today I decided to give my sapphire collection by BTV a spin again. I had tried them when I first got them and then both our own @Justin Tillery and @Jonathan Ventura tried this set after me. Truth be told I wasn’t very excited about them as I found them all harsh and synthetic. Performance was beast as expected. But the scent profile was offensive. Fast forward 8ish months and I decided to come back to them. It’s actually much better than I remember and smooth now. Still beast mode but though. This frustrates me as for what BTV charges the frags should be aged to perfection no matter what size you purchase. Let’s face facts here. None of BTV contain real oud and anyone that tells you they can smell oud don’t know frags or oud at all. They are smelling a chemical woody derivative that in know way can compare to the intricacies of oud distilled in various countries and ways. Whether steel or copper pot distillation matters nothing. Every batch of Oud that’s distilled is completely different and there is zero chance of frag consistency between batches. But I’m getting on my high horse about actual Oud vs synthetic derivations of certain notes. Bottom line here is this is MUCH better now. FBW? At this price point imho? No. But and this is a big but, I’m not upset at purchasing the sapphire set currently. 😂 now I have to go through them all again to see if this trend continues with the other three…. What say you fam????