How to choose your Perfume

A signature perfume often shows the sense of familiarity in people who wear scent that suits their body’s chemistry. It not just becomes a part of their life, but also provides a comfort to loved ones.

Sniffing and zeroing upon your perfect fragrance comes down to 2 important things – your preference and your body’s chemistry.

It might take few trial and error methods and experimenting to find your ideal scent. But that same scent might smell differently when it is on your skin, this is because of hormones and pheromones which ultimately affect the final smell.

Now, this makes picking a signature fragrance tricky. A fragrance must capture the essence of the wearer and also smell amazing.

Which types of perfumes do you like?

Sense of smelling is well linked to our memories. Go back and recall what did you like and also what you never liked.

It could the smell of flowers on a sunny day, or scent of first rainfall, or musky masculine smell of your dad’s cologne, pine or even leather-based notes, or may be even spicy star anise or cinnamon smell. Which smell evokes what emotions in you?

Once you find out what you like and what you don’t, it is an easy start into picking up your signature perfume.

Know the different fragrance notes

The kind of scent you like might easily fall into one of the fragrance families or fragrance notes as the early perfume consultants called it.

Floral notes, Oriental notes, Woody notes, Fresh notes and Fougere – these are five main fragrance families classified in the Fragrance Wheel.

Choose the concentration

There are different levels of concentration. As the concentration gets higher, the price also increases. Higher the concentration of the fragrance, longer is its lasting power.

The highest concentration level is called perfume or parfum which typically lasts all day long with just one application at the beginning of the day. Mostly it is applied to the wrist or pulse points.

The next is eau de parfum which easily lasts upto about 6 hours once applied.

Eau de toilette stands at the third level and comes with an affordable price. It has fairly low lasting power, hence needs more than one application throughout the day.

Eau de cologne is the lowest fragrance concentration which has just about 2 hours of lasting power.

Testing

The first step of testing a perfume is by sniffing the bottle after you have gone through the list of notes in it. This will give you the main idea of how it smells.

Find the bottle of tester and apply on your wrist. It is always suggested to buy only after you have tried the fragrance on your skin. Since every body’s skin has its own unique code of hormones and pheromones, the smell can vary slightly or extremely once applied on your skin. It all depends on how well your body’s chemistry matches the scent’s mixture.

Spray a tiny amount of the fragrance on your wrist, wait for few minutes, and then sniff the scent on your skin.

This way you will be able to find a scent that will fit your own style. Once you feel that you have identified what you want, purchase the smallest bottle, which is usually priced low, you will be able to test it out in detail.