Throughout my life, I’ve had my fair share of Proustian experiences: Aquolina Pink Sugar, for example, reminds me of middle school dances while Britney Spears’ Fantasy causes my stomach to turn in knots, the same feeling I had when I’d sneak into my older sister’s room to steal a few spritzes. On a less traumatic note, Leila Lou, a light, fruity scent from By Rosie Jane, teleports me to the fall of 2022 when I went to Paris for the very first time with two of my best friends.
Our olfactory system is powerful. But when we inundate it with the same, monotonous smells over and over, do we lose what makes them so special? I ask Dr. Murthy this, but he says there’s not exactly scientific evidence to back it up—he does, however, tell me about a broad concept called adaptation. “When you repeatedly experience something, then you start responding less and less to it in general,” he says. When it comes to scents, people can become desensitized if they’re exposed to the same thing over and over, which, in my opinion, makes dedicating yourself to a signature scent all the more dull.
“To me, it’s sort of like eating the same food every day,” says Dominique Astorino, a content creator based in Paris. “I would get sick of that.” Ironically, Astorino runs an Airbnb experience in the City of Love that’s advertised as an opportunity to “find your signature scent” at fragrance hotspots like Guerlain, Printemps Haussman, and Galeries Lafayette. But instead of zeroing in on a singular perfume, she says people often end up buying discovery sets—collections of mini vials that serve as a preview before investing in a full-size bottle—and are more interested in the shopping experience versus finding a fragrance they’ll wear forever.
“There’s something cool and chic about having a signature scent, but I think your signature scent can evolve or function as your anchor point of the rest of your [fragrance] wardrobe,” she says. Astorino has an all-time favorite scent—Safanad by Parfums de Marly—but since she has 150 perfumes, she “wears something different almost every day.”
Think of ditching your monotonous perfume routine as a sort of fragrance friction-maxxing. That is, making an effort to disrupt your tolerance for convenience, like reaching for the same ol’ perfume everyday without putting any thought into it. I’m not encouraging you to run out and purchase a roster of perfumes that end up collecting dust on your shelves, but broaden your horizons. Invest in a rotating cast of two or three, and start with a trial size before fully committing to a purchase. “You want to test a perfume in different environments, different climates,” Astorino says. “For women, you want to test it during all four weeks of your cycle because [hormones] impact your sense of scent.”
Explore other ways scents can mingle with each other—hair perfumes! Body oils! Solid perfumes! They can all join together to create a harmony of aromas that’s unique to you. If you’ve already committed to a lifelong partnership with a fragrance, like Allure’s senior beauty editor Jesa Marie Calaor has, try layering. She sprays DedCool Xtra Milk everywhere but her wrists, saving that space to experiment with other scents. “The base is always the same and feels inherently me, while my wrists are more experimental,” Calaor says. “It’s like the scent version of a mullet. Business in the front, party… near my hands.” If a fragrance mullet doesn’t entice you and you still want to stick to a single scent, so be it—when you hit the bottom of the bottle, though, maybe try to find something else to replace it with.
