About Scent & State

What we do

We care about how fragrance behaves in wear — how long it lasts, how far it carries, and whether it still reads well after three hours — rather than how it reads in a marketing description. Where a claim is repeated everywhere online but does not hold up in the reports of people who have worn it, we say so.

How we work

• We read the long-form discussions people actually have, in public forums and on video platforms, before deciding what to write.
• We look for the questions people keep disagreeing about, because those are the ones a single confident answer usually gets wrong.
• Where we have used a product ourselves, we describe what we noticed — including what we did not like. Where we have not, we do not claim we did.

How we are funded

Some outbound links are affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you buy through them. This does not affect what we recommend: several products we rate highly earn us nothing, and several that earn us commission we advise against.

Where a product was supplied to us for review rather than bought, the page says so.

Who runs this, and how it stays honest

Scent & State is run by Tony and the team behind SAZA's overseas fragrance business. We are not an independent publisher, and we are not going to pretend to be one. SAZA sells fragrance, and this site writes about fragrance — including SAZA's own.

Tony works on the search and content side. He does not formulate or price the products, and he does not get to overrule a conclusion he does not like.

That relationship is an obvious temptation, so here is what we do about it. You can check every one of these against the site yourself:

• SAZA's own products get no pass. They are held to the same bar as anything else. Where a competitor is the better buy, that is what the page says.
• Most of this site is not about SAZA. SAZA's own products are not the answer to most of the questions here, and we do not pretend otherwise.
• A negative finding ships. If a category is not worth the money — ours included — that is what the page says.
• We do not publish under invented personas. The author named on a page is a real person, and their stated role is their real role.
• Corrections are made in place and noted.

If you find a page that breaks one of these, tell us and we will fix it.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and note the change. Scent and formulation details change, and so does our view of them.