Choosing Your Perfect Scent

The first step in choosing your perfect scent is to look for a fragrance within your favorite fragrance family. If most of your scents are light and floral, look for other florals — a departure from your chosen fragrance family does sometimes work really well, but it might just make you feel a bit uncomfortable if you are already fairly attached to a certain type of perfume. Then, take a good look at the description that'll be supplied with each scent. 

Fragrance Shopping Tips

• Spray the fragrance onto a piece of card, then leave it for at least 10 minutes. Walk around the store, or even go outside, and don't make a purchase quite yet. Make sure you still love it after 10 minutes!

• Look for fragrances that evoke memories in you or that just make you feel good.

• Don't be swayed by fragrance packaging - although we all love to have decorative perfume bottles on our dressing table, it's what's inside the bottle that counts and there are some delicious scents in some very plain bottles. Some of the most innovative and beautiful perfume bottles will contain scents you hate, meanwhile.

• Let the fragrance develop on your skin. What smells fabulous on your best friend might not smell so good on you, simply because your skin and your pheromones are different. Let the fragrance sink into your skin for a good half hour before you buy it so that you really get to know how it smells and how you feel about it.

• Be open to new ideas. When you first sniff a fragrance, you might be a little unsure, but if you give it a chance to develop and settle, you might absolutely love it.

• Is your skin dry or is it oily? If it's dry, the fragrance will disappear more quickly, so an eau du parfum will have more staying power than an eau du toilette. 

• Clear your palette - or your olfactory perception - in between testing scents. If you don't, the fragrances will get muddled and you won't have a true idea of what each perfume actually smells like. Some perfumeries have small jars of coffee beans here and there and these are for you to sniff in between scents.

• If you're stuck, ask for help. The salespeople in perfumeries are trained and they know how to match people with their perfect scents, so if you're having trouble, speak up! They might suggest scents that you'd never, ever considered, so it's well worth it!

Above all, choose a scent that makes you feel good. If, whenever you smell the scent, you smile, you know that it's the perfect scent for you.