SHOP BY PERSONALITY

Who are you shopping for this holiday season? A picky wife? Your active mother? A homebody sister?

Choosing gifts for friends and loved ones can be a daunting task; and with overtly personalized gifts such as fragrances, it can be even more nerve-wrecking trying to find the right products to suit the tastes, personalities and styles of those you’re buying for.

If you know who they are but not what they like and want to avoid the barrage of sorting sample sticks at the end of a shopping day where your nose hurts as much as your toes, you have two tools right here at your fingertips to help you solve your scent shopping woes: MICHAEL EDWARDS’ FRAGRANCES OF THE WORLD database and PERFUME.COM’S Gift Guide— both are designed to ensure you get the perfect gift for the right person, every time.

There are a few tricks of the trade you can use in order to become the proper fragrance fairy this holiday. Start by stalking out and forming ideas about the kinds of notes and olfactory families your loved ones may favor: if they comment on the sweet aroma of garden roses and lilies, at the warm vanillic scent of freshly baked cookies, or at the smoky aromatic clouds from a sandalwood incense.

If you’re still not sure, try taking a peek at their existing collection— but be weary of just buying them the same well-used fragrance to “top up their collection”, which takes away from the holiday surprise, and is like the Christmas equivalent of refilling the fridge with milk!

Once you have a direction in which to follow your nose, try doing simple comparative tests between perfumes that are based on similar note combinations. Try searching through other available scents in the same fragrance family as well: such as woody, oriental, fruity, citrusy, aldehydic, and fougère scent groups.

Start shopping!

By Kiki D
Published November 3rd, 2009 14:56

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