Disclosure first: we are the two people who pick what goes into Base Note, a $20/month fragrance subscription. So this is a post about our own taste, written by us, on our own website, with an obvious commercial interest in you liking the answer. We have tried to write it the way we would explain it to a friend over a drink — including the parts where our system has holes, the fragrance we carry that our own database has failed to categorise for months, and the reason our rotation leans harder into fall than into July.
If you only read one thing: The single rule that governs everything else is that every fragrance in the rotation costs the same — $20, flat, whether it is a $510 Creed or a mass-market designer bottle. That is not a marketing flourish; it is a constraint that changes what we are allowed to buy and how we have to think. Because we cannot charge more for the expensive houses, we cannot pad the catalogue with cheap filler to subsidise them either. Every slot has to earn itself on smell alone. Right now that means 32 fragrances from 19 houses, spanning 16 fragrance families, with 13 tagged office-safe and 4 that genuinely work in all four seasons. Below is the actual filter, the actual counts, and the actual rejections.
Who is doing the choosing
Two of us. Jeff runs the buying and does the first pass on everything; Alex handles the catalogue, the notes data, and the arguing. There is no panel, no perfumer on retainer, no algorithm. When you read "we selected," it means two people sat with a stack of decants and disagreed for a while.
We say this plainly because the alternative — implying a curation committee that does not exist — is the kind of small lie that makes everything else you read here worth less. A small team is a real limitation. It also has one advantage worth naming: nobody has to defend a slot to a merchandising department, so when something is not good enough we can simply not buy it.
The other thing worth saying up front is that taste in fragrance is not a matter of expertise overriding yours. It is partly biology. Humans carry roughly 390 functional odour receptor genes, and as John P. McGann put it in Science, differing sensitivities across individuals and species are "presumably due to genetic variations in odor receptor complement" (Source: McGann, Science, 2017). Two people can stand in the same room and receive different information. Our job is not to tell you what is good. It is to make sure that whatever you are, there is something in the 32 that fits — which is a coverage problem, not a taste problem, and coverage is something you can audit. We wrote more about the individual-variation side of this in why perfume smells different on you than on your friend.
The constraint that comes first: one price, no tiers
Most fragrance subscriptions run a two-tier catalogue. There is the standard list, and then there is the premium shelf — the Creeds, the Xerjoffs, the Bond No. 9s — which costs extra, sometimes double. It is a rational business decision. It is also the reason people end up paying a subscription and still not being able to try the thing they actually joined to try.
We priced the other way. One flat $20 gets you a 5 ml twist-up atomizer of anything in the rotation, roughly 60 sprays, about a month of ordinary wear. First month is 25% off at $15. Cancel whenever. And as of this year you can also buy a single vial one-time at $20 without subscribing at all, if you just want to test one thing.
Here is why the tiering exists at the other companies, using published prices we checked ourselves. The arithmetic is ours; the retail figures are theirs.
| Fragrance | Full-bottle retail | Cost per ml | 5 ml at that rate | Base Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creed Aventus, 100 ml | $510 (Source: Creed, 2026) | $5.10 | $25.50 | $20 |
| Bond No. 9 Bleecker Street, 100 ml | $470 (Source: Bond No. 9, 2026) | $4.70 | $23.50 | $20 |
| Bond No. 9 The Scent of Peace for Him, 50 ml | $295 (Source: Bond No. 9, 2026) | $5.90 | $29.50 | $20 |
| Bond No. 9 Nomad, 50 ml | $345 (Source: Bond No. 9, 2026) | $6.90 | $34.50 | $20 |
Notice the pattern in the last two rows. The 50 ml bottles cost more per millilitre than the 100 ml ones, not less — $6.90 against $4.70 for the same house. Small formats always carry a premium, because the bottle, the cap, the box and the shipping do not shrink with the juice. That is the honest mechanical reason sample-size subscriptions add a surcharge on expensive houses. We absorb it instead, and we make it back on the fragrances that sit lower down the retail range. It only works because the rotation is balanced across both, which is the next section.
One more data point on the spread: the same Creed retails at £310 for 100 ml in the UK, listed on Creed's own site as "£3.10 per ml" (Source: Creed UK, 2026, on Green Irish Tweed). Full-bottle pricing on these houses is not a rounding error you can wave away. If we tiered, that is where the tier would land.
What earns a slot
1. It has to be the actual fragrance
Everything we ship is decanted from bottles we bought. No clones, no inspired-bys, no house reinterpretations. This sounds like table stakes and is not: the clone market is enormous and much of it is genuinely competent on the opening. What you lose shows up in the dry-down and in materials that are expensive for a reason, which we went through in what you are actually losing when you buy a dupe. If we cannot source the real thing at a price the flat $20 survives, the slot stays empty.
2. It has to be legible in 5 ml
A month of wear is a real test, but it is a specific one. Roughly 60 sprays is enough to learn a fragrance in several kinds of weather and at least one social situation you cared about. It is not enough to develop a relationship with something that needs six months to make sense. Fragrances that are mostly interesting as objects — brilliant on paper, inert on skin after twenty minutes — do badly here. We are looking for things that reveal themselves on the second or third wear, not the thirtieth. If you want the arithmetic on how far a vial goes, we did it properly in how long a 5 ml atomizer lasts.
3. It has to fill a hole in the grid
This is the least romantic test and the one that rejects the most candidates. Before we buy, we ask what the rotation is currently thin on — a season, a family, an occasion, a price band — and whether the candidate genuinely fills it or just resembles something we already have. A superb woody-spicy is an easy no when we already carry thirteen spicy fragrances and only two green ones. Coverage beats individual excellence, because you are not buying one fragrance from us, you are buying access to a set.
