How Scent Court works

We don't ask you to trust one nose, including ours. Our host is an AI. It can't smell anything, and it never pretends to. That's the whole point: every verdict is built from what real buyers report, weighed by a fixed method, with the receipts on show. Here is exactly how, and what we can't tell you.

01How a verdict is built

We collect three things separately and never blend them into one hype number: what creators claim, what owners report after real wear, and what skeptics push back on. Long-term wear outweighs a first spray. A claim repeated across forty videos counts once, unless the people making it actually owned both bottles.

Every reported opinion is weighted before it counts toward a ruling:

4: A side-by-side against the original, plus a full day of wear
3: An owner who has worn it many times over 30+ days
2: One full wear, or a sample with clear notes
1: A first-impression or test-strip opinion only
0: Someone repeating another reviewer's claim

We publish ranges, “70 to 85% match,” “four to eight hours”, never false precision, and never a “99% identical” score. A bottle is not a percentage.

02Where our evidence comes from

Public, community discussion, aggregated, not invented. That means Reddit (r/fragranceclones, r/DesiFragranceAddicts, r/Colognes), Fragrantica, Parfumo, Basenotes, YouTube comment sections and retailer Q&A. We read what owners, long-term wearers and skeptics keep agreeing, and disagreeing, on.

We are honest about how much evidence sits behind a ruling. When a case says “4,300 reviews,” that is a real platform review total. When it says “~5 community reports,” that is how many independent opinions we could actually find in our sources, a small sample, labelled as one. We never pass one off as the other.

And to be clear: we never smell anything ourselves. Everywhere a case describes what a bottle “smells like,” it means what owners describe, not us.

03How we fix mistakes

A verdict is not final. Any ruling can be appealed, by a real buyer complaint or by new evidence, and the case is reopened. When that happens, the verdict is held (Upheld), revised, or overturned, in the open.

Every case file carries a review date, so you know how fresh the ruling is.
We change a verdict by publishing the change, not by quietly editing the old one and pretending it never happened.
Prices carry a verification date and a region. They go stale; the date tells you how stale.

04Who pays us, nobody

No fragrance house pays for a verdict, a ranking, or a spot on The Board. We take no brand money, and no brand has ever bought a better ruling.

We currently run no ads and no affiliate links.
If that ever changes, the disclosure goes on the case file itself, never buried in a policy page.
If a bottle is ever supplied free, the case file says so, and it does not buy a kinder verdict.

05What each verdict means

Verified: Strong, consistent owner evidence, including community side-by-side reports.
Upheld: Previously ruled, then re-checked against newer evidence and held.
Contested: Owners meaningfully disagree, and we can identify why.
Wait: A known flaw makes the purchase hard to justify right now.
Early: Real signal, but the evidence pool is still too small to rule.
Blacklisted: Misleading on its own terms. We recommend skipping it.

06How close is close, the dupe grades

Replacement: You could stop buying the original.
Strong Clone: Very close, with a recognizable difference.
DNA Cousin: Same family and direction, different balance.
Vibe Match: Evokes the target without copying it.
Packaging Bait: The box copies it. The liquid does not.

A grade, not a percentage. It answers “what kind of match is this?”, replacement, clone, cousin, vibe, or just packaging.