The actual popularity of fragrances - Page 2

I think you're right. I encounter very few people who seem to wear fragrance anymore, maybe 1/10 as you suggest. I do smell fragrance on more women than men, but among my women friends that I meet casually I am usually the only one in a group of seven perhaps who wears fragrance on an everyday basis. When I smell a fragrance on anyone I'm so pleased, even if it is one I don't care for. A family friend had us for dinner a while back, and he smelled so good BECAUSE he was wearing a fragrance. I asked him what it was, and he went to get it to show me: it was Armani Acqua di Gio. He smelled great. How nice that he used it liberally. And yes, I agree that fragrance wearing seems more commonplace among us here on Basenotes because we are all obsessed with it. Out there, not so commonplace. But then if that's true how do we account for so many releases? Somebody has to be wearing the stuff. Even in the evening when people are going out to social events I don't often smell perfumes in the air. Everyone is so frightened of smelling like anything at all, I think. Then, I thought perhaps it is rather that I don't perceive all the fragrances people are wearing because, 1) I can't smell theirs through my own, and 2) my sense of smell is diminishing with age. I'm going to pay more attention to this now as I go out and about.

I must agree. I also reside in NYC and it is quite uncommon for me to run into some else, who is wearing a fragrance or at least a noticeable fragrance. It is always the same persons who are known to me as fragrance users who I smell with fragrances. And I work in a very, very busy court house where thousands of persons enter and leave each week. Rarely do I come across someone who catches my attention due to their scent. I am proud to say that I am not one of those persons. I proudly hold my chin up high, shoulders squared back, and spray 3-4 squirts of my SOTD. I'm proud to be a member of the frag community. Hail to the fragheads.

Even 1/10th of the population is still a lot of customers...

most of my friends wear fragrance, but in very small doses and not every day. It's very precious to them because they don't have 6 litres of it!

True. And some of the people around here could single-handedly keep a small niche firm in business.

I live in one of the most newly-trendy ( think lots of younger Californians moving here) cities in the country, and I rarely if ever smell anyone wearing scent as part of their daily life. If I get a whiff of a woman wearing something, it's a major occurrence. Granted the local Macy's has counters that serve both men and women, but trendyness implies materialism as well, and I suspect people buy scent because it's one more thing a person "should" have....more than because they actually will find themselves wearing it.




This is certainly the truth, and speaks to the phenomenon of young people being...."more into themselves" if you will.

As part of my other life, I'm a member of a fairly alternative social web network, where I take care of some of the mental health boards they have there. Of a community of several tens of thousands of international members, I'm probably among the 20 or so guys in their 60's who are on the site. And I can confirm that younger people are, simply as a part of their natural developmental process, more concerned with issues of self-identity than older people ( who are still concerned with such things) usually are.

This should be no surprise, since establishing a self-identity is something that every human does, and the time when that process serves a person most is during their younger years. How many layers of tattoos does it take today before a person has established a proper self-identity ? It should not take any at all to be truthful, but if one were to take a wild guess as to what age group self-identifying activities like this have always appealed to ( all current fashion aside ) I suspect most people would agree that it's the more youthful members of just about every society.

To be honest, I'd be worried if youthful individuals were not working at establishing a personal identity, even if obnoxious labels are often applied to what is, in truth, a quite natural human process.

Women - most
Men - rarely

I rarely notice a fragrance on someone and when I do it is usually someone at work (wearing a classic Guerlain) or my eighteen-year-old nephew (wearing Bleu de Chanel). People also very rarely comment on my fragrance, although nowadays I am always wearing something. I think this is largely cultural: public taste around here definitely tends towards the discrete and the classical, so it is hard to say how many are not wearing fragrances at all and how many are just wearing them at non-detectible levels.

^ the most interesting man in the world.

Given the veritable flood of new fragrances and totally new lines of fragrances, the impression one gets is that more and more people must be wearing fragrance ( and be willing to pay high prices to boot ).

I'm not sure I notice that trend here in my town, but could it really be true ?

Perhaps it's all happening in "emerging markets" and that's who's absorbing the landslide of new products ?

Out of my crew (early 20s guys) besides me only one other dude wears them and that's cause I gave them to him as a gift (Chrome and Lacoste L12.12 White). In the office I've smelled cologne on one or two old timers (and it was one of them old school ones). On some of the younger men a few of them I have noticed use some light citrusy ones. That's it for the men. Women obvs are way more prevalently scented.

In my part of world, I haven't encountered a lot men wearing perfumes (deodorant doesn't count). However, a lot of women do wear perfumes, maybe 6 out of 10?

Very rarely smell fragrances on others to be honest. That is why I am breaking that trend wearing fragrance everyday!

travelling on buses and trains, movie theatres, at work and in the street, being Milan, Rome and everywhere scent people are very few, when I enter a scent shop or dept store and talk scents with SA it's like being someone who's just come out of a flying saucer!