My apologies lovely readers. I tempted you with my Fumblings of a Fledgling Fumehead Introduction post and then ended up feeling too intimidated to delve any further into documenting my fragrant adventures. I’m such a tease! 

I thought a good place to start would be to show you exactly how I got started down the path to becoming a full blown perfumista. The fabulous world of sample/discovery sets! Please hear my message perfume houses of the world. PLEASE OFFER SAMPLES! Even more importantly please offer reasonably priced sample/discovery sets. Because you know what’s going to happen don’t you? We are going to fall in love with at least one, if not many, scents and we will NEED full bottles. Isn’t that the goal. Also the amount of feverish discussion of your scents in the perfume lovers communities is the best possible free advertising you could ever have. We live to enable one another. An incredible example of the advantages of offering samples to possible future customers is the incredibly generous and genius Kilian Club. Every day people are sharing and discussing their experiences sampling the incredible By Kilian creations. The kind and handsome Mr. Hennessey offered those who joined his Facebook Fan Club a beautiful pouch of samples from his L’Oeuvre Noire collection for free. I mean how incredible is that?! I for one am not in a location where sampling his line is possible. To be able to sample and appreciate these scents in the comfort of my own home has been a joy and has me craving one of his incredibly beautiful full bottles so badly I don’t know how to contain myself.

OK now where was? By Kilian was not part of the start of my journey but rather came later. But By Kilian does understand the value of samples and has even recently released a fabulous Discovery Set of his L’Oeuvre Noire collection containing 7.5ml sizes of all 10 scents! 

So after I started expressing my interest in learning more about fragrance in the beautiful fragrance community I also started asking for recommendations of samples to try. I was hoping to find websites to purchase various samples from. There are options in this area like The Perfumed Court and several others where they sell you decanted samples from full bottles they have on hand. It can become a pricey endeavor. I instead decided to focus on samples being offered online directly from the perfumer. Here are the sets I ordered the week of my crazy perfume sample buying binge a couple of months ago:

From Ineke:

From Ormonde Jayne:

From Juliette Has a Gun:

From Opus Oils:

I ordered pretty much every one of their samples and sample packs!

I am so happy with my purchases! It has been an incredible journey and learning experience. It is amazing to be able to sample such a variety of scents from such a range of perfumers. I can’t imagine buying a perfume “blind”. While I’m an avid online shopper for cosmetics and buy things untested/unsceen all the time I can’t fathom taking that risk on bottles of perfume. Not to mention some of these can be quite the investment. Even lets say I was lucky enough to live nearby a boutique that sold all of these scents and had them available for testing. Trying to sniff testers at a store and maybe trying the odd one on or taking a scent strip home can in no way compare to the luxury of fully wearing a scent for two or three days from a sample vial to get the true experience.

There are still so many houses to explore that offer this option. Some of the ones I’m hoping to order next are:

Neil Morris Signature Collection Sampler:

One or two Tauer Discovery Sets:

Some Aftelier samples:

Sonomo Scents Studio sample set:

Deluxe Sampler from Liz Zorn:

Penhaligon’s Scent Library:

Aroma M Perfume Samples:

DSH Perfumes Sampler Packs:

Amouage Sampler Box:

I hope this has inspired you to try something new. I would love to hear your thoughts and share in the adventure with you! xo