We have some great Wedding Perfume Sample Sets to get you started!

It’s the week before your wedding, and at your shower, one of your guests asks you…

Hey, What Wedding Perfume Have You Picked Out?

Oh, hell, how did I miss that pesky wedding perfume detail?

Scent tells you the story of your life, it remembers the details and feelings you sometimes think you forgot.  Scent mainlines to the limbic system, triggering emotion, which searches for memory, if any. All of that happens before you’ve had one single thought about smell.

Jean Paul Guerlain said it best

               “perfume is the most intense form of memory.”

Scent has no language except remembering.  The scent that will hold the memory of your Wedding Day is not one you want to leave to chance or decide at the last minute.  Decades from now, when you are watching you and your husband’s grandchildren play on the lawn, he will catch the smell of the perfume you wore on your Wedding Day, grab your hand, and you will both remember how that special day felt when you joined your Always into one.

Before you scurry after a new perfume, check with your husband-to-be. Some men feel very strongly about having you smell like yourself on your Wedding Day. They may love the perfume you wear now or object strongly to some foreign smell invading that day.  If that is important to him, give him that gift, and maybe you can check out some much naughtier things for the honeymoon.

If you don’t have a signature scent or he doesn’t care, well, hey, let’s have some fun!  

First, some do’s and don’t’s

• Find out if his mom, gramma or Aunt Becky have a signature scent and what it is.  Then don’t get that one.  You don’t want to remind him of his mom, gramma or Aunt Becky on your Wedding Day, honeymoon or, well, pretty much any time if you want a long, sex-filled romantic marriage.  And you do!

• If he insists on you wearing the scent his mom, gramma or Aunt Becky wears?  Paging Dr. Oedipus.  Ew, no.  If your heart is set on Guerlain L'H'eure Bleue and it’s a scent his mom wears?  Look for something else in the Guerlain line that makes you happy but won’t make him think of mom when he says   

I DO.

• Do find out what you like without any preconceived notions.  You may think you love rose perfumes or florals because that’s what you’ve always worn.  The nose gets used to something and will start filing scents you don’t really like over in the trash basket of memory.  A long, frustrating consultation with a client who had only worn two scents up until then – both big hair white florals – led me to believe that’s what she liked.  No, she hated every similar perfume I had her try.  An hour later, she had settled on a woodsy iris scent. That would have been the direction I would have gone if she hadn’t thrown out that red herring of what she normally wore.

• Don’t suffocate yourself and your groom and your guests with a super-heavy perfume in the summertime.  Yes, you love your vanilla gourmands, and if you’re having a fall/winter/early spring wedding, go with it and spritz with abandon.  In the summertime, those big vanillas can get very claustrophobic.

• Test, test, test, and test again the scents, and give them plenty of time to open up and reveal their secrets.  Going to the department store to pick out a scent is fraught with peril!  First, the salesperson may be pushing whatever is popular or they are getting told to push on you as “the perfect thing for your wedding!” at worst or just giving you an opinion you don’t really care about at best.  You are also under time constraints. A scent really has to develop for about an hour or longer before you can be sure it doesn’t turn into dreck or just disappear entirely. Skin is very different.  Some people have Peacock skin that reflects pretty accurately the way a scent was made to smell, they can wear about anything. Other people amp certain notes, like vanilla, amber,patchouli, and turn that gorgeous scent into a scrubber (perfumista-speak for something you want to take a bottle of Chlorox to rather than smell it for one more second). Don’t buy something that you’ve smelled for all of 5-10 minutes. The top notes that open a perfume are very different and designed to smell “oh, pretty!”  It’s not a true reflection of what you will have to endure all day.  

• Oh, look, the pretty box from Surrender to Chance just arrived, wheee!!!!  It’s full of so many samples, I wanna try them all!!!!!  No, just no.  Stop, sit down, take a deep breath, find your chill. Okay. Do try only 2-3 scents at most in a 4-hour period.  Your nose gets so weary and exhausted after it’s smelled a few things, and it stops differentiating them. This is the scary spot where Horrible Perfume Accidents can happen.  

• Flowers?  No, not IN the perfume. What flowers are you having in your wedding?  Don’t let your flowers and your perfume clash. Luckily notes combine beautifully, so you’re probably not in too much danger here, but just be aware of the potential for some weird clashing that you hadn’t thought about.  Get a few flowers like you’ll have at your wedding, the ones with the biggest smell, and test it while wearing your perfume.

• Your groom, don’t you want him to smell great too? Do include the groom in the smellies.  If he’s been wearing Axe or some scent that is harshing your scented mellow, this is the perfect moment to get him to try some new things that you, My Darling Bride, approve of and want to smell on him when you are troth-pledging.  

• Ask other people about what they wore on their wedding day – friends, relatives, strangers (blogs are sorta strangers, and there are some great stories out there!)  The answers will surprise and delight you.  From “I don’t remember” to a detailed account of how she picked it, what it meant to her and how she feels now about it.  

• Don’t pick a scent just because someone you know wore it.  This is your Very Special Day.   You may fall in love with a perfume someone else wore, and that’s great, wear that!  Make sure it’s something you love and not something that’s popular or that your friend Gracie wore.

• There’s nothing scary about perfume, even though you may think there is now.  When you first start exploring, you’ll hear all about the fragrance pyramid (crap!  don’t believe it!) and types and classifications – chypres, orientals, fougere – and that can freak you out a bit or worry this is like that awful Organic Chemistry Final that you gave up a spring break to study for. Classifications are helpful for knowing what something you love falls into.  And that’s it. You don’t need to become an expert in anything but figuring out what you love.  Do explore with abandon and with no care to what you need to know.   

• But I don’t wanna smell like flowers!  Well, then, don’t! Brides can smell like anything! Want a zen, calm scent?  Incense, baby, and it smells amazing in the summer. Outdoors girl, grab that woody scent and spray it like you mean it.  Want some sexy, rough leather?  Well, maybe something a little smoother for The Big Day.  You can do any of those things, and it will be exactly right.

And, hey, I’ll just wear the same scent on the honeymoon as I did on my wedding day?  

Are you crazy?!?!?  

No, no, no, just no.  Wedding Days are about Forevers and Vows and Commitment.  Honeymoons better be about hot, amazing honeymoon sex, and these are two completely different smells.  Picking out something smutty and sinful and delicious to wear on your honeymoon is a 

DO-me-do-me-doo