Perfume 101: 517 posts

Why does it happen that the scents you detest linger the longest? My capacity to tolerate unpleasant odors has increased markedly during my perfumery training–remind me to tell you a story involving a place called “the stinky room”, but even so, I occasionally encounter fragrances that make me wrinkle my nose. Sometimes it can just be an innocuous perfume tried on the wrong day. I know as soon as the liquid dries on my skin that I’ve made the wrong choice. My throat tightens and an oppressive, sickly feeling rises up slowly from the pit of my stomach. At that point, there is nothing to do but remove the offending scent.

Rubbing wrists raw with soap and water won’t make much difference because fragrances are formulated with ingredients soluble in alcohol, rather than H2O. Following this logic, you can rub your skin with pure alcohol, but this is a harsh solution that would turn sensitive skin into a patchwork of angry red spots. Instead, here are my three favorite methods to get rid of unpleasant perfumes in a gentle and effective way. Some of them even double up as beauty treatments.

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Please welcome a contribution from Courtney Humphries, who will join us at Bois de Jasmin. Courtney is a freelance journalist and author living in Boston, and she writes about science, health, and culture for a variety of publications. I especially recommend her article for Wired, Engineering Replacements for Essential Perfume Ingredients. Courtney became enamored with perfume after wandering into a Diptyque shop several years ago and smelling Philosykos, which immediately captured her attention. As she describes, “A quick web search on it led me to perfume blogs and reviews, and my journey went from there.”  

Before I became a perfume lover, I regarded fragrance much the same way most of the people I know do: as an afterthought. Perfume was a functional product to help me smell good in social situations. I usually owned just one bottle of perfume, and if I remembered I’d spritz a tiny bit on before going out to a party or on a date. Just as often, I’d forget to put it on before leaving the house, so the bottle would languish on my dresser for months or years, until I tossed it in the trash (in those days I believed perfume “went bad” after a year or two).

When you own only one bottle of fragrance, your choices are minimal—you’re either perfumed or you’re not. For me, that decision depended on whether the occasion met a certain threshold of “specialness” that justified going scented.

But when I became interested in perfume, I began to see fragrance as a source of personal pleasure. I had to make a leap from what had been my “normal” way of thinking about perfume—that everyone needs just a single fragrance—to the quite radical notion that one can collect an entire wardrobe of fragrances.

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Yes, of course, we  do! Only in 1990, we had 76 new perfumes, this year we have 700 and this doesn’t include the upcoming holiday launches.* Even the consumers are asking the industry to slow down. In various studies done on both sides of the Atlantic women express skepticism and disappointment when it comes to recent releases. “They all smell the same” is a common refrain. While the number of new launches is indisputably high, you can’t blame the malaise of the fragrance industry on the volume alone.

A couple of weeks ago I was researching materials for a presentation on 1920s fragrances which required me digging in the archives and leafing through lists of long forgotten perfumes. You can get a whiff of the 1920s today through Chanel No 5, Guerlain Shalimar, Caron Nuit de Noël, Molinard Habanita and perhaps 20-3o others, and it might seem as if the fragrance houses were launching one classic after another.

But one look into the Guerlain archives, and you see that in the 1920s the house launched more than 20 different fragrances. There were several variations on identical themes like jasmine, vetiver and leather. At the end of the day, only Shalimar, Liu, and Eau de Fleurs de Cédrat survived.  You can find similar trends from Chanel to Weil.

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Serge Lutens Ambre Sultan, Guerlain Shalimar, Bulgari Black, Annick Goutal Sables, Chanel Cuir de Russie, anything with woods. The only thing these perfumes have in common is that I disliked them after my first encounter and now they’re among my favorites. I even remember giving away a bottle of vintage Guerlain L’Heure Bleue because I dismissed it far too quickly. Now I want to kick myself! So please don’t repeat my mistakes. If you’ve ever taken one whiff of a perfume, determined that you didn’t like it and crossed it off your list, you might as well not have bothered to smell it. Making a decision based on one sniff would be like deciding that one doesn’t like Tolstoy based on the first page of War and Peace.

Any scent, however simple or complex, requires more than one encounter. For instance, professional tasters believe that it takes 5 to 10 tries to determine if you dislike a flavor, and the same theory can be applied to perfume. Since a fragrant blend will change its character and even style over time, it’s especially important to be patient. Even the mood in which you smell can play a crucial role in shaping your judgement.

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As I recently sat through a fragrance forecasting presentation, I was busy jotting down notes to share with you. Who would have guessed that American men are getting more and more into perfume? Sales of men’s fragrance have increased by 6 percent in the first quarter of 2013 as compared to last year. Of course, it might also mean that more women are buying perfume for their friends and family. But on the other hand, 40% of males between the ages of 18-65 don’t use any fragrance at all (a higher fraction than in Europe).

Top Selling Perfumes USA : Popular Fragrances Spring 2012

Top Selling Feminine Fragrances 2011 USA

Top Selling Feminine Fragrances for 2010 USA

Top Selling Feminine Fragrances for 2010 France

Top Selling Masculine Fragrances 2010 USA

When it comes to women’s shopping habits, the NDP Group reports that US perfume wearers are enamored with cologne. Sales of women’s colognes, particularly from niche brands, have increased by 4% in the first three months of 2013. Sales in the florals and floral orientals families were fairly flat, while marine and oriental genres appear more popular.

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