4. It has to survive both of us
Either of us can veto. Neither of us can unilaterally add. That rule exists because our tastes diverge in a useful way — one of us reaches for gourmands, the other finds most of them cloying — and a fragrance that both of us can defend is usually one that a stranger can wear. The exception is deliberately polarising fragrances, which we do carry, but only when the division is the point rather than a flaw. Baccarat Rouge 540 is the canonical example of a scent people either love or cannot stand; when we add something in that category, we say so on the product page rather than pretending it is universally liked.
How the 32 actually balance out
Here is the current state of the rotation, counted from our own catalogue rather than described in adjectives. Nineteen houses across 32 slots. Parfums de Marly has five, Bond No. 9 and Creed have four each, Xerjoff has three, Dolce & Gabbana has two, and fourteen houses hold a single slot apiece — Bvlgari, Dior, Givenchy, Initio, Mont Blanc, Prada, Rabanne, Tom Ford, Valentino, Versace, Viktor & Rolf, YSL, and Armani twice under two separate lines.
Fragrances carry more than one family tag, which is why the numbers below add to more than 32. Across the rotation there are 113 family tags on 31 fragrances, an average of about 3.6 each — a reasonable proxy for how few of these are one-dimensional. If the family names are unfamiliar, start with fragrance families explained.
| Family | Fragrances carrying it | One example from the rotation |
|---|---|---|
| Woody | 16 | Dior Sauvage |
| Spicy | 13 | Xerjoff Alexandria II |
| Vanilla | 11 | Parfums de Marly Layton |
| Fresh | 9 | Creed Green Irish Tweed |
| Aromatic | 9 | Versace Eros |
| Fruity | 8 | Xerjoff Erba Pura |
| Clean | 7 | Rabanne Mesh Metal |
| Amber | 7 | Valentino Born in Roma Intense |
| Oriental | 6 | Initio Side Effect |
| Sweet | 6 | Emporio Armani Stronger With You Intensely |
| Gourmand | 5 | Parfums de Marly Pegasus |
| Floral | 4 | Prada Paradigme |
| Powdery | 4 | Givenchy Gentleman |
| Smoky | 4 | Creed Aventus |
| Green | 2 | Creed Silver Mountain Water |
| Leather | 2 | Parfums de Marly Haltane |
By season: 22 fragrances work in fall, 21 in winter, 19 in spring, 15 in summer. Only four hold up across all four seasons — Creed Aventus, Mont Blanc Legend Eau de Parfum, Versace Eros and YSL Y Intense. Those four are the ones we point people toward when they want a single fragrance rather than a rotation.
By occasion: 16 are tagged date-night, 16 evening-out, 14 daytime, 13 office. The office number is the one we watch most carefully, because it is the hardest brief — something has to last a nine-hour day without pushing four feet off your skin. That set is what the office-safe guide is built from.
What gets turned down
Anything we cannot verify the sourcing on. Grey-market bottles at suspiciously good prices are the single most common thing offered to a business our size, and the batch variation is real. We pass.
Fragrances that are a duplicate of something already in the rotation. There are perhaps a dozen excellent fresh-aquatic scents we would happily wear that will never make it in, because Acqua di Gio Profondo and Silver Mountain Water already hold that ground. If you cannot tell two of our fragrances apart, one of them is wasting a slot.
Fragrances that die in an hour. A 5 ml vial that gives you a beautiful fifteen minutes and then nothing is not a month of wear, it is a demonstration. Longevity is not the same thing as strength — we untangle the three terms in projection vs sillage vs longevity — and the one we insist on is the boring one.
Anything whose appeal is the bottle. You are receiving ours, in an unbranded twist-up atomizer. If the fragrance does not survive being separated from its packaging, it is not for us.
Limited editions and flankers we cannot restock. Adding something we will have to remove in four months is a bad trade for whoever falls in love with it.
Where our system is weak
Summer is our thinnest season. Fifteen fragrances is enough to get through July, but the rotation clearly skews cool-weather — 22 fall entries against 15 summer ones — and part of that is honest seasonality in what people order, and part of it is that the two of us like fall fragrances. We know which is which and we are correcting for it. If you are shopping in the heat right now, the hot-weather guide works with what we have.
Green is a two-fragrance family for us. So is leather. Both should be bigger.
Our data has gaps. Bvlgari Le Gemme Orom — bourbon vanilla, Siam benzoin, oud — has been sitting in our catalogue with an empty family field for months, which means it does not show up in family filtering even though it is one of the more interesting things we carry. That is not a curation failure, it is us being two people with a spreadsheet. We are telling you rather than quietly fixing it and pretending it never happened.
And nineteen houses is not the whole of fine fragrance. There are entire categories — classical chypres, several of the great Middle Eastern oud houses, most of the independent perfumers — where we currently carry nothing. We would rather say that than describe 32 fragrances as comprehensive.
What we would tell a friend
Do not take our word for the taste part. Take our word for the coverage part, and then use the rotation as a testing instrument rather than a recommendation engine. Pick three fragrances that are as different from each other as the grid above allows — one fresh, one woody, one gourmand — and wear each for a full month before deciding anything. That is three months and $60 to find out more about what you like than a year of reading will tell you, and if you decide to build properly from there, the five-slot rotation is the structure we use ourselves.
If you would rather not choose, the quiz narrows it in about two minutes, and you can swap your next fragrance any month from your account page or let us curate it. Everything in the full rotation is $20 either way — that is the whole point. Subscription orders ship free; one-time vials ship for $4.99, free at $50 and over. US addresses only, out the door within two business days, tracked.
— Jeff Theefs & Alex Cherne, Founder & Cofounder, Base Note