I don't think I can keep it up

Alba,
Samples can become expensive, but they and decants are definitely the way to go, especially if you are going to limit yourself to certain perfumers or houses. As far as the perfumer route, I'd hesitate to do that, but perhaps it makes sense for you. I think by house is a good approach because it may help control for quality (both ingredients and perfumer and marketting expenses could be kept under control, generating a consistently better product).

Another option is to keep up to date occasionally (like once or twice a year). Choose a new perfume or two or three, wear those for a year or two, then choose other modern ones that you think are more suitable, wear those for a year or two, etc. You don't need to sniff every single thing out there! Most of the time, it's not worth the chase. I've beent there more times than I can count!

Are you near a shopping mall with a store that carries more than the usual designer fragrances? I pass a mall on my way home, and I'll detour once a week or so to stop by the Sephora. (It's across the aisle from a side entrance, so I don't waste time getting distracted by other stores). I've been able to sample various Hermés, Aqua Allegoria, and most of the current designer scents on the planet. The SAs are really nice about decanting free samples (picked up a spray vial of CK Secret Obsession yesterday after spritzing myself with Caléche). It's adds about 20 minutes to my commute, but the grocery is across the street from the mall, so it doesn't often seem like much trouble (and aren't I the best smelling thing in the produce department!). Niche scents are admittedly harder to come by. My closest Neiman Marcus and Barneys are almost an hour away!

Not even people like Luca Turin can keep up! I think it is important to make yourself a gameplan: choose specific styles, noses, houses you want to systematically explore, read all you can about them, then buy samples or decants or try watever you can in stores. Don't get into believing you're missing out on stuff you're not trying, focus on the pleasure of what you ARE experiencing. This is supposed to be fun after all, not hard labor

I have never had a problem keeping it up. Sorry you left the door wide open for that one.

I posted a similar topic awhile back and received some good comments/advice. Essentially, what I got from the overall response is that we have to approach this whole scent journey in our own way. We will never be able to sample everything, anyway. So sample what you reasonably can, read BN for comments and reviews on scents you have not tried, and above all, enjoy yourself.

That's really good advice. I too suffer from the illusion that I should try to keep up, but recently every time I check my inbox I have another notification from NST that there is yet another new niche house with 5 fragrances to start, or another flanker being launched, etc...It's overwhelming! And I haven't even sniffed most of the 'classics' that are still available! ^_^

I've personally hit a point where I just wait for things to fall in my lap. My bag of samples "to try" has gotten a bit unwieldy. Of course, I ADORE samples. But that's because I tend to wear my scents very sparingly. Big spray bottles make me nervous

Swapping is a really good way to get exposure to scents you didn't even know existed or wouldn't think of trying, though I don't know how easy it is from your neck of the woods.

No good suggestions from me, I'm afraid... I love samples too, and if I didn't explore that way, I wouldn't be able to have this hobby at all - I literally couldn't afford it!

Personally I love the fact that I'll never be able to keep up. It means there is always more to explore.

Yes! The thrill of the hunt. The promise of an undiscovered beauty!!! I think it's akin to hope...the thing that keeps us going.

Give yourself three or four categories that you like.
Buy one fragrance in each category.
Rotate new fragrances in and out of each category.
That's what I'm doing.

I don't think you can keep up and it's not even worth trying. Going with the flow is hard though when you feel that there could be that ONE gem you might be missing amongst all the hum-drum or downright awful stuff. My advice is to try and accept that just like it's not possible to read every book ever published in one lifetime, it's not possible to keep up with all perfumes and scents. That's why places like Basenotes become invaluable because you can follow leads based on our discussions, chat about fragrance families you like and read the reviews. You get a very good sense of what's worth hunting down, even if it's just to explore it and declare it not for you.

I've approached sampling in an idiosyncratic way. I am curious after reading an especially well-written review on the blogs, after several mentions on BN. I will always test new fragrances from houses that I like: Guerlain, Parfum d'Empire, Parfumerie Generale, Ava Luxe, to name a few. I am drawn to specific notes: mention musk, amber to me and I will pursue. I don't have the inclination to be thorough; that would be a full-time job. Relax and have fun!

Well, over the last five months or so, I had very little time for this hobby, therefor I missed almost all new releases.

After things had calmed down a bit I did some backtracking on Basenotes to see what was hot and worth trying according to the noses here, but forty something samples later I can safely say that I didn't missed anything at all.

I'm at the point that I have become very suspicious of the word 'niche', for as far as I'm concerned it has become not much more than just another marketing ploy. Overpriced pseudo exclusiveness, which in reality is just about as boring as their mainstream counterpart - the designer frag.

I do hope next year will be better and that the bizz get's it's act together, else I save my money for other things. Simple as that.

Part of the problem of "keeping up" is purely one of perception. If we were back in the Middle Ages, and had the luxury of spending income on fragrances, there would only be a small number of people within the king's realm who were producing them. Now we have over 6 billion people on the planet, and if one of them does something unusual, the Internet is going to ensure that you hear about it. The fragrance world is a subset of this, of course. Noses all over the world are making new juice, and BN makes sure you find out when they are all being released. So it's inevitable that people will feel overwhelmed.

It's easier to deal with if you put a positive spin on it. Since so many new fragrances come out all the time, you can afford to be really selective. And the fragrance houses make it easier for you by mostly coming out with mediocre product. It's only occasionally that a house comes out with a real winner, if ever. Since I don't have a lot of free time to run around and sample fragrances, I have started ordering a lot more samples through the mail. Then I can just test them at my leisure. This allows me to avoid parking problems and running a gauntlet of aggressive SAs.

But I've also learned it's important to not use the act of purchasing a fragrance as some sort of catharsis or psychological release, because then I'd be spending several hundred dollars per month on fragrances (which I cannot really justify). So I've learned to take a very long time to make decisions about a purchase. For example, it took me about 2 months to finally decide between Annick Goutal Sables and Andy Tauer L'Air du Désert Marocain, and I'm still trying to settle on a vetiver fragrance after over 3 months of sampling them.

Once one can make peace with an infuriatingly slow schedule like that, it all gets easier. The fragrances you don't have time to sample today will still be there tomorrow; there's no rush. Just let them sit in the queue for a while, sample them at your leisure, and never feel compelled to buy a full bottle. And because of BN, you can think of purchasing a full bottle as a little like buying a car ... it has resale value if you decide to drive something else. And in the case of a bottle of fragrance, you can always decant part of it away and recoup some of your expenditure for another purchase.

This sounds like a good framework for fragrance sanity. I just might try it! Thanks, Purplebird.

Thanks, yeah, it works for me.
And to satisfy those cravings for trying new things, I buy samples frequently.
I use the samples fully instead of collecting them. And I use my bottles fully instead of hoarding them for years. Everything stays fresh. And I don't have thousands of dollars tied up in perfume.

Ah, the good old days when fewer releases meant an extended and excited dialogue with lots of participants! Remember when Chene came down the pike? Remember how a new Lutens release seemed like a release from the banality of "commercial" fragrances and how eagerly anticipated they were?

There is an analogy to be drawn here, to the music business. Bands would release an album every few years, not hurry to market or iTunes, and there was a slow, torturous build-up to the release date and the single--and then the big concert tour; this process went on for months on end. And then you turned on the radio and there it was--Brown Sugar--wasn't that worth waiting for? The Stones are still kings, ladies and gentleman, even after Let It Bleed and Beggars Banquet.

And we talked about that song and while we talked we burned the grooves clear through to the felt of the turntable.

The world of perfume, of the perfume fan, felt a little like this, before houses we had never heard of opened their doors for business and created not desire but confusion, not long lines but short memories. And we are the poorer for it, in a way, because chances are many of us haven't tried that esoteric scent and won't; where there isn't much advance hype (the drumbeats are faint in the distance) there also isn't a shared experience and a good group discussion.

