Declutter Diaries #1: The Perfume Journey
I recently posted part 1 of a 3 -part video series to my YouTube channel, where I go through my entire perfume collection to declutter the perfumes that are not getting much love from me (and frankly, deserve better).
So far this year, I have decluttered somewhere between 30 and 40 bottles of perfume in total (I will post a final total cull list once the last two videos have gone live). However, looking at my perfume cabinet…the dent is barely noticeable.
That is surely an indication that I:
- most likely have FAR too much perfume
- I clearly have trouble saying goodbye to perfume
When I speak to other perfume enthusiasts, it seems to be a common theme that many of us first start to dip our toe in the water by maybe getting some samples and decants, which even if we love, we wear sparingly purely because we don’t want to run out. Then suddenly, something snaps in our brains and the floodgates open and we start to give in and just buy bottles of EVERYTHING that we think we like before we have even worn through a 2ml sample…until we one day suddenly realise (either through doing our income tax or updating our perfume spreadsheet…) that we have more perfume than we could ever wear in a lifetime and that some bottles we’ve had for months and months (or possibly years) and have worn perhaps once or twice.
What then ensues seems to be a process of constant decluttering and analysing and questioning “will I want to wear this [again] one day?” and “if I do want to wear it and I dont have it, will I miss it? Will I still be able to get hold of it?”.
This is similar to the anxiety-driven “back-up bottle” practice. There is one perfume I have bought back-up bottles of over the years, and that is Samsara. Since I bought those back-ups (of which I believe there are two), do you know how many I have actually had to bust open? None. Zero. Zip. And my current open bottle of Samsara (vintage) is still 80% full, thank you very much. Why? Have I gone off it? Not at all, I just have SO MANY other perfumes that I rarely get to wear it if I want to give reasonable attention to the rest of my wardrobe.
What underpins this is that age-old problem we like to refer to these days as FOMO.
The reality, however, is that even if we do one day miss that bottle of XYZ perfume, and even if we can’t ever get it again…that disappointment is likely to be fleeting because there is ALWAYS going to be something else that we love to smell and will happily wear.
So, my goal is to simply enjoy the memories of wearing them (and perhaps documenting a few), and allowing the bottles to move on.
Does this mean I have since become a ruthless perfume declutterer?
LOL. No.
But I am working on it…
I encourage those just starting to build out their fragrance wardrobe to go slow, to sample, sample, sample – trust me there is ALWAYS going to be something else you want but there is only so much perfume you can wear.
My name is Cherie and I am a perfume addict who suffers from a hefty dose of FOMO.