How do you rate longevity and when does a fragrance lose its identity?

I decided today that i would be making a change in how i rate longevity. I wrote a blog about how i see weak fragrances recently and it seems to have made a change in how some people see weak projecting and short lasting fragrances and even inspired someone to rethink things and write a blog about it. Thanks for the mention :) They are to the right of me on the homepage go check it out. Click the homepage icon and scroll down. You will see new blogs by others and this one there. I think at this time of year people will have longevity on their mind as we reach for the fresher fragrances as we are leaving spring and entering summer, depending on your location of course. Enjoy your winter frags Australia :) 

If you are thinking, wait didn't i read a blog you wrote a few hours ago about this same topic? Then yes you did. Don't worry you are not going mad. I was, with the editing problem of this site lol. I realised my wording was not great in my first edit and changed it up quite a bit because when i read it back i realised even i found it hard to understand what i was trying to get across so i changed it up and when i clicked publish, poof! it was gone. I was stuck with the prior version so i deleted it and started again. Thank you for reading again lol. i hope it is easier to understand this time.

So, i have spoke about projection in another blog and now i am on to longevity and how i will be rating it in the future. You see before i would rate longevity with top scores as long as you could smell even a single note 24+rs later. Forget that the fragrance lost its identity hours ago and now smells like numerous other fragrances with similar notes when they reach their drydown stage also. Oh and it also became a skin scent "How long ago?" as you look at your watch realising you only sprayed an hour or so ago after you first sprayed it.

Linear fragrances are going to probably do well because they don't change very much even in drydown but what about fragrances that do change with time, how will i rate that? Well if i have a fragrance that lasts 10hrs and in the first 3hrs there were several different stages then after that, it has one linear stage but i still can identify that stage with the fragrance that i am wearing and it is still projecting like mad, or decently enough, top marks from me for sure.

If i get a fragrance however that again is non linear, starts off really strong, really nice with a few different stages but suddenly 2 hours later this fragrance has for example a strong chocolate patchouli in it and all the other beautiful notes except patchouli are gone and now it smells like numerous other fragrances with patchouli in it and it is a skin scent, then that fragrance has lost its identity. So, i have two options. 1, i respray to bring back the ability to smell that products DNA, bring back what makes it unique from everything else, its essence, that or i simply wear something else. If that happens within 2 hours that is poor longevity, i don't care if someone says "but you can still smell the patchouli from it for another 24hrs" it has lost its identity and if i want to smell like patchouli for 24hrs i will buy patchouli oil. Nope from now on longevity will be voted for the amount of time i can smell that fragrance and still identify what i am smelling. 

If it smells great for that first hour or two i will give the scent a 10/10, if this fragrance that i have smelled nothing like it before blows my mind away, i am in heaven this is like smelling my first fragrance again and better, i will give it 10/10 for scent no problem whatsoever even if it was linear BUT if that fragrance suddenly after 30mins becomes a skin scent and all the notes but a select few that when combined smell like a million other fragrances that end up smelling the exact same in their drydown  and this fragrance costs let's say .... £800 do you want someone to say this £800 fragrance that smells amazing lasts 24hrs but they forget that the good part only lasted 30 minutes and the other 23hrs 30 minutes smells like the dry down of numerous, numerous other £20 fragrances how should the longevity be rated? 

I will be rating fragrances for as long as i can identify the product without needing to respray it again and that includes if i can't smell it without having to force my wrist against my nose and take a deep inhale through my nose to get a couple of notes slightly resembling the orgasmic smell i had just 10 minutes prior because that's how i would want other people to rate a fragrance for me. When rating a fragrance we need to be doing it not just for ourselves to make us feel better about our crazy amount of money we spent to make us feel better because we didn't bother to order an expensive sample to try it out first. No we should be letting others know what to expect or otherwise we end up with what is called confirmation bias and that is not a good thing at all.

I wore a fragrance the other week to sample and in the drydown after only a few hours it had smelled like at least 2 other fragrances i own and i could smell it the following day still smelling of another fragrance i own, the smell that next day happened to smell of a clone of another  fragrance that i own and i could have just sprayed the clone on top of it the day prior when it reached that stage and nobody would have been the wiser that i had actually been wearing something that smelled so different for the first 2hrs and i loved it but to test longevity i didn't do a respray and you know what i gave that fragrance that smelled like a cheap nasty clone the following day? 10/10 for longevity, it was a skin scent the prior day for so many hours but it lost its beauty  2 hours in to the experience. To me that is not good longevity. If i wore it today after this change in how i see the way i will be rating things i would give it a 2/10 because that was how long the actual smell of the fragrance lasted, 2 hours! What i experienced onwards was just some left over notes that happen to last longer than the others, but i don't believe their intention was to smell like a £20 clone of another fragrance for the rest of its lifetime. I also should say i gave that fragrance a 10/10 for scent because it did smell beautiful for the time i experienced all the notes present.

Flankers will obviously get a break if they are indeed intended to smell alike but when different brands end up with fragrances that smell exactly the same as one another after an hour then imo a respray is needed to bring back its identity and sure some may overlap here and there but as long as it's not for hours smelling the exact same as some other brands product and is projecting well then i can cut that some slack.

So how about you? How do you rate longevity? How would you like my ratings to be? Would you like me to revert back to the ability to smell a single note for 24hrs resulting in a 10/10 rating or is my new system letting you know how long the intended scent lasted being scored highly or lowly on how long that lasted for being a more useful rating system to you?  

Yes i know each fragrance is subjective but the majority of us smell something very similar to each other unless we have a very different skin type but generally speaking we are able to give people a basic understanding of what to expect. What also helps is if you have the ability to share your batch code and where you got it from in case there are weak batches going around. I experienced this recently with a discontinued fragrance that suddenly appeared in a high street store of all places, and in a sale to top it off. That fragrance is meant to last hours. Mine lasts 2 hours then vanishes completely. In fact i will name it and see if it shocks some of you. It is Aqua De Gio Profumo. The store i got it from usually sells things that when batch checked were created just a month or 2 ago. The discontinued fragrance was made last November. So batch codes help. That's why i like the statement section on this website. Nobody needs to feel pressured to do a full review, they can leave a statement warning others. 

I would be interested to hear other peoples rating systems in the replies and just how important a rating is to everyone. I find it helpful when people let you know if there are weak batches going around and from which store so i know to wait a little or try find it somewhere else but when i see a huge difference between ratings causing the controversial warning on some of the fragrance pages on here it makes me wary of a product and i want to know why it has that warning. How about you?