Merchant
Arkansas
(03-18-2017, 05:19 PM)Freddy Wrote: Hi Rod and Mandy. Let me add to the chorus of thank yous for your wonderful products, great prices, and fantastic service.
Perhaps you may not be able to answer this but I was wondering about scent strength by type of scent. Over the years, my sense of smell has diminished quite a bit but some scents come in way stronger than others. With shaving soaps, for example, pure rose or lavender I usually don't have trouble with. Others, I can barely smell at all. I enjoy several of your shaving soaps and bath soaps and, recently, was sent a gift of your Arkadia shaving soap. It is inspired by Terre d'Hermes EdT which is one of my favorites. However, when I lathered it up, I could detect no scent at all. It was as if you made an unscented soap and called it Arkadia. The great Stirling performance was there in abundance and my shave was excellent, just no scent. Let me iterate that I'm pretty sure this is me and not your product so why is it that some scents come through to me just fine but others are simply not there? Will the scent present itself with further use?
On another note, I own three of your synthetic brushes, the 22, 24, and the Kong. These brushes are absolutely amazing. While I enjoy and use all three a lot, my favorite remains the Kong. I was just wondering, of all of your synthetic brushes, does one sell better than the others and, if it's not a secret, which of them sells the best? How do the synthetics sell in comparison to your badgers?
Again, thanks for doing this AMA and for bringing such great products to the wet shaving community.
Thank you for the compliments, Freddy!
I don't have the the full scientific answer, but there are some studies regarding "noseblindness." It is a fully legitimate phenomenon, and even I have issues with it. There are some scents that I make that I can't smell very well, and not at all one some days. I have to ask Mandy or Laura to verify some batches of soap before I okay them to be wrapped, capped and labeled.
I do know that moving to different area or smelling your clothes can help "reset" your olfactory sense. Exercise, strangely enough, is also good for making your sense of smell better. As for as regaining the ability to smell certain scents, I don't have an answer for that. Which is why I still on a weekly basis have to ask Mandy "Does this Sharp Dressed Man soap smell normal?"
All that said, for the Arkadia what you are experiencing is not rare. I've found over the years that customers who own the originals colognes that dupes are modeled after often have issues with the dupes in soap form. My best guess would be that would be a combination between the lower strength of the fragrance in the soap as compared to the EdT, along with a psychological/cognitive factor in how humans perceive and deal with scents. Hopefully Will from Barrister and Mann will do an AMA here soon, and I can get a better answer from him. :-)
The synths all sell at about the same level. They do sell faster than the badgers, simply based on price. Also, it's still really hard to convince some customers that you can get a really nice badger brush at the price at which I sell them.
