Fragrance Obsessed: A Personal Study on Perfume Utilisation

How much perfume do you really wear?

We fragrance enthusiasts tend to over estimate how much we really need/want/can actually use up. Especially when we discover fragrance new to us that we are certain we will want to wear every day for months on end (but then we get it and we end up wearing it for a few days max before moving our attention to something else). Of course, everyone is different. Some people like to shower in their fragrance in the hopes of drawing out compliments from strangers in neighbouring countries. Others are more sensitive and prefer to spritz reservedly in an effort to avoid upsetting others, or perhaps to enable them to enjoy changing up their fragrances throughout the day.

Taking stock…

In 2022 I did a Perfume No-Buy Year. Effectively this meant that, with the exception of things like birthdays, I was not permitted to purchase any full bottles of perfume for the year. I was allowed to sample things, and for that I had a set a strict budget. Throughout this process I gained a much better appreciation for how much perfume I really wear, and I tried to use that year to become better acquainted with what I had accumulated in my perfume wardrobe over the past decade or two.

How to monitor what perfumes you are wearing

I also became a little obsessed with finding the perfect method to record my daily perfume wears. In the past I had used spreadsheets, but as life got busier I wanted to have flexibility to record anywhere, anytime, not just when I was sitting at my computer. Also, I am inherently lazy and I despise trying to wrangle with a spreadsheets on my phone. So I experimented with Apps like Airtable to help me to record what I was wearing, how I was wearing it and what I thought of it. Eventually that fell over because my Airtable simply got too big and it was prompting me to pay for my subscription, which, when you are paying in Aussie dollars, is not insignificant.

This year, I am trying to better manage my digital addiction and dopamine levels and I wanted to move away from using digital devices as much as possible. Also, I want recording my daily perfume wear to be fun and thoughtful experience. So, I have transitioned to manually writing in a notebook when I climb into bed in the evening. This serves to distract me from the lure of screens, and also helps me to wind down for a better sleep.

In my notebook, I record what I am wearing and – wherever possible – recording my experience of wearing them. At the end of the month I transpose this information into a spreadsheet so that I can start to visualise the data. I have taken to reporting on the most worn fragrances on my YouTube channel, but for the nosy parkers amongst us (me being one of them), who want to know EVERYTHING I pick up and applied to my skin throughout the month, these posts will provide a bit of a fuller picture.

Sharing the perfume data so we all can get some perspective

I decided use this data compilation to share as a “Most Worn” series here on this blog and on my YouTube channel. Each month will have it’s own dedicated post, and I have broken the lists down to show you what I wore and how many times I wore it, as well as the situation I wore it for. If I happened to record any superfluous notes about my wear experience or any significant deviations from my previous experiences, I will also attempt to include those. It should also be noted that not every perfume was worn for a full day, sometimes I would spritz something on just for a short time to walk the dog or something.

The main categories are:

• Scent of the Day (SOTD) – this is the fragrance or fragrance combination (if I’m layering)
• Scent of the Night (SOTN) – typically what I am choosing to wear to bed or just in the evening around home
• Scent of the Gym (SOTG) – pretty self explanatory
• Scent of the Afternoon/Morning (SOTA/SOTM) – typically what I am wearing to walk the dog, run errands after work, or if I simply decide I want to switch up my fragrance for the day.
• Sampling – again pretty self explanatory. A lot of the time this will be something that I am spritzing once or twice on the back of my hand and recording how it wears. It is usually the first thing I apply in the morning to clean skin before I progress to wearing my SOTD.

I also welcome you to share what you have been wearing the most in the comments and why you have been reaching for them 🙂