Collectinghabits

Just curious. What are you looking for when buying new perfumes? For example. Are you looking for something unique that you’ve never smelled before? Do you gravitate toward certain notes or smells? Are you a bottle collector? Do you go for whole collections or whatnot?

Spill the beans, how do you work your collection?

After a few years in this hobby, it mostly comes down to this:

1) Artistic/creative direction

2) Wearability, performance

3) Redundancy

At this point, I'm looking for animalic scents and true shapeshifters. Meaning the top/heart notes are completely different from the drydown.

They also must be wearable, with great performance and a good reason to wear them instead of something else in my downsized collection.

With unreasonable requirements, it's easier to stick to samples. Until something blows my mind.

A mixture for me. I have a few unusual bottles and would like to get some more. I'll have to post a new thread to get some recommendations there. Other than that, yes I like to get new or unique fragrances that I find pleasing and are wearable (for me) and perform well. If I decide I like something and get a bottle, I'll probably not bother testing a similar fragrance. For example, I like Kutay and have a bottle. Therefore, I won't bother buying a sample of Baraonda Extrait de Parfum which is supposed to be almost identical. Performance is also important. It doesn't have to be beast mode. If it's really nice and lasts for 5 to 6 hours, I'm OK.

I tend to gravitate towards stronger, spicy, animalic and masculine fragrances. I'm not very keen about sweet or floral fragrances, although there are exceptions. I don't have a problem with designer scents as long as they meet my criteria.

I don't care about testing or owning an entire house. I will buy a discovery set if, based on reading, I think there's a good chance I'll like quite a few of the scents in the set. Otherwise, I'll buy individual samples.

There is one exception to collecting an entire line. That is, the One Man Show line. I have all but two of them. One Man Show scents are all cheapies, some are good, some are mediocre, but at least I'll have one complete collection. lol

@Ceesie how would you answer your own question?

I generally go by the notes or profiles I love, like teas, iris, or citrus, green, etc. As my collection has grown, I'm a lot more careful about what I buy, especially when it comes to cold season perfumes (it takes longer to run through these) or if I already have something similar. Now, when I run into a white flower I want, for example, jasmine, I first ask myself if this is the best jasmine perfume I have ever smelled. If not, I don't buy it. If it still gnaws at me, I ask myself how this perfume adds something different to the other jasmine perfumes I already own. If it doesn't, I don't buy it.

I make exceptions for the following: perfumes I can only acquire in that particular country and are not available anywhere else, small bottle sizes that I know I will finish quickly, perfumes that I know my sister will love and that I can split with her, perfumes that absolutely knock my socks off and I can't stop thinking about.

Well, given that I'm still somewhat at the start of my fragrance "journey", I'm just trying to try out as many different fragrances as possible to gain some experience, so I mostly buy samples (also, my budget won't allow me to buy the full bottles lol). But if I were to choose a fragrance based on my priorities and the things that I look for the most, those would be:

• Something unique that stands out through its notes and isn't as simple and as easily-likeable as most fragrances (so basically, niche fragrances)

• I do enjoy leathery fragrances, so that's one of the key notes that I consider. I also love tobacco and slightly sweet scent profiles, and coffee is one note I'm also always looking for.

• Longevity and projection also play a huge role for me, as I don't really have the best skin chemistry. For example, I love Spicebomb Dark Leather and I was almost ready to buy the full bottle. But when I saw its very poor performance on my skin, I just couldn't justify buying the full bottle. So regardless if I absolutely love a scent profile or not, if performance is underwhelming, I will hardly consider buying a 50-100ml bottle.

But for now, as I said in the start, I'm just testing all I can, through samples. And if I happen to discover a fragrance that I absolutely love, and simultaneously also performing good on my skin, then I highly consider buying at least bigger 10ml samples if I can't stretch my budget to a full bottle.

All of the above. But after 8 years of this hobby, it's getting harder and harder to decide on a purchase.It's hard for me to be impressed by anything. The criteria are very high.

