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Perfume Tip

Want to shop for perfume at a department store but don't know what to do. Here are some tips.

Don't wear fragrance when you go. If you are the type who likes to get samples, go with some exposed arm skin. A real perfumista shows up at a perfume shop or department store with naked arms and even some decolletage to get maximum sample area.

Perfume shopping is like going to Disneyworld. You can't do it all in one day, so pace yourself. If you have specific perfumes you want to try, be sure to get those first. Be prepared for the fact that you'll go home without having sampled everything.

Depending on the quality of your nose, you probably can't really sample more than a few scents well in a given foray. Instead of going for quantity, go for quality of the experience.

You can sample perfume by having some sprayed on you, by having the clerk spray some scent into the air (which you walk "under" or through) or by having the clerk spritz some perfume onto a paper or ribbon strip that you carry away.

Skin sprays are the best because you're actually wearing the stuff. But if you try six different fragrances, you're no longer wearing the stuff, you're wearing everybody's stuff. It's like trying to tell what you look like in a bathing suit by trying a raincoat on over it. So reserve skin space for the scents you most want to test.

Paper strips are wonderful but only if you can tell them apart later on. For some reason, most clerks will not write down or otherwise indicate which is which, even if they make you a dozen strips.

Bring a pen and shamelessly write down the scent on the strip. You'll be glad you did. Strips hold the scent a long time and they're good reference material.

(By the way, some strips are marked with house logos or even perfume names but clerks sometimes spray other scents on them.)

Smelling a lot of perfume can be taxing on the nostrils, so inhale a bit of coffee bean aroma to "clear" your sense of smell. Many perfume counters have a few coffee beans in a little net sachet that you can "whiff" between scents.

Most perfumes have top notes or an initial burst of fragrance that differs somewhat from the main scent that lingers on your skin (heart notes and base notes). However, most people just smell a perfume and move on. That's fine, but you're just smelling top notes and that's sort of like going to a restaurant and only eating the appetizer from a three-course meal.

You can often find online descriptions of fragrances that spell out top, heart, and base notes or talk at least a bit about some of the main elements in a particular product. This can be useful pre-shopping information. For instance, if you want to get away from heavily floral scents, you can shop online a bit and see which scents might best meet your criteria.

Perfume is generally not one of those things that a person can return to the store (although you can probably do this, it just is not done). However, perfume also almost never goes on sale. As a result, if you like something, go back and get some samples on your skin and wear it for a few hours. If it works, then you can buy it.

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The Perfumista Diaries

Safari, So Good

by Jo Ann LeQuang

Perfume is partly about the thrill of the hunt. You're chasing something elusive--an aroma--and trying to find one that is both intriguing in the wild (that is, out of the bottle) and yet flourishes in captivity (on your skin). My first perfume forays after I regained my sense of smell were more like safaris, although my friend, Britt-Nicole, and I did not exactly take a tent or have people carry our supplies out to the department store. Still, it was a civilized sort of hunt, a way to be both fashionable and yet somehow wild.

Britt-Nicole and I both had one thing in common, beyond our nearly fanatical desire to acquire as much great perfume as possible, and that was that we knew nothing about perfume.

Embarking on perfume safari for the very first time, we learned one strange truth, something nobody talks about but apparently everybody knows. When it comes to getting more perfume, it's not about the money. It's never about the money. It's so not about the money that perfume never goes on sale. In fact, it might even be rude to speak the words perfume and sale in the same sentence. Money plays no role in this shopping experience.

The perfume counter in a department store is where our first safari took place. Up until this time, Britt-Nicole and I had mainly observed perfumes in drug store type places and those are the tame perfumes, the fragrance equivalent of zoo animals. Not that you don't see their wild twins in more safari-like settings, but there is something tragic about a perfume being locked up behind glass in a drug store, being at the mercy of a dim-witted clerk who wouldn't know Charlie from Tresor.

