Starting another Monday, and going with Burberry Hero EDT. The freshest version with nice citrus off the top but strikes quickly into that known cedar foundation. The EDP is still the best in the line to me, but this is more of an every day wear.

Week 5: Finalizing the Build Hey guys, Joe A. here with another one for ya’! Welcome back to Shelf Control, where one man attempts to bring order to a fragrance collection that clearly stopped respecting boundaries! So now the brackets are up, the shelves are in, and the empty shelves are officially in position. In other words, the construction phase is largely done — which is both exciting and slightly terrifying, because now the wall is just standing there waiting for several hundred bottles to show up like it knows something I don’t!! For the shelves, I ended up going with birch panels instead of oak. And no, before anybody starts connecting dots, this was not an Aventus nod. I chose birch because the lighter white wood works beautifully with the blue tones in the room and keeps the whole space feeling clean, open and airy. Since I’m down here in Florida, I wanted the design to have a little bit of that bright, fresh, coastal feel without turning the room into a Tommy Bahama clearance rack. The shelves are roughly 4 feet long and 16 inches deep, mounted on heavy brackets, and you can clearly see the acrylic tiered displays fitting in nicely! Right now, everything looks clean, calm, and suspiciously under control, which means the bottles clearly haven’t arrived yet. The structure is there, the spacing is set, and the garage office wall finally looks like it was designed to become the Joe Average Fragrance Library! Next up is the big one: The Great Bottle Migration, when the collection starts moving from around the house into one central location. The stage is built. The shelves are ready. Now it’s time to see if Shelf Control can survive first contact with the actual collection. #EnjoytheJourney Week 6: The Great Bottle Migration (Part 1)!

Down the rabbit hole I went, searching for woody aromatic / fresh spicy scents that I can wear year round here in Seattle. After much testing and scoring some good deals, I landed on: - Roja Reckless: an elegant mix of cypress, cedar, aromatics and spices with that patented Roja complexity. I think it’s discontinued but I landed a gently used bottle - Widian Black I: delicious mix of cinnamon and cypress, with hint of incense and cardamom but it somehow manages to stay pretty fresh - Ormonde Jayne Evernia: I fell in love with this elegant woody mossy scent at their boutique in the Royal Arcade. It supposedly has rose and orris (the top notes on my no-fly list) but it’s blended so well I don’t notice them at all All wear relatively close to the skin and aren’t projection beasts, but they are all so elegant, complex, and natural smelling (and a bit addictive to me) that I’m over the moon to have found them