Perfume wasn’t something that I was interested in until my late 20s. I had used different scents and fragrances here and there but I never had a collection. As my interest grew, I started to pay attention to the scents that attracted me to them. Over the last two years, I’ve built a small collection of fragrances and I’m still a beginner at this. I don’t see myself having a bookshelf full of perfumes but trusting my nose has helped me build mine. Today, I’m going to share my experience and story about building your perfume collection as a beginner.
How I Started Buying Perfumes
Whenever we went on family holidays together and we had a stopover, my parents would always stop at duty free. My parents would always buy each other a gift, whether it was fragrances, cufflinks, jewellery or books. Seeing that growing up really stuck with me because it is so sweet and thoughtful. You really have to pay attention to someone to know that is something they wanted.
As I started travelling solo more often and having a lot of stopovers to my final destination, I had a couple of hours to myself to explore duty free. To make my travels more memorable, I chose to do a scent of the trip. I travel about 4-5 five times a year and I made a rule to only buy fragrances when I did international trips and visited new places.
My stopovers would usually be around 2-3 hours so I had time to explore, sample the perfume and take in the scents. I started doing this at the end of 2019 and I started with samples to see if I actually liked the scents instead of what was popular at the time. It wasn’t until June 2021 that I bought my first fragrance, Good Girl Supreme by Carolina Herrera.
Sampling Perfume
When it comes to sampling perfume, I highly recommend taking your time and not rushing the process. Go to a parfumerie or any store that sells them, grab a tester strip and spray some. Fragrances have top tones, middle tones and bottom tones. Give yourself time to capture and take in the various tones. I prefer to wait about 2-3 minutes before smelling the tester strip a couple more times to see if the other tones appeal to me.
Sampling is still very new me so I always have my phone ready to find out what these tones are and if it is something that I like. For example, I am not a huge fan of anything with a floral scent. I don’t like floral in general so I aim to avoid that. Scents that are woody, citrus, spicy are the typical direction that I go towards.
Unfortunately, they don’t have sample bottles at the airport duty free. I can spend up to 30-45 minutes deciding whether buying a bottle is worth it and so far, I haven’t made any grave mistakes. I’m enjoying the fragrances that I have in my collection.
I hope this post gave you insight into my experience and my story of getting into perfumes. If you are a perfume enthusiast, expert or beginner, please share your story. I’d love to hear how you got started and I can learn from you. Don’t forget to subscribe and join the blog squad so you don’t miss out on the rest of blogmas!
Until next time,
Folakemi
