Since the end of the last year when I made my resolution to spend more time with perfumes I love and own I’ve improved my relationships with y collection significantly: even if I spend a day testing new perfumes I go to bed wearing something I like. And still I have more perfumes that I want to wear than time to do so. What will I do when my collection grows?
Quick June stats:
* Different perfumes worn/tested: 50 (5 less than last month) on 63 occasions;
* Favorite perfumes worn: 19 on 30 occasions (+7);
* Perfumes I tried for the first time: 15 (-2);
* Perfume house I wore most often: Jo Malone (for the third season of the weeklong test drive) and Chanel;
* Most popular notes (only from perfumes I chose to wear, not those that I tested for the first time): top – (not counting bergamot) rose and violet; middle – rose and jasmine; base – musk and sandalwood. The only change in comparison to the previous month is violet in the top position.
* The most popular beginning letter in perfumes names this month was letter C.
Do you have any trivia facts about your perfume collection or usage habits?
Image: my own
Undina's Looking Glass 
I’m really interested in how you accumulate all those data. I’m not bad with Excel, but your data gathering seems very elaborate! Do you have one tab for each month? (If so, how do you keep track of which perfumes you tried for the first time? If not, how do you separate your June wears from the previous months’?) How do you find your most popular notes, do you have one cell per note for each perfume? I’m just starting with perfumes but I’d love to have similar stats for myself. :)
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I’m even geekier than it might seem from my playing with Excel’s charts: I’ve created a database (I use MS Access) where I first started collecting general information (brand, perfumer, year of creation, notes) for perfumes in my collection. Then later I added “diary” part where I record daily which perfumes I wore or tested. And then I created queries to answer different questions – brands, notes, new perfumes, etc. – databases are good for that. Now every month I come up with some silly question for my stats post and find an answer to it.
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Aw, I don’t know nor have Access… I might try to find a way to get it just for that, though! Thanks! I particularly like the idea of tracking which house and notes you wear the most, it might be very useful for a newbie like me…
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I am an Excel geek. I have started litsing all my samples and recordind dates and reviews. I love the idea of a database. Maybe you should market this :). Thanks, love your blog.
Sharryn ~♥~
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Thank you, Sharyn.
I tried to find a “ready-to-wear” application before I started creating my own and didn’t succeed: there are some for books, DVDs and some other collections but nothing suitable for perfumes. Basenotes perfume wardrobe probably is the closest to what I wanted but I do not actively participate in there and I wanted somethiing on my computer… So I started working on my own. It’s far from being a product but it serves my needs.
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Hi Undina! I, too, am very impressed by your data collection. Even though I don’t take a scientific approach at all in tracking my perfume usage, it’s interesting to read the stats from someone who does.
What I can tell you about my own usage is that it’s not very diverse: when I’m testing a fragrance for a review, I like to wear it for three days in a row. This gives me four days out of the week to wear other things, so usually I’ll spend two or three days wearing something from my collection that I really want to wear, and then one day in which I’ll try on several new things at once (mapped out on different places on my arms) to see what I want to review next.
(This is why I decant: on my own, I’d never make a dent in my collection.) :)
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Since I’m not really writing reviews I have a luxury of wearing what I want when I want. Usually between I first try a perfume and till it becomes a story ready to tell (if ever) I wear it on multiple occations and record multiple impressions. When I “grow up”, tell all the old stories and decide to try myself in writing reviews I will, most likely, switch to your system.
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Now that I have seen you pull stats all fancy like, I MUST BUILD ONE OF MY OWN!
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That’s the spirit!
I constantly plan to improve mine, I have some ideas but then I constantly have to choose what I have time to do – read and comment on friends’ blogs, write in my own or improve the database.
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This is so funny, especially the letter at the start of the names data. Totally appeals to the market researcher in me. Keep the trivia facts coming!
: – )
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Thank you, Vanessa. I was just trying to amuse myself and not to be too serious.
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