The Madness to My Method -- Part One

So since I've gotten a little more serious about reviewing perfume, I thought I'd talk a little about my process and what you will and won't see here. Since this turned into a seriously long document, I'm going to do it a piece at a time.

1. How I test/review a perfume.

I always start with clean dry skin that I've moisturized with unscented lotion. After giving the bottle a sniff, I put a small amount on, either on my wrist or on the inside of my elbow. I'll sniff it right away and then let it dry down. After that, I'll give it a sniff at five minutes, ten minutes and twenty minutes in. If it's still morphing after twenty minutes, I'll come back to it at thirty minutes. I'll keep notes during the process and then after about twenty minutes to a half hour, I'll note the staying power (unless it started fading early) and the throw, with the caveat that the throw won't be as big as it would if I were wearing it to go out.

The review write up changes a lot depending on a couple of factors. If I'm reviewing something for both this blog and a community or forum, I'll try to use the community/forum review guidelines. Given my druthers, I'd rather not use a guideline/standard form type thing because perfumes can vary so wildly. If I'm reviewing a single/layering note then I'm concerned with the way it smells both by itself and layered. And with a simple two or three note perfume (Possets' awesome Girls Love Vanilla is a perfect example) there's often no real difference between how it smells at five minutes and how it smells at twenty. On the other hand, the more complex blends do morph quite a bit during that initial half hour and so I tend to get a little more into the timeline involved.

Finally, I'll occasionally wander off into the land of memory because, scent is such a powerful trigger. I like to think that stories and such like provide a personal note and are entertaining.