I gave up on buying samples. It's more fun to wait until someone tosses a vial or two your way; I have enough tropical florals to satisfy Dolores del Rio in the old "Road to..." movies and can wait for that tuberose that only one or two people have discussed, very subjectively.

I´m so struggling with all of this, I completely understand it but I find it so hard to use samples instead of saving them are a reference. And I still stop using a perfume if my bottle goes half empty

I do like surprises, often the samples I get as an extra turn out to be better than what I originally swapped for :/

I'm also feeling vaguely overwhelmed by my shiny new perfume hobby - it somehow shifted from sheer fun to something else while I wasn't looking. I've been overthinking why. (The extent of the overthinking should be clear from the length of this post. But coming from a family of hoarder types, I think that a fair bit of thinking on issues of acquisition and use of possessions is worth the time investment.)

Samples, for example. I always really really want to buy them, and I put time into begging for free ones from perfume houses and stores, but when I have them and I put them in the sample bucket, I'm irritated at how many I have. So I clearly have too many.

And cheap bottles. I was late to the discovery that, hey, designer fragrances are _really deeply discounted_ most of the time! And, wow, sometimes they make minis! I realize that everybody else already knew this, but I started at the niche end and then started exploring the designer fragrances, instead of the other way around, so the world of discounts and minis and gift sets is relatively new to me.

And, of course, there's the infinity of fragrances that I don't have time to smell. I make sniff lists, divided by brands that the stores might carry. This was fun when I started, but now when I get to a store, especially one of the rare stores that carry niche fragrances, I feel so pressured to sniff what I really wanted to sniff, that it's not fun.

And perfume hunting obsession. Every single time the SO and I go somewhere that has perfume, even a rather dull fragrance department that I know from experience has nothing new or interesting, I insist on going to sniff things. This annoys him.

All this means that I've been buying too much and I want to buy too much and I'm not having enough fun with it even as I'm spending too much time and energy and money on it. Right now, I have about twenty-two bottles-and-minis, six solids, six or seven decants, and probably a hundred samples, so "too much" isn't out of control yet. But all but about five of the bottles-and-minis and all of the solids and decants and samples were purchased in the last six months or so, and I'm accelerating.

So I need to stop. I'm not quite sure how to stop, but my experience is that I respond well to personally-imposed Control Freak rules. And my recollection is that some of the fun of the perfume hobby is based on scarcity - when I have plenty of stuff, I'm not happier, I just want even more, plus I feel guilty. When I very rarely get anything new, each new thing is a fun shiny toy. So my new rules are:

- Until the sample backlog is drastically reduced to, say, ten pending samples, samples will get exactly one skin test. (Or whatever you call it when you dot on just a bit to get first impressions.) After that, I'll actually put on enough to wear, usually using up the sample in one to two wearings, or give the thing away. Something about all those "maybe; try again" samples makes me feel overwhelmed.

- I'll narrow my purchased samples to Houses Of Interest. Right now, that's Guerlain classic pure parfums, Perfumerie Generale, and CB I Hate Perfume. I will avert my eyes from Tauer and all the other things that sound so delightful until I feel that I know what I want to know about these categories.

- Control Freak Budgeting. If I budget by dollars or don't formally budget at all, I tend to get a bunch of fun cheap junk and get overwhelmed and don't enjoy any of them much. If I budget purely by items, as in one bottle per some interval, I can of course spend an infinite amount of money.

So I'm thinking of allowing myself one full bottle every three months, at a maximum price of...well, I'm not sure, but I'll set a price that can support many, if not all, of the niche brands. The rule is that I get only _one_ bottle, I can't divide that budget into several bottles. And I have to get the smallest full bottle available. This should, hopefully, drive me to buy the one bottle that I really want and will wear.

And every month, I'll permit myself one very modest-priced sample order of one to five samples, where small decants or small minis count as samples but even one will generally blow most or all of the month's sample budget

None of these budget restrictions will apply to gift money or gifts or other small frivolous windfalls.

