Skin temperature, what you washed with, and the simple fact that you stop noticing your own scent in twenty minutes.
This is the most frequent disappointment in the trade and it has three ordinary causes, none of them the fault of the bottle.
The first is temperature. A scent is a set of materials that lift off the skin at different rates, and heat speeds all of them up. A warm skin gives you a bigger opening and a shorter life. A cooler skin holds the heavy base notes for hours. Here, almost everybody is at the warm end, which is why an oil blended for a cold country can feel enormous for twenty minutes and then vanish.
The second is everything already on you. Strongly scented soap, hair oil, a coconut based body cream, even laundry detergent: all of it sits underneath and changes what goes on top. We have had two customers on consecutive days try the same oil and describe two genuinely different smells, and the difference was a hair oil.
The third is the one nobody believes. You stop being able to smell your own scent within about twenty minutes. Your nose filters out what stays constant, and it does it well. Everybody else still smells it perfectly clearly. This is the single biggest cause of people applying too much, and of the complaint that a scent has no lasting power when what has actually happened is that the wearer can no longer detect it.
The practical test for that last one: put it on and ask somebody in the evening, or smell your own shirt collar the next morning. Both will tell you the truth your own nose has stopped telling you.
Which is why we do it the slow way. Two on the wrists, an hour away from this shop, and a decision made somewhere that does not smell of a hundred and eighty other things.
