The 'perfume wardrobe' con

Every now and again, The Bargain Queen encounters the idea of a 'perfume wardrobe' in a magazine or on a fashion web site. The idea 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.

While perfume is always a lovely thing to have, The Bargain Queen is unconvinced about the perfume wardrobe idea and suspects it might be a marketing ploy to increase perfume sales. She has two reasons for this.

Firstly, perfume has a very limited shelf life. Usually it's estimated at about a year; in The Bargain Queen's 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 mould 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, The Bargain Queen finds it hard to use a whole bottle of perfume before it starts to deteriorate, even though she wears 2-3 squirts of her signature scent 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, The Bargain Queen doesn'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 (e.g. that irresistable bakery smell, aromatherapy, Cleopatra's barge of rose petals on the fetid Nile). Perfume is a way to unconsciously help people 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. Plus wearing a different scent each day means you never build up 'your smell' in anyone's mind, so you lose perfume's evocative effect where people think of you when they smell that fragrance.

So The Bargain Queen's unconvinced about buying a wardrobe of perfumes. If having a few fragrances works for you, fantastic... just try to buy smaller bottles or keep them in the fridge so you don't end up smelling like Eau de Stale Cat. But unless you're a perfume afficionado, The Bargain Queen thinks that one perfume at a time is probably enough.

Filed in:

• beauty
• buyer_beware