The History and Current Trends Surrounding ‘Signature Scents’

The brand, tone, and style of fragrance you choose to wear regularly is the finishing touch to your wardrobe as well as your overall style and beauty look. Your fragrance is an expression of your personality.

A signature scent is essentially the fragrance or perfume that other people associate with you, and wherever they are in the world, when they smell that particular scent, they automatically think of you. Your signature scent is not necessarily your favorite, moreover, the one you tend to wear the most often and leaves a mark of you wherever you go.

Perfume’s Humble Beginnings

With considerable advances in organic chemistry knowledge, the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries were when the first real era of perfume came to the forefront, with France leading the way in cultivating and producing flowers and herbs used to create fragrances.

However, the human race has used perfumes and fragrances on their bodies for thousands of years, particularly the ancient Egyptians, during their religious ceremonies, who used perfumed balms and utilized them in lovemaking. Every culture, regardless of location, has always valued products, as natural smelling as possible, that enhance the feel of skin and produce a scented aura around them.

Mainstream Popularity and Accessibility

It wasn’t until well into the 1960s when perfume, as we commonly recognize it today, became available to ‘ordinary’ people with a normal income. Throughout the entirety of the swinging sixties, Chanel No.5 and Miss Dior were still leading the bestselling perfume charts.

Gone are the days when the only feasible way to find out if you personally enjoyed and appreciated a particular perfume was to attempt to decide from the smallest spray on a damp tester card as you walked through a department store.

Nowadays, in no small part due to the takeover by the internet, there are a plethora of ways to experiment with different designer perfumes without forking out the hefty price tag each time. The most cost-effective and downright exciting way to do this is to treat yourself to a monthly perfume subscription box whereby every month, you will be sent a new designer perfume to try.

“A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future” – Coco Chanel.

How Do You Know When You’ve Found Your Signature Scent?

The most effective way to connect and truly experience an individual fragrance is to give yourself time to ‘live’ with the scent, and the opinions of friends and family may or may not also help you decide.

It is advisable to only try out three scents at any one time, especially if you are not what some would call a fragrance connoisseur. It is best to start with water-based, muskier, and lighter scents first and be aware of any individual fragrances that you regularly gravitate back towards.  

Your signature scent should make you feel empowered, confident, energized, attractive, and, by far the most important, should assist you in becoming the best possible version of yourself.