How to test if a perfume or a fragrance is strong enough ?

We will explain first in this article why you can not test a perfume on your clothes or on your body ?

You have just returned from vacation. You have been away from your home for several days. Before leaving, the house was put away and washed from top to bottom. However, from the first step, you smell like musty and you rush on the windows to open them. But the house is not dirty, it is only that your nose was no longer used to smell such smells. It’s the same with your perfume. You have taken years to find the rare pearl that sticks perfectly to your skin. However, over time it becomes almost impossible to smell it on yourself. However, everyone around you can smell your perfume. A mystery that has found a simple explanation.

For example, the American magazine New York called on Pamela Dalton, an expert from the Monell research center in Philadelphia in the United States, to try to solve this enigma. This cognitive psychologist spent 20 years studying odor memory and what the Americans call “nose blindness” (literally translated as “blindness of the nose”, editor’s note). According to her, the first time a smell arrives in the nostrils, the olfactory receptors send a message to the brain. It then processes this information and conditions the reaction (assimilation or rejection) of our body to this odor.

But according to Pamela Dalton, “after only two breaths, the olfactory receptors already begin to saturate and the intensity of the odor fades”. Why ? “Because your brain did not feel ‘attacked’ by this odor and it assimilated it. In the long term, it therefore no longer pays attention to it” analyzes this expert. According to the Newser site, Pamela Dalton conducted the following experiment: for three weeks, she gave a room fragrance (pine scent) to a number of people. They ended up coming to see her asking, “Are you sure it still works?” In reality, she said, “every week, they became less sensitive to the smell.”

As New York magazine reports, experts and scientists themselves do not understand why we get used to the smells of our environment so much that we forget them. But it is clear that this is the case. This is also the reason why we quickly detect strange, abnormal or unexpected smells when we are in our daily environment, for example the smells of burning, rancid or any other foul smells which are perceived as alerts by our brain.

“As soon as there is something new in our environment it takes precedence over everything else. This is why, each of us is an expert in change in our own house” says Pamela Dalton to the British version of Yahoo . And this cognitive psychologist adds: “This is also why we notice the smell that emits the house or the apartment of a friend, but not that of our own accommodation”.

But rest assured, there are a few tips for finding a little “nose”. So first advice distilled by Pamela Dalton: if you miss your favorite perfume even though you wear it every day, you just have to stop putting it on for a few days to make your brain “forget” this smell….

To conclude : If you wish to test a perfume as professionnal do, be professionnal and follow our advices below :

1/ Never test perfume on your clothes or on your Skin (it can be done on skin in a shop to try a new fragrance just to buy it, but not in a laboratory to experiment).

2/ Take a carton stick, if you do not have please cut by yourself some stick paper and spray 3 times the perfume on this stick, smell it immediatelly to get the first notes, and to test the intensity, write the reference of the perfume on the stick and place it away from your noise, and every morning for example smell it again, to see if the olfactory notes stay on the stick and give an objective score from 1 to 10, and day after day you could have a curve, use excel table in case.

3/ If you compare for example a perfume that you have made and the orginal branded perfume, please use the similar concentration of oil in alcohol, example if a perfume is 15 % concentration you need to make the exact same concentration in alcohol with the perfume you created. This is important to compare the intensity of perfumes.

Fragrance and perfume are subjective, it means not factual, so perhaps you will regognize your behaviour after :

1/ Do not say, this perfume do not stay more than 24 or 48 hours on my clothes if you tested it on your body or clothes.
2/ Do not say, i washed my clothes and the perfume desapear, of course a perfume desapear when you wash clothes it depends of the washing powder you use, if the washing powder gets a smell also because it can react with the fragrance or kind of ingredients do this means nothing it is absolutely not factual at all …
3/ Do not say i compared this perfume and this oil, not factual because not same concentration.

So apply professionally and experiment and note with following table the intensity and the quality of one fragrance.
Table BD01 test you need to have also the offactive pyramid, it is better to recognize, each notes.

Note 0 : No smell at all
Note 1 : Fragrance totally desapears or very weak.
Note 2 : Smell weak rest of perfume, the perfume tested can not be really recognized.
Note 3 : Base notes are still here. Intensity weak for base notes.
Note 4 : Base are here and heart notes are here. Intensity weak for heart notes.
Note 5 : Average Intensity. Recognize the base notes and heart notes.
Note 6 : Base notes, heart notes are still strong and here but start to disapear.
Note 7 : Strong perfume due to its base notes only.
Note 8 : Very strong perfume due to their base and heart notes.
Note 9 : Perfume powerful and contrasted, rest of alcohol totally desapears.
Note 10 : Perfume powerful, head notes, heart notes and base notes are here, alcohol in case can be still here and reveal the perfume. The perfume is just sprayed, if alcohol is a really neutral odor.

You will obtain this kind of table then you can make a curve diagram (easy to make it with XSL files) :

1 day = note 10
2nd day = note 9
5th day = note 8
28th day = note 6
55th day = note 5
122th day = note 3

So consider when you spray 3 times on stick and pass the 100th day with a note of 5 minimum, it means that your perfume is strong enough on your clothes.

Also if you do not find it enough strong while you wear it on clothes you can spray one, 2 or more than 3 it will increase the concentration of oil on your clothes. The best way to be is to appreciate the delicatness of a fragrance.