The department store we went to was not large but it had a fairly ample perfume section. The natives who ran the counter were extremely friendly and helpful, and, of course, Britt-Nicole and I were not exactly CIA material. We have no sense of secrecy or intrigue, and we quickly confessed that we were utter and pathetic newbies.

Of course, the people who worked at the counter could tell that by the fact that we spritzed ourselves with just about anything that was available and we probably would have sprayed Windex on ourselves, too, if someone had inadvertently left a bottle on the counter unattended.

We have since learned the meaning of the term "skin worthy," but in that first safari, we gluttonously sprayed ourselves silly.

I remember that we found the Estee Lauder display, which generously offers all types of spray bottles for the taking. It's easy pickings, but then, we were new. From there, we drifted to Lancome. Then we found some new scents, stuff we had never heard of. Escada, Valentino. We checked out the celebrity stuff: Lovely and some other fragrances whose names now escape me. Then we looked at Burberry, for no other reason than I own a Burberry purse.

By now, we were dizzy, exhilirated, and widely known at the perfume counter. A very no-nonsense Southern sales woman then took charge. She showed me some Givenchy Very Irresistable and, true to its name, I could not resist it. Almost on cue, another lady at the counter, assured me she had that very fragrance and she "loved it" and "wore it all of the time." She was a woman who looked sort of like me, that is, she was a woman I could relate to. I made the purchase.

Britt-Nicole and I left with our prey only to turn to see, lingering in the distance, a shimmer of an image that was infused tremendously with the legend of the stuff. Chanel No. 5. Coco. Allure. A whole display untouched, a whole portion of the perfume forest unvisited.

Alas. We left and returned. Actually, Britt-Nicole and I returned several more times and we got better at hunting. I was starting to know my way around. Britt-Nicole was starting to recognize sales people. One poor young man, obviously stranded at the perfume counter by cruel fate or the department store management, once helped us and sprayed about a zillion papers for Britt-Nicole and I to consider. (By now, we had learned about paper strips and coffee beans.) Unfortunately, he was a total disaster at spraying paper strips because all of the strips smelled like nothing. Still, Britt-Nicole liked him and I ended up buying some Tresor.

I soon owned a dozen perfumes but I refused to display them boldly, like trophies on a wall, because I had a respect for them as the wild, incredible creatures they were. I kept them safely in a large, deep drawer in my bathroom. My perfume captives.

By now, Britt-Nicole and I sometimes embarked on safari with a specific game in mind. I remember going for Youth Dew, a scent of my childhood. The first time I sampled it, I was horrified. But a few safaris later, it was safely in the perfume drawer.

The newer scents did not appeal to us much, although Britt-Nicole liked the packaging. Britt-Nicole tends to favor a more modernistic packaging approach, while I am more eclectic or at least willing to be surprised. I loved the retro pinched-waist shape of the old Youth Dew bottle (with its jaunty little ribbon "belt") and the plain rectangular shape of the Chanel stuff.

One day, Britt-Nicole and I were on safari and asked to sample Chanel No. 22 and Chanel No. 19. No. 19 was one of those perfumes in my memory bank but I could not quite conjure up the scent. The sales person told me it was no longer made. That was the first time I knew more than the perfume sales person. I knew 19 and 22 were still in production and I have since found out they are distributed far more narrowly than other Chanel fragrances.

By now it was time to venture to niche shopping. The department store jungle was just too known to us. We had not really bagged everything there and we still go out often, but there is just not that much that we have not sniffed. Besides, we found ourselves in that awful post-amateurish state of having more dislikes than likes.

At first, we scarcely smelled a perfume that did not awe us. Now, everything was familiar or, worse, "not right." Never did we find a perfume that was bad, for there was something inherently grand in just about every scent, but some clearly were not our style. Britt-Nicole and I mostly agreed on scents.

