The List/Guidelines

 I ought to start getting a move on with reviewing Noontide Petals but things just creapt up on me. I don't exactly know when I created my own personal rules for perfume but I think that it sort of evolved.

1. Never go buying vintage anything without smelling the current version of any perfume. Without knowing what the current version of Mitsouko smells like, how would you know how the vintage smells like. And you don't always know if the previous owner had drained the original scent and put something else in there.

2. Always buy back ups of the perfumes you love. Reformulations happen all the time and it's not always for the better. Or it's the horror of horrors, it's been discontinued. This is when E-Bay can become your enemy but it's going to contradict me when I get to my next thing.

3. E-Bay can be your best friend or it can be your worst enemy. I've been trolling E-Bay off and on since 2013 and this comes with getting perfume off this. I'm not one of those who does that bidding thing. If bidding is your thing, some perfumes when they are discontinued or vintage the price may be low but always seems to skyrocket just before the auction ends. But I love the buy it now option because in a way, I am saved from some of that paying what would be a mortgage payment. But what goes on with the buy it now, you do have to be careful because some people are putting half used or quarter full vintages and discontinued scents for $100 or more. But never turn your nose up because you can find a bargain once in a while.

5. Surrender to Chance and The Perfumed Court can be your ultimate best friend when sampling or your comparing vintage to the modern version of something or want to sample a niche perfume that you can only get a full bottle of at Amazon. Yeah, you gotta pay for those but it can be worth it. Hey, it saved me a lot of money. It has made me make up my mind when I was going back and forth between two perfumes.

6. Luckyscent maybe the place to go when beginning the perfume journey but it's not the whole picture. I can find my Amouages at other places and not pay full price. Luckyscent may give you codes for free shipping when you spend $75 and the maybe once a year 20% around tax time.

7. A lot of the time, Beauty Encounter and FragranceNet have the better deals for the Serge Lutens export line and Amouage. Truthfully, I prefer Beauty Encounter because the discounts seem to be better and much more frequent. Hey, where else could I have found Fendi Theorema for a decent price and unused besides Beauty Encounter?

8. Wear what you want, where you want, when you want to. What good is having bottles of perfume if they are just decorating the dresser? It's just not good because eventually the perfume will either evaporate or just go bad. Some perfumes (Clinique Happy for example) do have a short shelf life and go bad very quickly and I found out the hard way about that.

9. Visit perfume blogs like Now Smell This, Perfume Posse and many others. That's were you can find all kinds of perfume news and periodically there are perfume swaps. The things (perfumes) that you have been dying to get rid of and see if someone has something you are dying to try.