How and Where to Start Your Fragrance Journey

by Afif Sarker

When you’re new to scents and the world of perfumes, finding the right fragrance is not an easy thing. Your initial impression will be formed on the basis of seeing bottle design, which does not help you much, frankly speaking.

In Bangladesh, most perfume shops have sales assistants who lack the knowledge and they don’t have the necessary training. You are, therefore, left with few tester bottles to sniff and no guideline to take you to the scents you would love. Perfume descriptions are useless for a layperson to determine whether a smell suits you. So where to start?

Starting Point

The best way to start is to consider what scents you already love. For instance, I love the aroma which hits my nose when I enter a coffee shop and I also enjoy the fresh feeling I get from my aquatic body wash. Perhaps you got a gift from your uncle a long time ago and you loved that perfume! Maybe, you enjoy the lavender smell that comes from your soap. Or, maybe, the earthy smell of nature that you sniff when you go to a park after rain. Or maybe, even the smell that you love is a Kulfi that your favorite restaurant serves.

If these can give you a good direction to finding your ideal scent, search for fragrances with the notes like the ones you love in your daily life.

Use search terms like “Best coffee-based fragrances”, “Best Soapy fragrances”, and “Best Tobacco fragrances”. The more you do your research the easier for you to choose the right one. There are blogs and websites such as Basenotes and Fragnatica to guide you further.

The Next Steps

Let’s suppose you did your research and found out what you might like. What can you do about it now? Ideally, you should obtain as much perfume samples as possible to help you decide but unfortunately, in Bangladesh perfume samples are not easily available.

To get remedy from this problem several perfume enthusiasts became entrepreneurs to help the community by opening this business called Decanting i.e. transferring a small amount of perfume in little spray bottles from big bottles and selling them. Decants (small portions such as 5ml or 10ml in spray bottles) provides the interesting opportunity of trying out perfumes for much lower prices.

Collecting samples and revisiting them from time to time will help you to learn about your taste. It will also make it clear to you that which ones are stronger and last a long time and which are light.

A number of companies through Facebook pages now provides this sampling service that enables customers to buy 100% authentic perfume in small quantity. They include ShugondhiWala, Fragrance Club, Perfume Point Bangladesh, Decant Perfume Bangladesh & GoodFellas. These samples come in 2.5ml, 5ml, 10 ml, and 20ml sample spray bottles.

In case you find yourself before a perfume counter the most important tip for you is to avoid making decisions on the spot. Perfume consists of notes which are divided into three classes in accordance with the scents that can be sensed in different periods of time after the application. Usually, they are referred to as top (or head) notes, middle (or heart) notes, and base notes. When you spray a perfume you get the scent of top notes with alcoholic burst for a while and then top notes will fade out and the middle note will stay with a hint of base notes for as long the perfume lasts.

Thus when you spray in a shop you only get the opening or top notes which you might like but it may smell different after a while when it reaches to middle note i.e. drydown and you can’t know for sure if you will like it. Sometimes the top notes will be less interesting than the drydown, and vice versa. So, it will be a mistake if you make a hurried decision.

If you understand scent categories/families that will further help you decide what you want. Examples include:

Citrusy: Includes lime, Lemon, Oranges, Grapefruit or Bergamot.

Woody: These scents can range from a creamy nutty flavor to sandalwood, to spicy and dank like a musky old closet (patchouli), to an old No. 2 pencil (cedarwood).

Green: Includes the chalky aftertaste of a wheatgrass shot as well as a dewy moss on a spring morning or even wet muddy feel after rain.

Aquatic: Watery, Salty, and Clean.

Once you enter into this journey you will soon realize that scents can be so fascinating that you just joined a great adventure. It lifts your mood and makes you feel amazing. After all, it is a worldwide market of nearly US$60 billion of which Bangladesh has an astounding market size of nearly BDT 120 crores, according to the stakeholders.

You must also remember, as said Coco Chanel, the best color in the whole world is the one that looks good on you. The same goes for fragrances. The best fragrance is the one which smells great to you.