As we explore perfumes over the years, we tend to collect not just bottles but also fascinating details about them. Whether it’s something about ingredients, chemistry or history, those little bits of trivia add even more charm to our hobby.

Saturday Question #283:

What’s the Most Interesting Perfume Fact You’ve Learned?

It doesn’t have to be an obscure or groundbreaking fact – just something that surprised or intrigued you when you first learned it. Maybe it’s something many perfumistas learn sooner or later, but most people outside our hobby wouldn’t know.

My Answer

I recently came across something called “olfactory training” or “smell training,” which involves regularly smelling some distinct scents (e.g., rose, lemon, clove and eucalyptus) and consciously trying to identify them. Research shows that these simple exercises act like a workout for the brain, helping to keep memory and thinking skills sharper over time. Clinical trials with older participants and patients with early Alzheimer’s suggest that this kind of mental engagement can have measurable benefits.

For example, in one recent study, participants aged 60–85 in an “enriched” group were exposed to seven different pleasant scents each week, one per night, for two hours using diffusers, while a control group received only tiny amounts of the scents. After six months, the enriched group showed significantly greater improvement on a word‑list recall test, and brain scans revealed changes in a neural pathway known to decline with age.

It’s not a treatment for dementia, of course, but at least our perfume habit has an excuse for being indulgent: it’s brain exercise! Time for round two: let’s see if I can finally pick out a few notes in the latest batch of samples.

What’s the Most Interesting Perfume Fact You’ve Learned?

With Halloween just behind us, it feels fitting to bring up something genuinely scary for any perfume lover: discovering that a bottle of a favorite perfume has gone off. It doesn’t happen often with bottles, and mostly we deal with evaporating decants and spoiled samples, but when it does, we’re left deciding what to do with it.

Saturday Question #282:

What Do You Do with a Perfume Bottle That’s Gone Off?

Do you throw it away? Save somewhere? Keep on your shelf?

A bonus question: what was the last perfume that you discovered spoiled in your collection?

My Answer

After our discussion about Italian perfumes in our collections two weeks ago, I felt an urge to wear Prada‘s Infusion d’Iris (EdP), which I hadn’t reached for yet this year. I took the bottle out of its box, did a “control spray” into the sink (sometimes it helps to “clean out” some aged juice from the spraying mechanism), and then carelessly aimed the next portion at my wrist… Luckily for me, it hadn’t become rancid or really unpleasant. But it completely lost the opening citrus, I’m not sure I smell any iris, and even galbanum seems quite muted. My sink was treated to a couple more sprays, after which I applied more perfume to different parts of my body. With the same result. It gets more recognizable two hours into development, but overall, it is not the perfume I fell in love with many years ago.

The bottle still has about 20% of its volume. I do not think I will ever want to wear it in its current state again (as I said, it’s not unpleasant, but it’s not pleasant enough for me to want to put it on my skin). As I calculated from my 2012 post (Alien wears Prada Infusion d’Iris), I bought it the same year it was released – 2007. So, it was a good run. And I cannot make myself throw it away. So most likely it’ll go into my “retirement” box, where I store perfumes that I stopped wearing either because they spoiled or I had a change of heart and didn’t want to finish the remaining perfume, but couldn’t bring myself to part with them. And since that box contains some bottles I got 25 years ago (or even earlier), my old favorite Infusion d’Iris doesn’t have to worry about its fate. Well, at least until the rest of my collection decides to follow suit – and this is a horrifying thought.

How about you?

What Do You Do with a Perfume Bottle That’s Gone Off?

I negotiated with myself for a while whether it’s an appropriate question for a perfume blog visited only by “hardcore” perfumistas. But my curiosity won.

Saturday Question #280:

Do You Wear Perfumes Every Day?

Let’s not count special circumstances, such as being sick, visiting someone at a hospital or being stranded on a desert island. But in your regular life, do you still apply perfumes every day?

