The Biggest Perfume Wearing Myths: Busted!

Perfume has been around for nearly as long as any type of civilized societies have, and along the way, maybe because of all the magical secrecy surrounding it since day one, it’s caused a lot of myths to pop up. 

Maybe you don’t wear perfume to ward off evil spirits, or to heal illness (both of which were once uses attributed to fragrant potions), but to this day, some perfume myths still widely circulate – especially involving the wearing of it, and how it’s made. 

So if you’re a little new to regularly smelling like the magical being you are, we’re going to burst some bubbles about a few perfume fibs you may have seen or heard, so you know what you’re wearing, and how to do so flawlessly. As cool and breezy as we all smell, we’re very practical around here.

Myth #1: “The Air Spray” Move

Even if you’re new to fragrance, you’ve definitely seen this move before. Someone takes their favorite bottle, sprays a little cloud a few feet in front of them, and walks into it as if they were driving into the world’s most expensive car wash. 

If you’re guilty of this move yourself, we’re going to have to gently break it to you that the only thing this is good for scenting adequately is your floor. 

Even if you prefer a lighter scent, to radiate scent at all, the key ingredient is heat. This means that fragrance needs heat from your body or skin. To simply walk through a cloud will indeed attach some small droplets to your clothes, but these little splatters are sure to fade within a very short amount of time. 

Spray your fragrance on points of your body that give off heat – or onto things that are in contact with these parts. And yes, this means your pulse points on your wrists and neck aren’t the only option. Muscles you use frequently, like your bicep, the warm crook of your elbow, or even your calves, are great options. 

We now have widely available jewelry that holds scent for those that don’t want it directly on their body, but most often, these are worn around your neck and wrist, so they’re still a great option too, next to a bodily heat source. If you live in warmer climates and just want a light scent, places like your hair (which is attached to your warm head and scalp) are a wonderful backup spot. 

But please, don’t waste your precious fragrance by tossing most of it in the air.

Myth #2: “The Rub” Move

Yikes. This one might be tied with #1 as the most pervasive, instinctual application myth, if not beating it out completely. And if you do this yourself, we totally forgive you. It’s everywhere. 

A bottle is grabbed. Wrists are sprayed. Those two wrists then get smashed and rubbed together, and possibly brought up to the neck, where the very same move is done against the neck’s pulse points, in order to apply there. 

This move absolutely murders your fragrance, and here’s why. The gorgeous aroma that wafts from that spray is made up of multiple different materials and molecules. Some of those materials are really tenacious and will stick around all day. Some of them are a lot more delicate and will degrade under harsh conditions, like sunlight. When you rub and rub, you’re adding two things: friction, and a lot of heat. 

Gentle (known as “volatile”) materials don’t hold up to this so well, and they end up degrading mere seconds after you put it on, as you’re applying this way. Not only are you changing the whole symphony of the fragrance, you’re significantly decreasing your wear time before you even step out of the house. 

If the area you’ve sprayed is uncomfortably and initially wet, a light dab on some other area is ok, but try your best to not add any heat or friction, and mostly, leave the air to dry the spots you’ve sprayed, which – be patient – it will rapidly do. Fine fragrances are like fine wines. If you let them breathe, you’ll enjoy them more. 

However, this comes with a caveat, and a really cool cheat. Now that you know this, if you’re in a store, or in front of your new Olfactif box this month, and want to get the Cliff’s Notes of how a fragrance wears without having to walk around all day, use this aggressive move to your advantage. 

Spray. Wait a minute. Enjoy the fleeting top notes and see if you like them. Now do a slight wrist-rub. Wait until the warmth of the friction fades. Sniff. Does it change, stay the same? Is it gone after one simple rub? If it changes, and is still there, try the same move again.

In this way, you get a general sense of how the fragrance wears away, and how fast, without having to wait all day. If you have to do a couple fricative rubs to get it to go to a skin scent, you might have a scent that will last a while on you. Do you like how it dries down? 

You can always break the rules if you know them.

Myth #3: You Can Only Wear One

 

A lot of people and brands would have you believe that you are beholden to the perfumer’s expertise, the statement of the perfume, and whatever is in the bottle is just simply the end of the story. While we deeply respect perfumers, art, vision, and concept – we’re going to have to go to the side that this is just not true.

Once you take your precious bottle home, it’s yours, and your statement to make. You can wear two, three, or four, fragrances if you so feel that particular day. We encourage you to play. Put one on your wrist and a different one on your neck. 

