Maybe I know why people do this: avoiding skin allergies. Sidestepping smelling utterly wrong all day. Making it harder for the dogs to find them.
But ultimately, sniffing a perfume out of the bottle doesn’t tell you what you need to know. To fully experience a perfume, you absolutely must try it on your skin. You wouldn’t dream of just buying that tuxedo or frilly pink prom dress only to hang it on the wall and look at it. You most certainly wouldn’t carry a lipstick just to open the canister and look at the color (OK, I probably know people who would, but you know what I mean.)
Sniffing a perfume out of the bottle won’t tell you the whole story about the scent. In the bottle it is contained and captive, and you know nothing of its true essence. The whiffs you take are highly abbreviated inhalations of its possibility - and sometimes, often, I’ve found, that straight-from-bottle whiff isn’t entirely accurate. Consider my own Vampire fragrance:1 I’m compelled to warn all purchasers of my current batch that it smells exactly like acetone straight from the bottle. But after fifteen minutes on the skin, it becomes something else altogether, darker and muskier. While I’m alarmed by how my current batch really has come to resemble the stored plasma I used to see in my extremely brief try at phlebotomy 2
it’s proven safe enough, and fairly consistent in coming out like acetone and graduating into a much thicker experience. But you can’t know that until you try it on your skin.
The skin test is especially important for all-natural fragrances. The natural materials are chosen for their changeability, and since you are the final note in any fragrance, it’s a must that the wearer experiences how the scent plays out on the skin over the course of hours. It won’t have the same scent from application to wash off, and in a well constructed blend, it won’t even smell like the same perfume afterwards.
So when trying a perfume, wear it - that’s where the truth of its nature lies.
- I still intend to reformulate it, as in prior batches years ago there was no acetone response between the cedar and the wine. [↩]
- Definition [↩]
