Wearing Your Scent
You’ve found a scent you love. What’s next? Let’s dig into how you should be wearing your scent.
Believe it or not, there are clear do’s and don’t regarding how you should be wearing your scent to maximize its efficacy. These rules apply across genders.
Do’s
Moisturize. A key part in a scent’s pungency and how it wears is your skin’s pH balance and the degree of moisture in your skin. The drier your skin, the more likely your scent is to fade faster. That said always apply a cream or lotion to wherever you’ll be applying perfume beforehand if you’re seeking longer wear.
Spray on pulse points. While everyone is different, there are a few commonalities we share in terms of pulse points, places on our bodies where we emanate heat most. Heat helps activate the scent and push it off your body so that you have a scent aura surrounding you. These include: the neck, wrists, chest, inner elbow, behind the ears, and behind the knees. This is also how you can adjust intensity of your aura. If you want a scent to enter loudly or linger, you can spray on several pulse points. Conversely if you want the scent to be lighter you can apply to fewer or one pulse point.
Don’ts
Rub your wrists. Many people believe they should rub their wrists after spraying their perfume, but this is big don’t. Rubbing morphs how the perfume’s enzymes interact with your skin’s oils, which can yield a completely different smell as well as duller top notes.
Mist into the air. Perfume is meant to adhere to your skin and doesn’t do as good of a job attaching to other surfaces, so as a result you’re likely wasting your perfume in addition to capturing a very ephemeral smell.
Spray onto your clothes. For the same line of logic as the above, it’s not going to do anything for you, and you’ll be wasting your precious spray. Additionally, perfumes or colognes that are more oil-based can also leave difficult to remove stains on your clothing, (especially if they’re white) and affect the texture of your clothing, especially if natural fibers (e.g. cotton, wool, etc.)
Spray into your hair. Whether it’s a perfume or eau fraiche, alcohol is a considerable ingredient in almost every perfume. Alcohol is known for its drying properties and is often found in concentrations that are overly drying for hair, damaging the moisture layer protecting your cuticle. If you do want your hair to smell nice, opt specifically for a hair perfume, which is going to be formulated with a more tolerable alcohol-to-fragrance ratio.
