Frank

Kind of shocked to see the commenters struggled on this one, I'm usually the one complaining about puzzles everyone else finds easy... Guess it goes to show that you can't make a puzzle for everyone!

Some lucky guesses led to a new Friday PB. Very enjoyable solve, props to the constructor.

MidasTOUCH and Advil ruined my top left 🫣

Great puzzle, unfortunately the NISAN x SSA cross was outside my knowledge, same with CREPE x LEDA. Past those though, had a great time

Lot of tough crosses for me... Doesnt help that Im slightly inebriated on the way home from work... Thought for sure the Shipmates clue was USNc (wasnt aware USNA was a thing) which stopped me from getting the inferrable AESOP (I had also never heard of the makeup brand so the clue did not help there) As a canadian with some french, I shouldnt have been tripped up by AU NATURaL, dang it!

Better time than usual for me, just over 28 minutes. Got tripped up by the SOBE/LITEBRITES crossing as I was not familiar with either, but B made the most sense there. Ended up finding a typo later on in the puzzle - IT CANT HURT to double check, I guess.

So frustrating!! At first it looked challenging (so much white space) but I was able to breeze throught it and was well on my way to getting a PB... but for some reason, I just could not find my error.... turns out I had misspelled EtHEMERAL. In my defense, I had never heard of PUCE nor TUCE before now, so the cross didnt help much.

Beauty. Really enjoyed it, especially because I wasnt thrilled with Thursday. Only sticky point really was L'ORANGE, especially since I wasnt familiar with the ingredients in a grand marinier and the crosses werent much help (I kept thinking it was some variation of LOzeNGE? It was the first thing to come to mind haha)

Great puzzle, although the RAMI/AVEDON crossing got me... I was sure it was spelled ReMI and I had never heard of this richard eVEDON but I was sure he was a swell guy

I was in a rather different boat from everyone else, where they were all tripped up by BELA / LENAPE I was stumped by ANI / WIEST... Just goes to show how subjective difficulty can be