Method and standards
We do not ask you to trust one nose. Here is exactly how a ruling is built, and what we cannot tell you.
Creator claims, owner experience and skeptical pushback are collected separately and never averaged into one number. Long-term wear reports outweigh first-impression posts. A claim repeated across many videos counts once unless the people making it actually owned both bottles.
- Verified
- Strong evidence, side-by-side performed, consistent owner reports.
- Upheld
- Previously ruled and re-checked against newer evidence.
- 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.
- 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.
We do not publish percentage-match claims. A bottle is not "99% identical" to anything.
- Every case file states whether the original was tested and whether we ran a side-by-side.
- Where owners split, we show both camps and what appears to cause the split.
- Skin chemistry, batch and climate vary. We publish ranges, never guarantees.
- Prices carry a verification date and a region. They go stale; the date tells you how stale.
No brand pays for a verdict, a ranking or a place on The Board. If a bottle was supplied free, the case file says so. Any commercial link appears on the case file itself, not buried in a policy page. Cases are re-reviewed when new evidence arrives, and the review date is always shown.