The scent you choose to wear may have a powerful influence on those around you. Make sure your fragrance is memorable for all the right reasons by choosing your perfume carefully.

Do your perfume shopping early in the day, when your senses are sharpest. If there are a wide variety of fragrances you want to sample, don’t try to decide between them all in one trip. Taking in too many strong aromas in one visit will dull your sense of smell and may influence your decision differently than if you had taken your time. More than three fragrances per trip are too many.

Don’t do your scent selections on a day when you feel ill, or are over-tired. These factors also affect the accuracy of your sense of smell, even if you aren’t struggling with congestion that directly impairs it.

Always test perfume against your own skin. Scenting directly from the bottle, from the cap of the bottle, or from a sprayed sample paper will change certain qualities of the perfume. Also, the perfume will interact uniquely with your own body chemistry when in contact with your skin—to know what a perfume will smell like on you, the only true test is to wear it.