Oil is not perfume and it is not applied the way perfume is. Most people use four times what they should, then wonder why it is gone by lunchtime.
Somebody who has only ever used sprays picks up their first oil and treats it the same way, and both of the obvious mistakes follow.
The first is quantity. A spray is mostly alcohol, so pressing it twice delivers a small amount of actual material. An oil at twenty per cent is concentrated, and the correct amount for a whole day is roughly what sits on the tip of a finger when you tip the bottle against it, divided between two places. Not a smear along the wrist. A dab.
The second is rubbing. Everybody rubs their wrists together and everybody has been told not to, usually without a reason. Here is the reason. Friction warms the oil and pushes the lightest materials off within a minute, so you are throwing away the first hour of the blend and crushing the structure. Dab and leave it. If it looks like too much, blot with a tissue rather than rubbing it in.
Where to put it matters more with oil than with spray. Pulse points work because they are warm: the inside of the wrists, behind the ears, the base of the throat. In this heat, behind the ears is often enough on its own, and a person who applies to their wrists in an air conditioned office will find the blend barely opens at all.
Clothing is the other trick, and it is the traditional one here for a reason. A drop on the inside of a collar or on a scarf lasts far longer than anything on skin, because fabric does not absorb it and does not heat it. It also smells slightly different, generally a little sharper. Test it on something you can wash, because oil does mark light fabric and silk in particular.
And the thing nobody tells you: you will stop being able to smell your own blend within about twenty minutes. Everybody else still can, for hours. That single fact is behind almost every case of somebody applying far too much, and behind almost every complaint that an oil does not last. Ask somebody in the evening. They will usually tell you it is still there.
