Your Signature Perfume – How To Find Your Signature Scent

What Is A Signature Scent

How to find your signature scent – A signature scent is a personal fragrance that can be worn to express one’s own personality. It can also be used as a way to identify someone in a crowd.

The benefits of wearing a signature scent are twofold: it provides an individual with an air of confidence and self-assertion, and it helps others recognize the person.

It is common to think that the smell of a fragrance is just a matter of taste and preference. But there are many different factors that can influence how your body reacts to a scent.

We all have our own signature scents, but it can be hard to find the right one for you. There are many factors that determine how your body reacts to a scent, such as your age, gender, season, weather, humidity and mood!.

Now, do you have to have one signature scent? Absolutely not, in fact I have several signature scents including Lua by Xerjoff, Ruby N Vanilla Intense by EBK (you can check my review here), Bottega Veneta (the original), and a few more that I’ll share on another post. Being someone who likes to swap fragrances up throughout the day, I can’t imagine what it is like to have just one signature perfume! :-).

How To Find Your Signature Perfume

There are quite a few things you should take into account when finding your perfect signature fragrance which I break down below:

1. Don’t follow the hype

In a world ruled by social media, it’s easy to get lost scrolling through our phones looking for fragrance reviews and opinions on how to find your signature scent. My best advice: take everything you see and read with a grain of salt; not all reviews are candid, and not all reviewers know what they’re talking about.

Plus, the fact that a fragrance is hyped on social media doesn’t mean the fragrance is worth the hype. There are hundreds if not thousands of incredible fragrances that no one talks about.

Go for what works for YOU, just like when you go to a restaurant and you choose from the menu what you like and not what other people in the restaurant ordered.

2. Don’t blind buy

The previous point leads me to this second point: unless you trust the reviewer’s opinion, don’t blind buy fragrances based on reviews, especially if you want to find a signature perfume. However, if you still want to blind buy, please check out my YouTube video below where I share a few tips on how to safely blind buy perfumes. You can watch the video down below, or you can go to YouTube by clicking here but don’t forget to come back to keep reading 😉

3. Don’t gauge a fragrance lasting power based on how long it lasts on clothes or hair.

In your search for your signature scent, you might have probably heard people encouraging to spray your clothes and hair, and even gauging a perfume lasting power based on these two weak indicators.

First of all, unless it’s an old t-shirt or a dark fabric, I’d never encourage you to spray on clothes for reasons I’ll discuss on another blog post, but to stick to the purpose of this article, let me tell you that if you buy a fragrance based on how long it lasts on clothing or your hair, you’ll be disappointed.

Unless you wear vinyl or other plastic materials pieces, all fragrances (even those with weak lasting power) will stick to porous materials so the fact that you can smell a fragrance days after you wore it on your clothing and hair is not a candid indicator of fragrance longevity.

4. Avoid trying to like a fragrance

I hear all the time “I wanted so badly to love this fragrance”. If you want to find your signature scent, my rule of thumb is: if it’s a no-go, it’s a no-go. As humans we need to learn how to let go of things that are part of our lives but don’t serve us anymore, and also things that won’t serve us either.

Just like with haircuts and fashion, not everything out there is for all of us (can you imagine what a boring life that would be?!)

There are enough fragrances on the market to choose from; you don’t have to force yourself to try or like anything just because it’s popular. Trust me, the moment you find your signature scent, you’ll know it and you won’t need to try to like it, it’ll probably be love at first sniff, like a spell on you.

5. Know that niche is not always better

There’s a huge misconception out there where people think that niche fragrances are better. Niche means that the house just makes fragrances, that’s their “niche”: perfumes, and yes, supposedly niche fragrances have higher quality ingredients in the composition. Now, what happens behind the scenes we’ll never know. In some cases you can tell when a fragrance has high quality ingredients but in many other cases you just can’t.

I’m certainly not new to niche perfumery, and to be honest, with so many years of experience in the fragrance world, I came to the conclusion that niche is not always better. I have several designer fragrances that have niche quality in terms of scent and performance, while other niche fragrances didn’t deliver anywhere close to my expectations considering the price tag and the niche status, so be open-minded and know that niche is not always better.

6. Avoid the next shiny object syndrome

As I mentioned above in my second bullet point, in a world where social media is part of our lives, if you want to be successful finding your signature scent it’s key that you stay away from the “next shiny object syndrome” to avoid major disappointments.

Make sure that before you click the infamous “add to cart” button, you truly love what you already have in your collection, and whatever doesn’t serve you anymore just let it go. This is the best and most authentic way to curate a fragrance collection aligned with your taste and personality that truly represents you and only you.

7. Know your worth

(Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases).

Last, but not least, as cliche as it sounds, remember that your worth comes from within and its not determined by how many expensive bottles you have in your collection. Either if you have 1 or 100 bottles, and either if they cost $30 or $300, there’s no better or worse, right or wrong; if it smells good, it smells good. Just be yourself and enjoy your journey. If you want to learn more about perfumery, I’ve curated a super small collection of great books that you can check on my Amazon Store Front being these two my favorites: