Blind Buys - Are you a risk taker? Best + Worst Experiences

I ordered Courtesan by Worth as a Blind Buy. It hasn't come yet. It was inexpensive at the online discounters. My best blind buy was Loris Azzaro's Couture, $25 NZ dollars from SNet on a daily special. It's happiness in a bottle, so effervescent and yet so posh. Love it.
Sometimes I'm not so lucky, but hey, I'm not playing the one armed bandits in a seedy dive, I'm a perfume hobbyist and I have a budget, mostly, fairly consistently, with a little leeway

I hope it works out for you Omni! I'm just realising how many BBs are actually in my collection. Recent spectacular successes with "Cuir de Lancome" (adore it), Guerlain "Heritage" (fellas be damned! Love it) and "Ma Griffe" (perfect green, very cheap but, alas, longevity could be better).

Ma Griffe was one of our first perfumes in the sixties, the collection that my Mum and I scored as abandoned or forgotten when the guests checked out (she was a housemaid at an International hotel) It was too old for me then but I wore it, and others. Weil de Weil was bone dry and one that made it to New Zealand. Rive Gauche and Je Reviens were popular. I remember my Aunt giving me 'Le Train Bleu' by Picot, the equivalent of poor mans' french perfume. Shiseido Zen was so beautiful then but I thought it was slumming it. How stupid, with hindsight it was amazing. Fidji, another gift, disappeared faster than a speeding bullet. I'm sure the current Ma Griffe is better than Fidji was.

Cuir de Lancome is ravishing, so was Magie Noire. I really liked Magie Noire, my memory banks can almost smell it.

The current Fidji breaks my heart. It was my signature scent through my teens and twenties until it was discontinued. My recent re-aquaintance with the reformulated EDP has left me feeling like I'm smelling a pale ghost. The new Rive Gauche I don't mind. Perhaps because it was only an occasional wear for me back in the day (my sister owned it) so I'm less attached to the old version - or maybe they just did a better job...
Slumming it - I guess after all those high end dregs you could be forgiven for eschewing lesser quality fumes! My mother would not permit Avon frags to enter the house when I was a kid.

I have Catholic tastes, as in embracing all, not incensey taper fumes, and I actually helped my girlfriend sell Avon for a while. I remember a small bottle of, I think it was Genesis Oil, seeping into my makeup bag. Talk about for-evvah!
Triffid, I ordered a small bottle of Je Reviens pure perfume with my Courtesan order and in a way it's a blind buy because I only know it through my Mother in law who has a stash of vintage. Now that gives me an idea for a thread. Let's have fun.

I used to buy blind liberally 2-3 years ago but not so much anymore. Of course, there were failures and there were gorgeous finds but all in all I do believe it is indeed better to actually test a fragrance at least once (and even that might be a high-risk thing)....depending also on the price of the juice.
Say, I would not buy an Amouage or Kilian blind but Scentstory´s "24 Gold" might be a candidate to take the risk

"Say, I would not buy an Amouage or Kilian blind but Scentstory´s "24 Gold" might be a candidate to take the risk "
Indeed, Pontneuf, I think that, pricewise, most of us have a "sweet spot" where a blind buy is worth the risk. Amouage or Kilian price points would definitely be well outside of my blind buy sweet spot for sure. What I find most tempting is the niche perfume that is very heavily discounted at an online emporium. My current temptation is some less-than-half-price Creeds at my favourite online discounter. This is a tricky one. Great bargains (relatively speaking) scents unsniffed, still a bit pricey for a BB.

The first time I bought from TK Maxx (that's what it's called in the UK) it was Xeryus. First reaction to liberating this barber shop/powerhouse hybrid from its plastic security box was disappointment - I've wasted my money.
At the time classic style perfumes were new to me and it was way out of my comfort zone.
However, I came to appreciate its left field charm and it's now an occasional wear.
So, emboldened by this minor triumph of getting a Givenchy for £22, I thought I was onto a good thing, and made regular forays into each TKM within a 20 mile radius.
Sad to say nothing quite as good has ever popped up again.
Most of the blind buys have been ok, but the last, and most dreadful one was the foul and cynical flanker Cerutti Image Harmony. A disgusting lash up that smells like battery acid and drain cleaner. I think its fair to say Coty spent more on the fancy levered spray mechanism than the juice inside.
I didn't even try to sell it on eBay but just threw it in the trash.
No more chancing my cash for me, I always smell it first, leave the shop and think about it later. And if it isn't adoration, then that's just too bad. Still saving my centimes for that must have thing in the fabulous boutique parfumerie.

What disappointment, WildGardener. I mean, the Cerruti experience might not have been so bad if the perfume could have been repurposed as an actual drain cleaner. Useful, at least.
I read as many reviews as I can before purchase, so at least I have some idea of what to expect but it sounds like you're in another gambling league altogether: a blind buying, bargain bin foraging, discount chemist hunter. This is the kind of bravery and optimism that fuelled the great explorations of history and founded ancestral kingdoms!

rofl!