If one doesn’t last long enough to your liking, spray another one over it. What happens? You may be grossed out and head straight for the dishwashing liquid, or you may have just made magic to your nose. We can’t tell you what to do, but we can give you some tips.

Florals generally go super well with soft, white musky smells, or citrus (both, maybe?). If something smells fresh, clean and laundry-like, definitely see what a floral spray does with it. Bright, sunny citrus? Yes, try the same. 

Wood and leather scents go really well with sweet things. It creates a great tension. Something a little too vanilla for you? Do a splash of something woody or leathery (maybe even smoky) over it, and see what happens. 

And green smells always seem to go amazing with woods. It’s just how nature likes it. Go experiment. Perfume is your statement to make.

Myth #4: Naturals = Good, Synthetics = Toxic Chemicals

This is kind of the perfume myth that won’t die, and just keeps coming back as a zombie. So, we’re going to go at this one pretty hard. 

Now, we’ll admit, part of the reason for the confusion is because of the industry itself benefitting from being shrouded in so much mystery. We’re inundated with pictures of exotic forests, fields of flowers, rare materials grown at the ends of the earth, all giving you the image that perfumers are hopping in a dangerous boat to travel into far off lands, in order to collect these materials by their very lonesome. 

While this really isn’t how your bottle is made, we don’t think it makes it any less magic. Yes, unless explicitly stated otherwise, your favorite bottle is probably holding some materials that were created in a lab. But it’s actually these lab-made synthetics that cause your fragrance to wear the way we all want our scent to wear – projecting, durable, cost-effective, and the same quality, bottle after bottle. 

Natural materials are quite touchy, and can vary from growing season to growing season, much like vintages of bottles of wine. The variations are interesting for wine, bad for perfume. How would you feel if you ran out of your favorite scent, and then your next bottle smelled totally different? Not a very fun game to play. 

Plus, natural materials – floral absolutes, oils of rare woods, precious resins – are extremely expensive, and truly, don’t last very long on skin by themselves. None of us want our fragrances to be twice as expensive and last half as long, which would be the case if every single bottle was pure natural materials. Also, these materials have to be pulled, cut down, or dug up, and some of these materials have become endangered because of it, sandalwood being a prime example. 

But these materials are so famously prized because they smell so complex and lush. They smell that way because they are an amalgamation of fragrant - you guessed it - chemicals. 

Did you know a rose has over 100 different chemicals in that gorgeous, simple looking flower (stuff like phenyl ethyl alcohol, rose oxide, linalool, just to name a very few)? It smells so complex, because it is. And because there are so many molecules in one material, if you’ve ever had a reaction to a fragrance, it was most likely a natural that was the culprit. Shocked? Well, as we just learned, natural materials are overflowing with hundreds of chemical possibilities that could set you off. A synthetic molecule is just one single molecule. 

A lot of synthetic materials are actually made to mimic nature exactly. Flip over your perfume box, and we bet you’ll see the word we mentioned above, linalool. It’s kind of in everything, both food and fragrance. It smells like a cedarwooded, yet citrusy, floral and tastes like a tropical citrus with a spicy accent. You can find it in jasmine, rosewood, basil, and lavender, also to name a very small few. 

So, if we create a linalool molecule, that’s identical to the very same linalool molecule you could nudge out of a basil leaf, is that a natural molecule, or a synthetic one to you? Not even the definition is so easy. 

And yes, some molecules are not found in nature, being completely lab-made, and existing nowhere except in beakers and perfume bottles. For these, and all of the above nature-related molecules too, we have a large team of skilled scientists dedicated completely to making sure what you’re putting on is usable, safe, yet sustainable, and constantly updating restrictions and recommendations about what can and can’t be in your fragrance, or in what amounts. 

These are the International Fragrance Association (IFRA), Research Institute for Fragrance Materials (RIFM), and even the EU has its own set of restrictions for any cosmetic product that can be sold within its borders. There are a lot of eyes on all the things around, and on you, that happen to give off any wonderful smell. And while some words may be big and scary-sounding, it’s best to look to skilled, trained, and reliable outlets about what these words are and mean. 

The whole world, even nature, is all made out of chemicals. And we think that’s pretty cool.

Mythology is fun, but when you’re just trying to figure out what bottle to grab, and how to rock it, we all could probably do without all the smoke, mirrors, and bad tips that a friend got from a friend of a friend that knew someone once. 

So know that you know what you’re putting on, and how to do it right, do us a favor and go be that friend of a friend that knows exactly what’s up, and smells just as smart.