Perfume makes it into the top ten gifts for women. It's a favourite present for nearly every woman but how to make sure you buy the right perfume.

If you can sneak a peak at their dressing table you might discover their favourite perfume, or you can drop a subtle hint sometime by asking carefully "You smell lovely, what perfume are you wearing" and they'll tell you about the perfume. Carefully make a note of it and then you can buy them some of it for their birthday or christmas.

If you've not managed to decide which one to buy - perhaps they love two fragrances - then you'll need to decide which one you're going to buy. Sometimes price plays an important part in the purchasing of presents.

Buying perfume is fairly easy - once you've tracked down the name of the perfume they like it's just a case of visiting a site like CheapSmells.com which sells a massive range of perfume at low prices. This makes it easier to buy the right perfume - the bigger the range the more likely they are to sell the perfume you're after.

If you're stuck for ideas or would like to buy them a new type of scent then this site has plenty of options. They've got the popular best sellers, special offers and bargains that make it easy to find new and exciting perfumes.

Some people like to change the scent they use every so often, to re-invent their own trademark scent to give them a new image. Sometimes people stick with the same perfume for years and it's a smell that you associate only with them.

Cheap smells have award winning perfumes and it's this category that you're going to find some amazingly good scents in.

This site gives you a breakdown of the component smells in the perfume - and this allows you to find other perfumes based on the ingredients of one they love.

What is perfume? Perfume is a substance applied to the skin to give off a scent.
Originally perfumes would have been intended to hide the wearers own body scent but today it's worn to give a pleasant scent, and can be seen as part of the attraction process.

True perfume - perfume extract or extrait - is the highest proportion of aromatics to base (normally an alcohol base which evaporates quickly) - can be 15-40% aromatics.

Eay du parfum is 10-20% aromatics.

Eau du Cologne contains 3-8% aromatics

Eau de Toilette - also known as Toilet water contains 5-15% aromatics.

Splash and After shave: 1-3% aromatic compounds

Perfume oils - have an oil base rather than alcohol and can vary from solid perfume blocks when mixed with waxes

Perfumes are also used to scent many products including: totions, creams, powders, body splashes, aftershaves, soaps, body scrubs.

Storing perfume - you should always store perfume away from extremes of temperature and sunlight, keep it tightly capped and watch for the label stating how long the perfume should last. (A number circles usually something like 12M or 24M meaning 12 and 24 months respectively)

Where to apply perfume - it is believed that the pulse points are the best places to apply perfume and these are found at the wrist, behind the ear, crook of the arm and knee, base of the throat.

Adding a drop of perfume to your shower wash or hair when you shower will add in a subtle scent to your body which helps give depth to the perfume.

Why are some perfumes so expensive? It can take over a tonne of rose flower petals to make a single pound of rose oil and the processes take care. This means the ingredients can be very expensive. Usually the less aromatics in a product means it'll be cheaper.

It is possible for one perfume to smell very differently on different people. People's skin chemistry can vary enormously and this makes perfumes react differently.

 

 

There are several main groups of perfume:

oriental - spicy, warming and exotic

greens - very fresh natural smells of cut grass and fresh leaves

floral - of flowers

woody - smokey, mossy - stronger deeper smells including oils such as patchouli, pine and sandalwood

fruity - fresh smells of fruits such as strawberries

Water or marine - sea breeze and rainstorms - if you can imagine the scent of the sea then this is the sort of scent you'd get in a water group perfume

Aldehydics are synthetis - chanel no. 5 was the first example of this

Tobacco and Leather - strong masculine scents

Fougère - masculine but also in perfumes, translates to Fern from the french - built on a base of lavender, coumarin and oakmoss

Gourmand: scents with "edible" or "dessert"-like qualities such as vanilla - anything which smells like you want to eat it up

 

 

How a perfume smells

Top note - the initial scent - predominant for the first ten to 60 minutes

middle or heart notes that are most the obvious after about an hour.

The base notes which you can still smell at the end of the day.

Some scents are linear and are made up to smell the same all the day with no layering of scents. This is a minority of perfumes though which most following the three phase layering.