I think that this should re-introduce the scarcity that makes every new acquisition shiny and fun. And, of course, avoid that whole Going Broke thing.

- In-Store Sniffing. I'm seriously thinking of doing in-store sniffing only when I'm out alone, to stop annoying the SO. But that's rare enough that I'm not sure if it's going to work.

- Sample Days. Sample testing will happen only on Mondays and Tuesday. Yes, this is totally control-freakish, but now I find myself dithering between wearing something I already love, or knocking off one from the sample backlog. By introducing artificial scarcity, I think I'll look forward to Monday and Tuesday sample days, and I'll enjoy having the "sample or not?" decision taken away on other days.

Crayfish

Agree, it is not necessary to sample everything. What is important is that you find what suits your own taste and style and go in that direction.

I have never tried to keep up with the constant barrage of new scents and I freely admit there are whole lines I haven't bothered trying. I am content trying the occasional news scent and reading the reviews here at BN or at NST blog. Frequently when I do get to try a new line everyone else has moved on to the next excitement.

I do chase after vintage scents though.

Some of you may be teetering on collecting or cluttering which can be a symptom of depression. This can be especially noticable in the winter. I am a hypnotist and I work with people who have had those issues come out in just about any kind of hobby and steal the joy of the hobby.

I am a control freak and find I enjoy a hobby more if I have constraints so I have a tight budget on my purchases, I don't buy more than 5 samples at a time and I do use up my bottles. That is actually the hardest one for me - Like Lian, I want to stop using the stuff once it is half gone. I use basenotes to read all your reviews before I try something and really, if it isn't going to be the next L'heure Bleu for me... just how badly do I need to try it?

Seriously? Don't try. Unless it's paramount to you to be 'up' on all the new stuff, for some reason, then just go with what you like, in your own time and in your own way, subject to your own pocket. Keeping up? That way lies madness...

:-)

I seem to be (accidentally, rather than in any formal or intelligent way!) doing exactly this. In the time I've been on Basenotes, my wardrobe has grown exponentially. And I've had to call a halt. Partly for financial reasons, but mostly because I became unable to actually appreciate and wear all my fragrances. I've discovered which ones will always be my most popular ones (those bottles are nearly empty and flagging up for replacement) and the ones I only wear for 'special occasions' or if I really have no clue what I feel like wearing, so close my eyes and play 'ib dib'.

There are still some fragrances I'm very keen to try, but the anticipation of one day owning them keeps me going. In the meantime, I enjoy experimenting with layering if I get REALLY bored with my wardrobe.

I agree Clemmie. I am not in a financial position to have everything I might ever want to try on, but even if I were, I'm really not able to appreciate fragrances on such a casual basis. I need (for right now anyway) to spend more time with the ones I do love and really get to know them before replacing them with others. I am in awe of those of you who can try so many things and write such intelligent reviews but I can't take on that part of the hobby ...yet.

Thanks to the threadstarter who made me stop and think about this.

This thread so speaks to me. I identify with a lot of what you all posted above.

Such as. . .



And lots of others, but mainly these.

I guess I never thought about it like that. I guess to me it's more like having an endlessly restocked buffet to choose from. I don't have to be in any rush, I can pick and choose and just because I try one thing doesn't mean I won't be able to try something else later. Why not just approach it a bit less structured? What's the worst that's going to happen? You won't be able to sniff something? You're never going to be able to taste every great dish, eat in every great restaurant, drink every great wine or hear every great concert. If you're always worrying about what you may miss, you'll forget to enjoy the things that come your way.

..........Any ideas on how to keep up-to-date without risking bankruptcy?

Yeah. You'll never get it perfect and you'll never get it done, so stop and have some fun along the way. Most of them aren't any good to begin with. Be discerning. Keep sampling a few. Buy a bottle every now and then.

And most of all, appreciate what you have, and quit making such a big deal out of all of it. Life is supposed to be fun.

