Seattle is a smallish city; comparable to San Francisco in population. We have lots of perfume shops but New York puts us to shame when it comes to variety of product in those shops. And many stores in Seattle are stingy with perfume samples; they won't even sell me a sample when I ask or beg. Years back, most perfume companies abruptly stopped sending me samples of their wares. Was it because I sometimes gave negative reviews — so it was risky to put a new perfume in nose-shot of me? Was it because I ignored samples that didn't interest me instead of promoting them?
I didn't worry about it; I had always re-gifted not only full bottle/full-size products I received from perfume companies, but samples, too. I did this happily! Well, there was the time Amouage sent me a beautiful little bottle of Gold Man. After I pried the bottle from my clenched fist, I gave Gold to a friend at work who said she liked it. I still laugh when I remember the day I took a drive in her truck and smelled Gold; she excitedly admitted she sprayed the mats in her car with Gold! ("That stuff's great...even hides hound-dog smell! Lasts for weeks!")
Thus, sample stream dry, I got into the bad habit (for me, harder to overcome than nightly cocktails) of paying for fragrance samples. This week I tallied up my perfume sample purchases for 2020 (a below-average year for buying them). When I added single samples, decants, boxed sample sets (some over $50) I was alarmed/ashamed by what I had spent: $400 (put another way: 75 perfume samples).
Dedicated perfumistas (most of you here? do tell!) would laugh at that figure: "Kevin, it's only $7.70 a week! HA! The price of a latte and madeleine!" True, but hold on....
First, how did I justify this year's sample purchases?
1. I'm working from home due to the pandemic — and saving: So. Much. Money. No monthly parking fees; filling my car's gas tank once a month, not weekly; no large restaurant/bar tabs; no recitals, theatre; no need to buy new clothes; no travel (Sicily, don't go anywhere!)
2. The world is falling apart climate-wise, health-wise and politically: I deserve a pick-me-up (or ten or twenty or...75).
Thus...I perused online perfume shops, Etsy and eBay and kept my credit card hot.
What prompted this current reckoning? Last week, my fir$t 2021 di$covery $et purcha$e (or Expériences Olfactives, ugh!) arrived from Paris and not one of the 8 perfumes in the box was better than bland. ALL were scrubbers; they smelled "deficient," cheap. One scent I was excited to smell, described as reminiscent of "drinking a shot of icy absinth under the magnetic movements of the Northern lights" would have been better described as "My Virginia grandma's favorite mosquito repellent, applied with gusto on a hot August evening."
These eight perfumes: had great names and backstories, were composed by skilled perfumers (including Bertrand Duchaufour), were housed in tasteful packaging. The company webpage was beautifully designed. As I analyzed my dumb purchase, I realized none of that mattered to me. What gets this veteran of perfume worship to buy (someone who should know better) are lists of fragrance notes. We should never believe lists of fragrance notes! But as limette, orange bigarade, bergamot, black tea, cypress, artemisia, iris butter, papyrus, mastic, mimosa, chili, clove, vetiver, myrrh and the like are extolled...I swoon. I should've realized I swoon because I'm a gardener and cook as well as a perfume fanatic, and I love the real-life aromas of those flowers, fruits, leaves, spices, roots, trees! THOSE aromas are what I'm imagining when I make a decision to buy fragrance samples...what I get 85 percent of the time is a nondescript, budget-conscious, chemical stew.
For me, 2020 was the year of artless, shameless and synthetic-loaded perfumes offered at sky-high prices. Never have I smelled so many $250, $350, $450 perfumes that reminded me of $10 scented candles. Of the 75 perfume samples I bought, I reviewed (in a positive way) seven. One full-bottle purchase resulted from a sample sniff. Sixty-eight samples I bought were blah, been-there-smelled-that stuff that I only needed to dab on once. I wasted $359!
Resolution 2021? I won't buy any more perfume samples! Time to invest that money in something more worthwhile: plants, a donation to animal rescue, a vintage bottle of something I love...or food, liquor!
Please share your own Sample Stories...positive or negative!
Note: all images by the author.
Hi everyone,
I've been reading fragrance reviews on Basenotes and other perfume websites for a while now, but I am still relatively new to exploring fragrances and haven't tried a lot of them yet. For the past few years I lived in an area of the U.S. where I did not have good access to perfume stores, so I started sampling fragrances primarily through ordering samples online. This gave me an idea of some types of fragrances I like, and I've been able to build up a small collection of affordable fragrances (or slightly pricier fragrances that I was able to find for a reasonable price online by purchasing a tester or lightly used bottle).
However, a few weeks ago I arrived in a small city in France where I will be located for the next several months. Even though I'm not in Paris with all its exclusive boutiques, there is still much better access to perfume stores with harder-to-find brands here. Even the Sephora here seems to have a much wider selection than the Sephora that was in the nearest city to me back in the States (like a much larger selection of Guerlains, the Serge Lutens export line, etc.). Naturally, while I'm here I'd like to take advantage of this availability and try out some of the fragrances I've read about, and hopefully invest in a couple bottles once I find something I really like. This might seem like a silly question, but I thought I might ask the advice of some of you who have more experience sampling perfumes that are available in higher-end stores and boutiques. I don't really buy expensive clothing, jewelry, shoes, etc. and therefore don't generally shop in these types of places. In a more crowded/popular store like Sephora where the testers are out on the shelves, I can easily meander in, add a spritz of whatever I want to test to my wrists, and walk out. However, in some other stores, I feel like I'm not sure exactly what the sampling etiquette is. For example, yesterday I went into a small shop (I think it was actually primarily a jewelry store) that I'd noticed had a L'Artisan advertisement on the window because I wanted to sample Séville à l'Aube, which I'd been reading about. They had all their perfumes behind the counter, so I asked to sample it, and the sales assistant sprayed some on a tester strip and then on my wrist. She then proceeded to tell me some of the notes and things about the fragrance, which I already knew from some of the reviews I'd read, but I just sort of nodded because I thought it might seem arrogant if I said something about already reading about the fragrance on X, Y, and Z website, already owning another fragrance by Duchaufour, etc. And then I wasn't really sure what to do, because in a situation like that where I can return to the store later, I don't want to buy a fragrance immediately after spraying it because I want to wear it around to see how it evolves, test the longevity, etc. So I smiled, said I just wanted to try it, thanked her for her help, and left. She seemed nice, and I was trying to be very polite and was speaking to her in French, since I am fairly proficient in French. Still, after I left, I felt a little awkward, as if maybe I hadn't said something I should have said or had missed something I was supposed to do.
Do you have any advice for sampling perfumes in settings like this in a way that is respectful and doesn't seem like you are just trying to mooch samples from the store? It is odd for a customer to walk in knowing exactly what she wants to sample without browsing around much at all and then to leave shortly after spraying the sample on? Does it help if you mention things like you are interested in fragrance, you have already read about this fragrance, you have already sampled a few fragrances from the same line, etc., or does that come across as over-the-top or rude, like you're trying to prove you know more than the sales assistant? Would the sales assistants start getting irritated if they realized the same person was coming into the store multiple times and testing the fragrances without having purchased anything? I've gotten more deliberate in what I choose to sample, so it's not like I'd be coming in and sampling everything in these stores, but still, I don't want to seem like I'm abusing their samples or wasting their time.
Thanks so much for your advice!