Thanks for all your insights. I feel like I'm like @DAVID043329 quite green in the journey. Wanting to sniff everything there is to sniff. I used to like everything and also wanting to buy everything but I'm getting over that. So I think that's why I started this thread.

I gravitate towards certain notes at the moment, like lavender, amber and iris. Thing is, I can't have like 10 iris fragrances that smell somewhat the same. It started with Dior Homme Intense (2011) , then came along Iris Malikhân and Hyper Iris , Italian Leather Eau de Parfum and The Omniscient Mister Thompson and 502 Iris Cartagena . They're all very attractive to me and not entirely the same. But in the same ballpark so to say. I think I'd choose one of those but I'm just afraid something even better will pop up someday!

Also I'm a bit of a hoarder so my first few bottles in my collection were all from the Dunhill Signature line. All quite okayish, but now there's no real love for them anymore. So that may be a wise lesson for the future. Not to fall into that collecting-trap again.

I started buying perfumes whenever I found them at a good price, and my collection quickly escalated. That’s why I sold quite a few, and now I’m focused on a specific brand Bond No.9 and a few other fragrances I want to collect.

Ive decided to de clutter, going from about 30 fragrances to a HARD maximum of 12. Every scent has to be unique in what it does and not redundant, any new fragrance I buy has to be better, or make me want to replace something I have. This forces me to test more, not overconsume and think about, what are my genuine tastes? I love this approach, and now whenever I want to try something I stick to testing over buying. One thing that really helps is understandin how to differenciate "I love this" from "I want to buy this."

That seems like a legit method @Delarosafrag . There are so many fragrances I do love, but would I buy them? No. 

I'm also a little bit of a mixture of everything. I'm interested in new releases in general and will test them if I'll have the chance in order to find out if there's something unique and new that I have never smelled before. I'm also interested in beautiful bottles, however I won't buy the fragrance based on the bottle only except it's something extremely cheap and I really love the bottle. Also if there's a new flanker of a fragrance that I love, that definitely interests me too. But mostly I'm gravitated towards certain notes and certain genres. For example I absolutely love salty fragrances and coffee fragrances so if there's a fragrance with salt or coffee notes, that definitely gets me interested. Also my top favourite genre is beachy/aquatic/marine so anything in that genre gets my interest too. However my collection is huge so when I'm testing I'm also thinking if the fragrance is unique and beautiful enough to not to be too redundant. I have never had any problems with longevity as most fragrances last 8+ hours on me but if the sillage is too strong that's a little bit of a problem. I get nose blindness very easily so I don't really like too strong fragrances because I want to smell them myself too, couldn't care less if other people smell them because I wear fragrances for myself only. So "beast mode" fragrances usually are the least interesting ones to me.

I'm still at (what I consider) the very start of my fragrance journey, so I'm mostly buying decants of anything I can find to build my olfactory library. 

While testing those, I recently discovered the house of Loewe and fell in love with their selection. So I bought a few full sized bottles. Loved those. Came to the conclusion that I trust Loewe enough to blind buy from them — blind bought a few more bottles. Loved those... 

So at the moment I'm buying decants of whatever is available on the local market and in the meantime splurging on more and more full sized bottles of Loewe's fragrances when I can afford that kind of expense （´∇｀''）

I'll say that, When I buy perfumes and colognes, it's because they remind me of the ones I had, or it's one of those I had. No doubt!, the perfumes and colognes of the past were classic, because they were based on Quality. 

Nowadays, Ingredients become banned or unavailable. Or too expensive to use. Houses get bought and sold. Companies reformulate to match current tastes. Companies want to save money and strip down their products., In other words, a lot of quality is lost and very few modern perfumes can be admired.

Oh @Lempi, If you like coffee notes, I think I should tell you: I got a sample of Grand Master the other day and it is such a Goooood coffee scent. Not for me, (I like to smell coffee, but not on myself), but for those who love to wear coffee scents, it is beautyful!