I feel like one of the few who have yet to order samples from places like TPC, though there are definitely plenty I'd love to try that I don't have access to!
Since I've taken a more active interest in fragrances, I have, at times, found myself a bit overwhelmed... once I find one I like, I'm like... but what if it could be BETTER? And I'm on the hunt for the ultimate -- something that will really dazzle and inspire me.
But I've found that what works for me and inspires me at any moment in time could be drastically different the next. You have to kind of just let it come to you. I say do your research, familiarize yourself with the notes and noses you like and that are good quality... maybe even compile a list of things you may come across in passing that pique your interest... BUT SET IT ASIDE. Basenotes is a great community for input on narrowing down the market and being informed, especially when you're going into a department store with a lot of choices. I have been lucky enough to have been able to take advantage of my shopping. Shops like Aedes will include up to 7 samples with your order of your choosing, so you can really take advantage of that. Beautyhabit will even throw in I think 3 as well... so there's definitely ways to acquire samples along the way without breaking the bank. So far it's worked for me. And taking a step back from your collection, you can find you appreciate the ones you already own in very different ways.

I understand what you are saying, but let's keepn in mind that you have to do it as a pleasurable hobby, with a laid back attitude, come what may.
We don't have to catch up or keep it up, nobody does (have to), there will always be new and exciting scents but it's best to go along the world of perfumery as a scented road with a odd bumps, going places and discovering things and feelings you thought you didn't have and opening a world of possibilities whenever a great scent comes your way and you spray and transport to that world of dreams.

If you are afraid of risking bankruptcy then just don't buy any new scents but keep going to stores and sample new and/or old scents just for the fun of it, or if it's too much temptation then don't go to any stores and cherish the ones you have with each spray or dabble.

If you use the ones you have you may feel even more attached to them after you finish them and then can go back to new ones -in time- and remember the "old" ones with more admiration or love.

remember that it's not a race, it's a way of life.

cheers

Excellent advice- this is indeed a confusing hobby but it should always remain a pleasure! It's easy to get caught up in a search for 'the one', that ultimate perfume that you adore completely. And in this search you can forget your current collection, e.g acquisition becomes more important than actually owning. So when your budget is sparse, get out all the perfumes you own- there will be some favourites you've forgotten. Also, I find getting the occasional one I REALLY want makes it feel like a special treat. Make sure your loved ones have access to your wish list around birthday/Xmas time!

I'm having fun so far, and it's certainly pleasant to have a bunch of samples - I have daughters so nothing will go to waste, I ask even the littles if they'd like a smell and let them choose from the samples, sometimes we dump out a little box of them (I'm keeping them in small cardboard boxes, like from eye cream for example, inside "the box" that holds the perfume.)

But for budget guidelines, I have a waiting period, like for handguns, so if I want a sample of something the first thing I do is write down the name of it. If I still want it two weeks or a month later (but no less than two weeks) I order it then. For full bottles same thing, plus ultimate limit of 12 bottles at any one time, which I am not actually close to, but will not cross...No more than 12 pairs of shoes for me, no more than 12 bottles of perfume, I think (not counting my one backup bottle in the closet) And I want them to be Actively Worn. Since those are the items I spend more on and want best quality for me. No limit on # of samples but I do want to try them and give away any I am really not interested in, instead of holding onto them like I have been doing so far, and kind of don't want so many that I need a big complicated system of filing them.

I am not by nature a collecting person, and never actually thought about trying to smell everything in the world, not worried about that at all - I want to smell enough to be educated, want to have enough for variety, and wear some every day so that there is turnover in the collection.

Well this got long but:
Waiting period before buying anything, even samples
Limits on # of full bottles in wardrobe
USING the perfumes and enjoying them

are my guidelines for control.

I am a collecting person, I will have to be careful! And basenotes is a dangerous site!

I don't think one should even try to keep up to date. I went to a shop yesterday and tried four new (ones I haven't sniffed yet) fragrances and liked neither of them. It was just for fun, but if you want to do serious research I suggest you find out what kind of fragrances you actually like, and then focus on those notes, or styles.