The ‘perfume wardrobe’ con

Have you heard about having a ‘perfume wardrobe’?

It’s an idea that I see regularly in magazines and fashion web sites. It goes a little like this: instead of having a signature scent you wear all the time, you should have a ‘wardrobe’ of perfumes and choose one to suit your mood each day.

It’s also a big con. Here’s why.

While perfume is always a lovely thing to have, I’m unconvinced about the perfume wardrobe idea. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s a marketing ploy to increase perfume sales — for two reasons.

Firstly, perfume has a very limited shelf life. Usually it’s estimated to be about a year; in my experience it’s a little more if you protect it from heat and direct sunlight.

So what happens when perfume goes off? It doesn’t look any different or have mold growing on it, but the stale perfume smell is pretty distinctive and really not attractive. If you don’t know the smell, check Grandma’s dressing table — older people are usually a reliable source of beauty products that have been hoarded too long.

While perfume’s shelf life wouldn’t be an issue if we used it quickly, I find it hard to use a whole bottle of perfume before it starts to deteriorate, even though I wear 2-3 squirts of my favourite perfume most days. So having more perfumes is likely to result in either throwing out expensive scent that’s past its prime, or continuing to wear it until it smells like cat urine. Ew!

Secondly, I don’t think wearing a different scent each day makes sense from an affective point of view. Smells are tightly connected to our feelings and have long been used to shape our perceptions and influence our behaviour. For example, think of that irresistible bakery smell, aromatherapy, or Cleopatra’s barge of rose petals on the fetid Nile.

Perfume is a way to help people unconsciously associate you with lovely things like flowers, spices and delicious food smells. Maybe there’s some logic in smelling like a different lovely thing each day, but it also makes it more noticeable that it’s not you that smells great, just the bottled stuff you splash on.

Wearing a different scent each day means you never build up ‘your smell’ in anyone’s mind, so there’s no single lovely scent that instantly makes your loved ones think of you.

My advice? Find a signature scent you love and stick with it. Or if you really want some variety, but smaller bottles and keep them in the fridge so they last longer and you don’t end up smelling like Eau de Stale Cat.

‘Perfume wardrobes’ are a far better idea for perfume advertisers than they are for real people.