For me it is not necessarily an urge to blind buy but a "necessity" when one can not test the perfumes. Many perfumes I am interested in are not in perfume shops, yes I could order samples, but when in the EU it is annoying with all the regulations and extra taxes and not all online sellers ship to here... So, I actually bought many bottles blind.

I keep telling myself I'm not going to blind buy again. Then I get excited about a perfume and do it anyway. Re-resolving: I'm not going to blind buy perfumes!

(probably)

p.s. Unless someone tries to duplicate that first oriental by Piesse & Lubin found on the shipwrecked Mary Celeste. I'd have no other option then.

I blind buy, heaps. I tell myself that $40.00 of my dollars buys a 100 ml bottle that would otherwise go on postage of samples. Within a few months my country is going to clamp down on customs free purchases, so I am making hay/coumarin while the sun shines. Yesterday I bought Heure Exquise in EDP for $80 NZD postage paid. I love No 19 and as I write the dry down of Cristalle emblazons the air, how could Heure Exquise be wrong?

Well not a blind buy, but bought from one testing, Womanity. Loved the sample, hated the bottle. I bought a bottle of Chanel Cristalle today and I'm still not sure about it.

...

I've had this experience twice, lately, with Malle's La Parfum de Therese and Guerlain's Cruel Gardenia. What I sampled was markedly different from the bottle. Plan to resniff both samples and bottles to try to figure out the differences.

The vast majority of my collection was purchased blindly. I had smelt probably only five or so of my fragrances before I purchased them. I rely on the notes pyramids, reviews, and a knowledge of what I have and love. I know, for example, that I favour Orientals/Florientals, so these are the ones I look at adding to my collection.

My worst blind purchase was undoubtedly Jessica Simpson Fancy. Judging from the notes and the mostly very positive reviews, I expected to love it. However it turned out to be extremely synthetic smelling, so I did not keep it.

The candidates for best blind buy are numerous and diverse, including L'Heure Bleue, Coco, 24 Faubourg, Bois des Iles, Elie Saab Le Parfum Intense, Cuir de Russie, No. 22, and Sensual Amber amongst others.

I have never really thought about a price ceiling for a fragrance purchased blindly, but most recently I purchased a vintage Cuir de Russie for a few hundred dollars, and I purchased a contemporary Bois de Iles for close to a couple of hundred dollars.

My next planned blindly purchased fragrances are Coromandel and 31 Rue Cambon.

I have a new "best" in this category and it's Hiram Green's "Voyage". It's a limited edition I bought blind and, to my nose, it's in the league of vintage Shalimar extrait and Roja Haute Luxe--heady, all-natural, glorious. A real star.

I blindly purchased quite a few more bottles including Chanel Les Exclusifs. The only one I truly could not see myself wearing was Sycomore.

Fragrances that interest me are (for whatever reason!) mostly not available in stores to test, and I have to decide to take the risk or not. I had always done lots of 'blind buys' without knowing this expression, I suppose it was just another 'mail ordering' for me.
In the past, I couldn't imagine much from the listed fragrance notes and completely relied on some 'intuition' (and luck) based on the ad and bottle picture. Curiously, I never had a 'failed' blind purchase back then, and this left me in a blissful state of even not knowing such things exist.

After I had begun reading reviews of other people and started letting my attention lead to those I wouldn't have looked at myself (in order to 'broaden my horizon'), I collected a mass of 'missed' blind buys. Of course, I felt frustrated to discover that I seemed to be in the 3% minority to perceive a fragrance differently than the 97% who praised and wrote glowing words, more so if someone just wrote misleading, eloquent 'reviews' which, in reality, were fabricated without ever testing and received many applauding thumb-ups as to confirm their credibility (note: not on this site).
Some cases were rather 'against better knowing' or the lack of the ability to imagine anything, trying to persuade myself to give it a chance, just for the sake of giving people's sentiments more credit than my own feeling, and therefore, my own fault. It's not much different than with people, I suppose. And these also belong to my worst blind purchases.

Very nice finds were partly surprising, partly anticipated. Funny that "Fancy Nights" mentioned earlier belongs to one of my nicer blind buys, based on my impression of the bottle alone, and the description 'old, books', without ever knowing what patchouli smelt like or if I liked it. I just saw it was a controversial fragrance (at that point, there were more negative feedbacks) which didn't keep me from trying

Same here.
Lately I blind buy ZARA perfumes.

When I was digging into Montale I blind bought Dark Purple and Red Aoud didn't like them but the kicker was Dark Purple smelt amazing in the bottle but on my skin it smelt like floor cleaner.