Fine fragrances are as complex as fine wines, but few perfume counters employ a sommelier to help with selections. So let’s start with the basics. You can use these steps to select and appreciate perfumes, soaps, and more. Use these tips and future reviews of new releases to choose a fragrance you and yours will love on Valentine’s Day and beyond.
Fragrance is an art. Fragrances—perfumes, colognes, eaus de toilette—are composed a lot like music. There are top notes, which you smell first, then mid-notes, and finally, bass notes, which linger on the skin at the end of the day. (Musk and civet extracts frequently show up here. We wouldn’t like them alone—the scents can be quite intense. Mixed with the top notes, though, they produce a full-bodied blend.) Fragrances are categorized into general families, like “orientals,” which are spicy, “florals,” “citruses,” and “waters,” and most people find they have a preference for one family of fragrances over another.
I’ve found that I prefer the deep, rich, oriental family of fragrances, which my sister says smell “gacky and sweet.” She, on the other hand, likes citruses, which I think smell sour. So while our tastes are polarized, there are a few fragrances we both love, and these are perfumes or soaps that have an artful blending of top, mid, and bass notes. Again, this can be paralleled in music: I sometimes find that while I generally prefer jazz over country music, there are country songs I love and jazz songs I switch off at the first smarmy note. With both fragrance and music, what appeals to us, what lingers in our minds, what is stored in a time capsule in our memory (of an afternoon at our high school boyfriend’s house or dancing with our fathers on our wedding day), is not the genre but a particular song or a particular fragrance. It is the specific sensual experience that can call us back in time and cause an emotional reaction, and that’s what makes a chart-topping hit or a successful perfume.
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