On safari now, we mainly go back and revisit the classics. I used to know Obsession and Eternity, but I have not smelled them in ages. The safari worked well for that sort of expedition. But Britt-Nicole and I were eager to recapture the wild hunt of our newbie ventures.

By now we had discovered that there was such a thing as niche houses or perfumes that weren't sold in department store fragrance playgrounds. We found out about these from blogs and websites. We visited Fresh and Bond No. 9 and Ravallo.

We bought Bond No. 9's Bon Bon kit, an utterly shameless joy of a product that involves lots of niche scents in candy wrappers. Nobody ever won the heart of a perfume lover better than that. (You've got to try it, visit bondno9.com.

Britt-Nicole and I quickly found perfumista friends. They are never who you think they'd be. I asked everybody about perfume and everybody had an opinion. Nobody hesitated to talk to me about perfume. And everybody had a scent or two they liked. Sometimes I would hear of one and chase it down. Other times, I would hear of something and not bother. It was not always about the scent, either. Sometimes it was about everything that surrounded it. Bond No. 9? Yes. Victoria's Secret? No. Don't ask me why. I don't know. I love the smell of some of the VS fragrances around, I just can't bring myself to go into an underwear store to buy perfume.

Right now, Britt-Nicole and I are considering an unorthodox foray into Avon. Avon is hardly perfumista territory, and yet they've made a lot of scents for a lot of years. Mostly, I avoid drug store scents and I fear that Avon stuff may be like that, but I don't know exactly. And that's why the perfumista hunts. She doesn't know exactly.

For more on the Perfumista Diaries, visit perfumelover.blogspot.com.

<take me back to BASICS>

Ingredients: Musk

Musk is a very common term in the perfume world because it is a very common ingredient in perfumes. In fact, some times it's hard to find a perfume that does not use at least some amount of musk.

Musk has been used in perfume since ancient times but the original musk was an animal product.

The original musk comes from a substance excreted by a gland of the male musk deer. The gland is located near the animal's genitals and the word musk comes from a Sanskrit word for testicle.

The deer secretes musk as part of its mating ritual. Actually, a large number of other life forms also produce odors of this nature, including plants.

Natural musk was obtained by killing the musk deer, extracting and drying the musk gland, and then using a grainy paste from that dried gland to create a solution. Musk does not smell pleasant unless it is diluted.

Musk has a number of incredible qualities. Musk has a powerful scent that does is more penetrating and persistent than any other known substance.

Blending musk into perfume gives a fragrnace strength, body, texture, and a permanency that could not be obtained with just plant or vegetable matter.

Up until the end of the 1800s, musk was mainly obtained from natural sources. The highest quality musk for perfume is obtained from musk deer that are indigenous to China, Tibet, Assam, and Nepal. Because a deer has to be killed to extract the musk gland, musk has always been more valuable (by weight) than gold.

In the early 1900s, synthetic forms of musk molecules were introduced and today musk in perfume is going to be the kind that is produced in a laboratory.

That's a good thing because the musk deer is today on the endangered species list. Although true animal musk is still harvested to a limited extent, it is a highly controlled substance. Poached or illegal musk is still sold on the black market but it represents an incredible loss to an already rare animal species. It takes about 1,000 animals to make one poud of musk.

The use of synthetic musk has enabled some considerable variations to be imparted to perfumery. It is not unsual for perfume manufacturers today to talk about things like "vanilla-infused musk."

Although some perfume lovers would like to think natural is always better, in the world of fragrance, artificial ingredients have recently gained considerable importance. With the introduction of aldelhyde to perfumes in the 1920s, the debate on natural-versus-synthetic continues.

However, when it comes to many of the world's rarest and most valuable commodities, the trend to artificial ingredients is actually a good thing. Synthetic musk is helping to preserve an endangered species while still allowing the perfume industry access to one of its most beloved and valubable ingredients. Likewise, artificial ingredients are helping preserve the sandalwood forests of India and other rare plants.