Some of you perfume lovers happen to know the site BaseNotes, which used to be, in the distant past, a serious, unbiased source of information exchange for perfume lovers all over the world.
During the last couple of years, an interesting thing happened on the way to the bank: the website became invaded by dozens upon dozens of new accounts, almost invariably given to extolling the merits of a certain brand, the House of Creed (Creed Perfume). The BaseNotes people, if they didn't embrace the strange phenomenon overtly, surely and happily tolerated it with nary a peep. BaseNotes became, by implication if not by design, a barely masked propaganda arm for one perfume house, the House of Creed.
Who or rather what is "Creed Perfumes"? Incidentally, during the times when BaseNotes hadn't yet fallen prey to a couple of power-hungry, so-called "moderators," some of the best essays underlining the, to put it mildly, debatable business practices and suspicious advertising emanating from this Creed Perfumes operation were published there. The archives still contain some. I wouldn't be surprised if BaseNotes actually will erase at some point some embarrassing to them and to Creed Perfumes documents, such as the incredible essays signed by Zizanioides or The Good Life.
Nevertheless, with the passing of time, an interesting phenomenon has been increasingly noticed. Talk in any other than a glowing way about the Creed operation and there will be silencing, insulting by ill-bred moderators, threats of "banishment" (there is a Napoleonic complex at work there!) etc. The BaseNotes censorship, in all its crude brutality, is at an all time high. Speak the wrong way, make the slightest joke, you get a brutish message from some barely coherent bureaucrat treating you like you would be a Soviet defector and he would be head of the KGB.
Obviously the powers to be at BaseNotes - which apparently became a more and more commercially-minded enterprise as time went by- , don't want to endanger their own relations with the people from or related to the House of Creed Perfumes. That is understandable and, if they have something to gain from this symbiotic relationship with Creed Perfumes, which I have no way of knowing for sure, it's only human, I guess. Everybody likes a quick buck and a free perfume bottle. If one is desperate, even the cheap (in quality not price) Creed Perfume concoctions.
However, what is really obnoxious is the way BaseNotes at the same time allows for verbal attacks bordering on the obscene, attacks on simple perfume lovers, who, unlike others, have to actually work for every single buck spent on perfumes. These attacks emanate from either possible House of Creed advertising plants and/or from Creed Perfume fanatics, who made a religion out of adoring the uneven, over-hyped, laughably priced products of the House of Creed. All with a fervor which makes the Spanish Inquisition look like a profit-free nursing home for pregnant, disabled, and elderly women.
This blog is a space where people can share their experiences with BaseNotes, opinions which didn't make it in the highly censored, Maoist BaseNotes environment. It doesn't have to be all about Creed perfumes or the House of Creed. It doesn't have to be all negative.
This is not a place for payback, but for a truly free exchange of information regarding perfume-related subjects which, due to BaseNotes enforcing its own rules in an arbitrary and highly biased way, never see the light of day.