My Answer

For at least a couple of decades, I wore perfume daily, sometimes changing scents more than once during the day. Had I asked myself this question 2–3 years ago, the answer would have been an emphatic yes – I couldn’t even imagine staying scentless. These days, though… sometimes I go several days in a row without wearing or even testing anything. I don’t fully understand why. I still like perfume in general; I still love at least twenty (but probably more) scents in my collection. And when I do put them on, I enjoy smelling them on me. But more often than not, I experience choice paralysis when it comes to deciding what to wear.

I’ve tried using a predefined list of perfumes for a week or a month, and I know that works. But then I’d miss creating the next list – and end up back where I started.

It wouldn’t be a problem if I simply didn’t want to wear perfume anymore. But I do! And I feel bad when I can’t get organized enough to enjoy all the beautiful scents I’ve accumulated. Each day I skip wearing one feels like a missed opportunity, and it upsets me.

I think I need to reorganize my collection. Sometimes, even when I know exactly what I want to wear, I can’t find it quickly before my workday starts. Maybe I just need to go back to my old habit of choosing a perfume at night, while falling asleep – the way some women plan their outfits for the next day.

How about you?

Do You Wear Perfumes Every Day?

Smelling perfumes at a store and then getting a sample to decide if we want more, or ordering a sample of a perfume we got curious about, is the regular route new perfumes take to join our collections. But sometimes perfume or beauty orders come with samples we didn’t choose ourselves. This week’s question is about those samples.

Saturday Question #279:

Have You Ever Bought a Perfume from a Surprise Sample?

Would you have tried it if it hadn’t been sent to you? Do you still have that perfume?

My Answer

I came up with this question earlier this week while unpacking a package from Sephora.

The main reason I order online instead of going to the store just a 10-minutes drive from where I live is that I can choose a couple of samples with any order and get another larger sample with a minimum purchase. Had they made it easy to do the same in store, I would have saved them money on delivery and gone to the mall. But since they don’t, I order online. The samples that I choose are always skincare or makeup. I haven’t done an exact count, but it feels like in one out of two orders they substitute the requested sample with a perfume sample. And I don’t like when that happens: I just don’t know what to do with those mass-market perfumes. I try them when they arrive even though I know that I won’t like them. I don’t. And after that, they just sit in my drawer. Unlike a lotion that I can use on my hands or feet if I don’t want to apply it to my face or a makeup sample that is a one-use packet that I’ll try and forget, there’s no use for perfumes I don’t like. But it’s hard to throw away a full sample.

Mentally going through all the years and samples, I can think of a single perfume that fits that question – a long-discontinued Tiempe Passate by Antonia’s Flowers. As I described in the post My First Niche Perfume: Tiempe Passate by Antonia’s Flowers, I got a sample of this perfume with another purchase at a store that didn’t even carry it. So if it weren’t for that random sample, I might never have tried it. I still have that bottle and wear this perfume from time to time.

How about you?

Have You Ever Bought a Perfume from a Surprise Sample?

I planned to ask this question last week, but since I was traveling for the said occasion, my schedule got too hectic, and I didn’t even open my laptop to publish this SQ. But now I know the answer to my question without any hypothetical guessing.

Saturday Question #278:

What Perfume Would You Wear As A Wedding Guest Today?

Consider your current weather, what you would wear and any other imaginary circumstances of attending a wedding tomorrow and choose one of your favorites to scent that joyful event.

My Answer

Until the day I started packing for the trip, I was sure that I would be wearing one of my top 3 all-time favorites, Ormonde Jayne Ta’if. But at the last moment, I went with Armani Prive La Femme Bleue – a choice that felt as elegant as my navy-black gown and just as appropriate for the occasion.

I didn’t abandon my beloved Ta’if, though, and wore it to the rehearsal dinner, together with the brick rose/red silk blouse.

Perhaps it wasn’t me choosing perfumes at all, but my outfits whispering their own picks.

View from the wedding venue

How about you?

What Perfume Would You Wear As A Wedding Guest Today?