How can you tell which fragrance is for you? You could of course visit one perfume counter after another spraying fragrances all over your arm ‘till you get a mega headache. Or you could use your personality as a guide to narrow down the scents you might like.

Your Personality: Sporty
You love the outdoors and nature. You are the fit and sporty type and enjoy all kinds of games. Most weekends would find you playing a game of soccer or netball with friends or with your outdoor activities club, attempting a rock-wall.
Scent Type: Green
You would go gaga over the crisp, clean smell of green scents that incorporate the fragrances of herbs, grasses and leaves.
Try These: Amazonia (Aveda); Escape (Calvin Klein); Sunflowers (Estee Lauder)

Your Personality: Artistic
You are the sensitive and creative type and hang with the arty farty gang in school. You rather spend a day at the Art Museum than get a tan at the beach. Aromatherapy and ethnic-inspired clothes attract you.
Scent Type: Oriental
Fragrances in this category are warm, spicy and exotic – just like you! They are the heaviest scents and are often a blend of spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, pepper, clove, ginger etc.
Try These: Colors (Benetton); Mizan (Aveda); Opium (Yves St Laurent)

Your Personality: Happy-go-lucky
You are almost never in a bad mood. Your buds love you for your positive, perky nature. Making your friends laugh is what you enjoy the most.
Scent Type: Citrus
Refreshing, casual and upbeat, these scents will brighten your day. They are often a blend of citrus fruits such as lemon, tangerine and lime.
Try These: Isesi (Aveda); English Lavender (Yardley); CK one (Calvin Klein)

Makeup of a fragrance
A fragrance is usually a blend of many different scents, sometimes-even hundreds of them, also known as notes. The unique blending of these notes is what gives a fragrance its distinct identity.
Top notes
This is the first impression of the scent on the skin. The lightest of the bunch, it disappears within 5 to 10 minutes and usually consists of citrus (lemon/orange), minty, fruit or light spice ingredients.
Middle notes
When the fragrance interacts with the skin chemistry, it produces the middle note. This is the part of the fragrance you will notice after about 15 minutes of wear and can last for an hour or so. Middle notes tend to be medium spices (cinnamon), light woods/moss, or heavier citrus/fruity scents.
Base notes
This is considered the true personality of the scent. It blends with your own personal scent and lingers for hours. These tend to be the heavier, longer lasting ingredients like wood, leather, heavy spice (pepper) and tobacco.

Did you know?
We pinch our noses at the very thought of body odor. But did you know that it was only in the late nineteenth century that natural body odor started to be considered unpleasant and antisocial? In Elizabethan times a gal would give her lover a “love apple” to inhale. This was a peeled apple that she had kept in her armpit until it was saturated in her sweat! Try that now and that will be the end of your social life.

Scent & the brain
Fragrance does not just make us smell pleasant but can affect the way we feel. Here’s why: when we inhale a scent, it travels back into the nasal cavity where it is dissolved in the mucus of five million cells that connect to the olfactory area of the brain via long nerve fibers. When the brain’s small center detects a scent, it sends a message to the limbic system, which controls emotion, memory and intuition. The information also goes to the hypothalamus, which controls the body’s neuro-chemicals and hormones.

As a survival mechanism, the brain responds immediately to a smell to determine whether it is pleasurable or if it is a threat. The effect of smell on our emotions is almost immediate and it is directly linked to memory. For example, you can smell a fragrance worn by a friend years later and immediately feel hatred, fondness or sadness.

Before buying a fragrance
· Never judge a fragrance by the first sniff as this only gives you the top note, which doesn’t linger long.
· Instead of spraying every scent you want onto your skin, just ask for some blotter cards (blank cards which companies send in to sample their fragrances on).
· Once you have an idea of which scents you like, try it on your skin. Don’t rush through your decision. Wear the scent for a few hours (remember the top, middle and base notes?) before deciding.
· If you have been smelling a number of perfumes, your nose can get tired. Smell something plain like your T-shirt/coffee beans or take a break for ten minutes so your nose is ready for smelling again.

Fragrance & your skin chemistry
You love the new fragrance your friend is wearing. After you blow a few hundred on it, you realize it smells nothing like it did on your friend. Why? The reason is, your skin makes quite a difference. All our skins have different acidity or pH levels. Each ingredient in a fragrance reacts differently to our individual level.

Your skin type can also make a difference. Someone with dry skin tends to lose his or her fragrance fairly quickly because there isn’t much moisture to keep the scent locked in. Oily skin on the other hand, tends to hold a fragrance much longer because it’s the oil in a fragrance that makes it last. So you see, the same scent can smell completely different on you and your friend.