Assign yourself a signature smell and forever hold your place in nostalgia banks and treasured memories. No big deal
Google ‘how to find your signature scent’ and prepare to go into battle with countless lists and galleries of best-sellers, celebrity favourites, the new niche cult status, etc., ad Infinitum. But how about this? How about if your signature is that there is no signature scent? Rather a signature menu. Why would you limit yourself to the same pizza every time you go to the pizza restaurant? Once you’ve established you love pizzas, there’s a whole range to choose from. The whole genre of ‘pizza’ is your signature choice, plural. You with me? You hungry? I’m kind of hungry.
Back to perfume. If you can establish what your favourite kind of fragrance is, you can find your forever-after signature smell. It will be your wafty calling card, your redolent wardrobe. Also, and perhaps most importantly, it’ll make you so much easier to buy presents for – and that is quite rightly up there on the priority list. Don’t worry about families, or lingo or trends – they mean very little to your olfactory sensory neurons. Just worry about what you genuinely like. What are you always drawn to? That’s you in a bottle. Here, in case you need a signature-scent steer.
Do you like to smell sophisticated? To wear your signature on your sleeve? Definitely go designer. Chanel. But make it exclusif.
You like to find the good stuff, the expensive stuff, before everyone else. But you also like people to know about it. Celine? Oh sure, been waiting for it to launch since before they dropped the accent over the ‘e’.
The notion of celebrity is much more popular than the potions of celebrities these days. Britney is no longer the biggest seller ever, but you can’t help it - you are dying to smell like Chloe Sevigny because you loved her in American Horror Story. You are so not alone.
That means ‘green’ in perfume world. Like crushed leaves or dewy moss or Maison Martin Margiela.
Yes, you hit peak gourmand when everyone was wearing Flower Bomb, but what now? What’s next? Truffle apparently. I’m in.
Niche is so popular it needs its own sub-categories. In fact, it’s so popular it’s practically mass. Maybe you’re mass-niche. That’s a great place to be.
Dusty fire pits or pure palo santo though, that is the question. Actually, that’s an easy scale for your scent style. Anything wood-ish.
Not to be confused with immature, fruity is zingy, sparkly, light-hearted – and all the good things you’d probably like to be described as along with your citrus scent. Wear the fruity perfume, be the fruity perfume.
That’s what we call oriental-ish or even oud-y, these days. There are so many deeper, richer, sexier lingering scents to choose from. Choose them all.
Let’s be honest, who isn’t? But you’re allowed to love a pure rose as much as a dirty one. You might think you hate jasmine but you still wear Gucci Bloom. It’s OK, it smells so good.
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