Choose a mood instead of chasing whatever is trending

The usual way people end up with eleven bottles and two they actually wear is by buying what was being recommended at the time. Trends turn over every eighteen months. What you want to feel like does not.

Start with situations, not notes

Note lists are almost useless at the buying stage, because nobody can predict what bergamot and iris smell like together from the words. Reading a pyramid tells you what is in it, not what it is like to wear.

What you can predict is when you want to feel a particular way, and that is a question you can answer without any technical knowledge at all.

• Something for being taken seriously
• Something for being close to one person
• Something for a normal Wednesday that is still yours
• Something for cold weather, which behaves completely differently from warm

Four situations covers almost everyone. Most people need three or four fragrances rather than fifteen, and the ones they finish are always the ones attached to a situation that actually recurs.

Test on skin, not on paper, and wait

Paper shows you the opening, which lasts about fifteen minutes and is the least representative part of the whole thing. It is also the part designed to sell, which is why so much smells better on a card than on a person.

Skin chemistry genuinely does change the result, and the part you will be wearing for six hours only appears after the first hour. Buying at minute two is buying a different product from the one you take home.

Test no more than three at a time. Past three, your nose stops distinguishing and everything starts smelling like the shop.

Ignore who it was sold to

The gendering of fragrance is a marketing decision rather than a chemical one, and it varies by country for exactly the same juice. Several of the best-selling scents in the world are sold as masculine in one market and feminine in another.

If it smells right on you, the label on the counter is not information about the contents.