Reddit mentions of Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure, and an Unlikely Bride

Any perfume is bad if you don't like it, and by asking internet randos what's a good beginning perfume, the odds are high you're going to get something you don't like.

With all the thousands of perfumes out there and all the SA's trying to sell you shit, the best way to start is to narrow this down before putting a foot into a store. There are several gateways:


Door #1

I started with a book, Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure, and an Unlikely Bride, a memoir of a woman's introduction to and journey through niche.

Perfumes The Guide 2018 and the earlier Perfumes the A-Z Guide are books, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, full of pithy, descriptive perfume reviews — designer, niche and everything in between.

Door #2

There are wardrobe guides in the r/fragrance WIKI, like The Top Ten Male Designer Fragrances Every Beginner Should Sample and The Top Ten Niche Fragrances Every Beginner Should Sample.

There's more in the wiki.

Door #3

There's YouTube. You could ask some more experienced aromaphiles here which reviewers/channels they consider the best for honest, non biased, descriptive reviews.

Door #4

There are several extremely knowledgeable reviewers who review perfumes on their blogs. A few:

Colognoisseur

Take One Thing Off

Chemist in the Bottle

Persolaise

Now Smell This

The point of this is to get to know some fragrances by name. Read or listen to their descriptions and see if a perfume sounds like it would smell good to you. Go to Fragrantica or Basenotes — or both — and read some peer reviews. It helps to eliminate bias by gaining impressions and opinions from several sources.

Choose those you want to try first. You might end up with a huge list, but go through a few and do some process of elimination until you can compile a list around 10 you think you'd like to smell. Save the rest of the list because you might be coming back to them.

Get free samples from a department store (Sephora and Nordstrom are good for this) or buy them online (Google the perfume name+samples to find places to buy). You can try them in a department store, but that's not enough time to give you enough information about the perfume. Plus you'll be smelling every other perfume spray in the store, and may be under pressure to buy something.

Take those samples home and try them on your skin for a day or more. Limit yourself to around three sprays to get the right volume to smell the facets of the fragrance. Pay attention to what your nose and brain like and don't like. Try each fragrance for at least a few hours to become familiar with development from top note to heart note to dry down. Choose what you like, and buy either a decant, travel size or a full bottle.

If this sounds like conventional research, it's because it is. Finding a perfume is just like researching anything.