Express Yourself With The Perfect Scents And Fragrances
A great fragrance embodies your story. They let you personalize your everyday life, enhancing your style and enriching your memories.
When and Where to Apply Scent
Fragrances work through chemical volatility. Instead of simply sitting on your skin, they’re meant to react with the air, the heat of your body, and your own personal chemistry. This unique combination works together to scent the air around you, so you (and others) can experience a fragrance as it’s worn by you.
Because of this, it’s recommended to apply fragrances to warm areas of your body, like your neck, inner wrist, and upper chest. If you have dry skin, you’ll likely find that scents don’t last as long on you as on your friends; to solve this problem, simply moisturize or apply a thin layer of petroleum jelly to the skin before applying!
Tip: when in doubt, apply less fragrance. Our noses tend to get used to familiar scents, so other people can actually smell them more strongly than we can. It’s also often recommended to keep fragrance use to your personal time so that your coworkers can enjoy a scent-free environment.
How to Choose a Scent Category
There are four main categories of perfumes and colognes. Fresh fragrances smell light and zesty, and often feature citrus or herbacious notes. Because fresh fragrances are so volatile, their bright opening notes will disappear quickly.
Florals are (as expected) feature flowers, such as jasmine or rose. The oriental fragrance family is spicier and sweeter, often with accents of cinnamon or vanilla.
Finally, woody fragrances are heavy and sultry. They’re more common in men’s fragrance, and will feature notes like oud, musk, and juniper.
Try to match your personality with the fragrance category that speaks to you the most. Then, select a scent with notes (components) that you enjoy. When you spray a fragrance, you’ll smell the top notes first, then the heart notes, and finally, the base notes will last the longest on your skin.
The Differences Between Parfum and Eau de Cologne
Brands typically have a scent signature, so each of their fragrances is suggestive of the next. Because of this, you’ll get somewhat familiar scents from the same brand, with some scents (called “flankers”) being inspired by others that you may already own .
But your fragrance quest isn’t over yet! Once you pick a fragrance that you like, you’ll still need to select a concentration. Parfums are the strongest, with a 20-30% fragrance concentration, so they’ll last the longest on your skin. Eau de parfums come next (15-20%), followed by eau de toilettes (5-15%). Finally, eau de colognes, eau fraiches, splashes, and aftershaves contain very little fragrance (under 5%) and make great accents to your dressing routine.
To enjoy your fresh, floral, oriental, or woody fragrance for as long as possible, try using an eau de parfum on top of a matching body lotion or shower gel.