CREATOR & EDITOR: KERRY T.

I'm a "hip, modern gal" with huge collections of perfume, music and silky bathrobes. I also have a recently discovered passion for costume dramas, especially of the Austen or Dickens BBC variety. Outside of that I'm really into science fiction, animal rescue, costume jewelry, and looking really fantastic as often as possible to prevent looking like shit when I meet my future husband.

I currently reside with Megan, my best friend of 16 years, and since she loves costume dramas and perfume (possibly even more than I do) it's a fun and agreeable household that also smells really pleasant, despite having 3 cats and 2 dogs between the both of us.

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR : MEGAN C.

 Bio to come!

How to smell a whale is:

• A blog dedicated primarily to ( women's and unisex) mainstream perfumes ( i.e. perfumes you can find in most department stores) and the occasional home perfumers' fragrances.

• A blog containing perfume-related facts, personal reviews, anecdotes, and lots of complaining . Oh man, the complaining!

• Sometimes peppered with swearing or unsavory analogies, so if you're put off by that sort of thing, then this website is not really for you.

How to smell a whale is not:

• Focused solely on new releases or pricey perfumes from expensive niche houses ( but they aren't altogether excluded, either ).

• Written in any sort of chronological or alphabetical perfume order, but sometimes we do have themes like "Favorite Summer Smells" or "Things We Thought Smelled Like Shit a Long Time Ago But Let's Smell Them Again And See if We Still Feel The Same Way".

• In any way affiliated with a corporation, organization, religion, or special dietary/political movement.

WHY THE FOCUS ON MAINSTREAM FRAGRANCES?

The short answer is:
Accessibility. I'm a huge fan.

The long answer is:
I have nothing against $150+ bottles of juice, and actually, I would be a lying bag of lies if I said I didn't read about them, salivate over them, and when they touch my brain right in that special spot, buy them. However, one of my favorite things about perfume is that it's the most accessible part of haute couture – the average person will never spend $1000 on a designer handbag or $5000-$10,000 on a designer gown, but $50-$100 on a bottle of mainstream designer department store perfume? That's quite another completely accessible, feasible, glamorous, and guaranteed-sense-memory-you'll-have-for-the-rest-of-your-life story.

It's actually pretty amazing that mainstream perfumes exist and are even a sustainable and lucrative market when smell is such a subjective experience. I can easily comprehend how a high-end niche perfumer can design a fragrance that's impressive to other perfumers and a handful of extremely avid enthusiasts. However, a truly remarkable feat is creating a mass market fragrance that is appealing to 53-year-old Sally who works at the water treatment facility in Oklahoma but also has her notary license and maybe 2 bottles of perfume sitting on her dresser at any given time, and is equally appealing to Kerry, the 31-year-old art director in North Carolina who swears a lot, is obsessed with luxury sleep systems, finds language barriers attractive, and has 25+ bottles of perfume on her dresser (excluding all decants and samples) for this month's rotation alone. It's especially mindblowing to think that many of these fragrances have been able to sustain this sort of mass appeal over generations: Chanel No.5, Mitsouko, Poison, Joy, etc…the list of classics is a long one.

The smaller, primarily home-based perfumers are included on this site because they're accessible in a different way: they make scents that are extremely unique and really affordable. The added bonus of buying from them is that because they're such small operations, you are far less likely to run into an evil fragrance twin.

The smaller perfumers also offer a completely different and usually more intimate buying experience – sometimes I actually wind up corresponding with them semi-regularly, and they show a genuine interest in what types of scents get me excited. These people are making perfumes because they love it, and doing business with them is an extremely different interaction than shopping in a giant department store.

Will I ever be using this site to announce new releases or rave about a $300 special-edition-Serge Luten-Aqua di Parma-Montale-L'artisan type of thing? Hey, probably! But only when one completely blows my mind with how amazing or shitacular it is.

NEED TO KNOW MORE?

If you want, you can email me at kerry@howtosmellawhale.com and actually, I hope to hear from you soon unless you're a Nigerian official offering me unrealistic sums of money to store millions of embezzled dollars in my bank account on your behalf,  want to make my breasts larger, or would like to sell me massively discounted narcotics you don't actually possess.