Every year introduces a new wave of womens designer fragrances from the major perfume houses gets released to the market. The choices for women are enormous and as we traipse through department stores, the first department is usually the fragrance and cosmetics departments. There the smells bombard us and sexily dressed and made up coquettes bombard us with spray after spray of 50 new fragrances on strips that are handed to us. What do we do with so many fragrance strips? We have so many that we forget which ones were the discount women’s fragrances, the rated women’s fragrances, and the fragrances for women in 2008.
Admittedly selling fragrance for women is not an easy job. I think I would develop bronchitis if I had to work in an environment saturated with womens perfume day in and day out. Fragrances for women is undoubtedly big business but for women in general, its very difficult to make a selection based on taking a whiff of for or more different fragrances. I think any more than scent strips and its olfactory overload. You simply will not be able to distinguish the differences in all the notes of a scent if you have more than three different fragrances to study. Think of it. Each scent strip is loaded with fragrance that has a top note, one or two middle notes, and a base note. So multiply lets say the number of notes by three fragrances so you have a total of at least nine separate underlying fragrances to evaluate. That’s why I say no more than three scents at a time.
Most smelling behavior by clients in this atmosphere of high pressure sales is to sniff the fragrance from the scent saturated strip and they will accept or reject the fragrance within ten seconds. Just a small percentage of shoppers will actually apply the fragrance to their forearm and take a whiff from there. the perfume manufacturers know this and many of their scents are designed to smell good on paper (no pun intended) but when it is applied to skin, its a completely different story. many perfume creators do not feel like creators at all. They simply take orders from the market researchers because sales and profits have become the driving formulas for the major perfume houses. the volume comes from the sheer number of bottled perfume that gets sold all over the world. It is the only heavily branded almost couture fragrance product that the ordinary consumer can purchase for a song, or maybe a little more than a song. So synthetics are a big part of fragrance components as are the perfumers in laboratories who manipulate them as a way to help sluggish sales.