How to Test a Perfume Properly, and Why the Paper Strip Lies

The paper strip tells you about the first five minutes of a perfume. You'll be wearing it for the next eight hours. That gap is why so many bottles bought in a hurry end up at the back of a drawer.

Testing fragrance properly isn't complicated. It's mostly a matter of slowing down, and of knowing what the strip can and can't tell you.

What the paper strip is good for

Blotters have one real job, which is elimination. Paper shows you the top notes cleanly, so a strip is a fast way to discover that you dislike something. If a fragrance is unpleasant on paper it won't redeem itself on your wrist. Use strips to cut a shelf of twenty down to two or three.

That's where their usefulness ends. Paper has no warmth, no oils and no chemistry. It flattens a perfume into a single impression and holds it there, which is nothing like what happens on a living person.

Why skin changes everything

On skin a fragrance moves. Your body heat drives it through its stages, your natural oils hold some notes and release others, and the result after an hour can be startlingly different from the strip. The same perfume can turn sweeter on one person and sharper on another.

This is also where you meet the part you'll actually live with. The opening lasts minutes. The heart lasts an hour or two. The base, the slow woods and musks underneath, is what you'll smell all afternoon. Buying on the opening is like choosing a film from its first scene.

The method that works

• Shortlist on paper. Smell no more than four or five strips in a visit. After that your nose stops giving reliable answers.
• Put one finalist on skin. One fragrance per arm at the very most. Clean skin with no scented lotion underneath.
• Don't rub your wrists together. It bruises the opening and hurries the top notes away.
• Leave the shop. This is the step everyone skips. Walk around, have lunch, and smell your wrist again at thirty minutes, at two hours and at the end of the day.
• Decide tomorrow. If you still want it the next morning, that's a real answer.

And ignore the jar of coffee beans on the counter. There's no good evidence it resets anything. Smelling your own unscented sleeve or stepping outside for fresh air works better.

What if you can't test it at all?

Buying online removes the counter entirely, and it's fair to say that's a real limitation. You can't smell a web page. What you can do is read the notes with a clearer eye. Look at the base rather than the top, because the base is what stays. Look for texture words such as powdery, creamy, dry or resinous, which tell you more than a list of flowers. And check whether the house describes how the fragrance behaves, not only what's in it.

Knowing a few materials helps enormously. Once you can picture what musk smells like or what woody accords means, a note list stops being poetry and starts being information.

Testing Prima

Prima is sold online, so we try to describe it the way we'd want a fragrance described to us. It's a skin scent: musk and mimosa at the top, sesame in the heart, woody accords and rice in the base. It opens powdery and clean, warms into something dry and nutty, and settles close to the skin. Give it the full half hour before you judge it, because the soft base is the whole point of the eau de parfum and it's the last thing to arrive.

A perfume is a day-long relationship. Audition it for a day.