Perfume and Cologne Guides

What is the best fashion style that suit me most?

Wearing a perfume is like mixing and matching your clothes, bags and shoes that requires a little bit of artistic sense in making the right decision. However, before you can put your artistic sense into mixing and matching your clothing, bags and shoes, you definitely need to know a little bit more about fashion styles and what is the best fashion style that suit you best before you can make a good choice or decision. Once you are aware and out your knowledge into use, you will be able to come up with different combination to represent different themes or moods that you would like to portray for different occasions. Selecting the correct perfume to go with your theme of the day is also very critical, if care is not taken to match it, you may be in for a big surprise.

The types of fashion style and color a person wear is very much related to the body shape and facial feature of the person. When care is not taken, having a wrong match is totally disastrous. Wearing perfumes is also the same, each and individual of us have a different body chemistry that reacts differently to different types of perfumes. If we choose the wrong fragrance to wear, the resultant chemistry between the body odor and the perfume may also be disastrous. Therefore, we need to know our own body chemistry and the different types of perfume and cologne in market in order for us to select the perfect scent for our theme.

So how do we differentiate between perfumes and know how they react will our body chemistry. Perfumes are classified under 4 main categories depending on the amount of fragrance oil essence concentration in the perfume. The most concentrated of all is the Parfum, the Parfum normally contains about 40% concentration of oil essence in the mixture. The next in line is the Eau de Parfum that has a concentration level of about 15% to 20% of oil essence in the mixture. The most commonly found perfume on the market id the Eau de Toilette that has a oil essence concentration of about 5% to 15% in the mixture. And the least concentrated of all is the Eau de Cologne that contain about 3% to 8% essence oil content in the perfume mixture. Different body chemistry is suitable for different types of perfume concentration, if you use the wrong perfume on a wrong day or body chemistry, you may turn peoples off from a mile away.

Therefore selecting the types of perfume to use on any day and must be suitable to your body type requires a lot of studies and trial. One good example is the perfume that is tested good on a cold chilly winter day is totally not suitable for use during the hot summer day as it may seem to be overpowering. The second factor that differentiate between perfumes is their Olfactive families. Although we may not be able to correctly classify a perfume base solely from their Olfactive families, however it will be a good starting point to get to know a perfume better. The classification of perfumes under their Olfactive families has been practiced for the past century since 1900.

The traditional classification separate the perfume into several main families and some of them is as follows;

1. Single Floral – perfume classified under this familiy often is dominated by a single flower scent.
2. Floral Bouquet – perfume classified under this family contains a mixtures of different types of flower scents.
3. Amber – is a huge class that contain a sweetness of animalic scents of ambergris or labdanum and is often mixed with vanilla, floral or woods.
4. Wood – perfumes that are dominated by woody scents such as sandalwood, cedar and agarwood.
5. Leather – perfumes that smell like leather normally presence in the middle or base notes of a perfume that contains scents of honey, tobacco, wood or wood tar.
6. Chypre – perfumes that contain fragrance from different family but group under a similar class because of the common scent that represent them.
7. Fougère – a class commonly found in the base note of a perfume that mainly forms from ferns like oakmoss, coumarin or lavender.

However through the years, the method used in the manufacturing of perfumes has progressed with technology and because of this in 1945 a new Olifactive Families classification of the perfumes is introduced.

1. Bright Floral – is a combination of the traditional single floral and floral bouquet families.
2. Green –  is a lighter and more modern represention of the traditional Chypre.
3. Acquatic, Oceanic or Ozonic – is the newest classification introduced that represent the modern scents of androgynous perfumes.
4. Citrus – is one fo the oldest classification used till today that often represent the freshness in a perfume through its fresh and non-tenacity citrus scents.
5. Fruity – used to describe perfumes that contain fruits other than those specified under the citrus family.  Normally fragrance that is fruity in nature is often perceive as a sweet scent.
6. Gourmand – describes scents like vanilla, tonka beans, etc that portray an edible like scents.

If you want to correctly differentiate a perfume from the different families, I suggest you get hold of a fragrance wheel that will assist you in determining the correct Olfactive families of the perfume and how they work with each other.  The third thing you should look at is the combination of the different Olfactive families within a perfume itself.  The correct description of a perfume is often related to the way a perfume react and linger on your body that often happen in three stages.  The three stages of head, heart and drydown are represent in the fragrance as the top note, middle or heart note and the base note.  How a perfume perform when applied depends greatly on the mixtures contain with each notes.  And it takes a lot of the skill of the perfume designer to come up with a perfect formulae that represent the uniqueness of individual perfumes.

After reading this articles, you should be able to differentiate between perfumes and understand the mechanics that determine the uniqueness of a perfume and will be able to select the perfume that suit you most.  I hope that through this article, I have answered your question on how to differentiate between perfumes and able to provide you with the relevant references for you to continue to advance in your knowledge on perfumes and colognes.