Stick to the same category (floral, Oriental, citrus, or spicy). Don't panic—you won't have to figure it out on your own. Just tell the saleswoman that she wears, say, Thierry Mugler Angel, and she'll steer you toward a match, like Marc Jacobs Lola (with the same vanilla and musk notes, spiced up with pink peppercorn).
— From THE GUY'S GUIDE TO BUYING FRAGRANCE FOR A WOMAN at Allure.
Don’t know how true this is. No matter what you tell them, most of them have a hidden agenda and will spray the newest, most popular scent or one from the company they work for. I just stick with what I know and do my own research or really pay attention to the SA. If they tell me the truth and aren’t just looking for comission, I’ll trust them.
I agree. The people at the perfume counters at most department stores are either clueless or they are pushing the newest product.
That’s the 1st problem. They often don’t recommend anything in the same fragrance family, they just offer what they’re getting the biggest bonus for that week.
I totally thought the same thing when I read this. Oh, and I’ve had several SA’s recommend Lola, in spite of my insisting that I find it horrific. Someone at Norstrom suggesed Lola and Chloe after I bought Coromandel. Huh? Luckily they were just giving me samples, but those were things I didn’t even want samples of.
You too? Every time I go into Sephora someone tries to force Lola on me.
I was killing time before a movie about a month and a half ago sampling perfumes when I was approached by one of the sale associates. I told her that I enjoyed floral & resinous orientals and she brought me Lola. Insisted that I try Lola because it was so popular and everyone who tried it loved it — the bottle alone sends me running to the door. When I told her that I did not care for it, she made me a sample anyway. I’ve yet to spray it on.
They’re always trying to push whatever they’re getting the best commission on, their target items, and often will force ridiculous large bottles of perfume on the unsuspecting buyer who are guilt tripped into spending more.
And thus why I shop for my perfume online.
Angel > Lola? Huh?
…proving that even magazines will push you in the direction of a newly released product. To be fair, they did list EL Beautiful, and that’s been kicking around for a while (and isn’t fruity floral!)
The idea here is supposed to be that you’ll get a recommendation in the same fragrance family, but comically enough their example takes you from a woody oriental (Angel) to a floral (Lola).
My thought exactly Karin.
hahahahaha I imagine this article will lead to a lot of dissatisfied/perplexed women. Where do they get Lola from Angel?? And I know that they suggest a Malle, but if you guys recall, Frederic Malle writes a monthly column for them about fragrance. I would imagine that is the only reason they are including the Malles.
So true! He’s earned his brownie points from Allure.
She wears Angel, I say buy her Angel or one of its flankers. Or a gift certificate.
Exactly! Get her some Angel Liqueur de Parfum. Or a sweater.
If you’re a lady looking to get gifted with perfume, I say leave hints! Or send your honey a wish list. Of course, there are those who think this is tacky. I’m willing to get over that if it means getting a bottle of Amoureuse for Valentine’s Day.
Here, here! And with my honey, it’s important to leave BIG, OBVIOUS hints (so at that point you might as well leave one of those tacky lists lying around).
I had to learn this lesson the hard way LOL! My hubby shops at one place and one place only…REI outdoor store. If it ain’t there I ain’t goin’ to get it 😀 One year I flat out told him I wanted TF Tobacco Vanille and he just about had a fit until I clued him in that he could get it at the MEN’S frag counter and didn’t have to even venture into ladies territory.
Luckily by now, mine knows that I have a wish list (and thanks to Amazon’s universal button, it doesn’t include only Amazon items)… so as long as I’m smart enough to put it on there, he’s smart enough to figure it out. (For Christmas, he even figured out the coupon code I left in the notes. :D)
Or call one of us and get good advice!
I could not agree more.She likes Angel get her Angel or the bath products.Or the new Angel Liquer there are so many Angel products to buy that would make an amazing gift.Stick to what they like that way you know for sure they will love it.
What’s with the naked woman at the beginning of the slide show? Is that how we know this guide is FOR MEN? 🙂
Yes. And it’s also why we know she needs CLOTHES, not perfume 😉
thank you for that!
The CEO learned his lesson the one and only time that he bought me unsolicited perfume and I had to ask if I could take it back. I think that it was White Shoulders or L’Air du Temps. I can’t imagine that he’d get a great recommendation from any SA either – unless he’d cultivated a relationship with a good one. Now he only buys me fragrance that I out-and-out ask for. Well, now he probably wouldn’t buy me anything because he thinks that I have too much of it anyway.
I can tell you one thing – that Lola would go right back. I’ve had several SAs try to push that and the new D&Gs on me.
I buy my own, and prefer it that way. It was sweet of your dh to try though!
It was definitely sweet, but completely not me. I felt terrible asking if I could take it back, but it would have sat unused.
What is it with them and Lola & new D&Gs? Are they getting double the commission when they sell those products?
I think I must have found the ones who don’t care about commission (or don’t get one!)… last time I was shopping, I was shown Coco Mademoiselle and NR For Her.
Yeah, my mum apparently had a wonderful experience while shopping for perfume for me for Christmas. The SA suggested Coco Mademoiselle, as well.
Ugh.. Lola and Coco Mademoiselle must be the thing to flog in Sephora this month – as well as the ever-present Daisy. Even after telling her what I like (No. 5 parfum, Kilian B2B [which she had never heard of], and various Chanel Exclusifs [which she had also never heard of, despite being a self-professed perfume fanatic]), she still kept trying to get me to buy that stuff. I get that she’s paid to sell what’s available in their store, but don’t try to bond with me over a shared mania and love of all things Chanel and then not know anything. Even after I expressed a preference for Coco over Coco Mademoiselle, she kept pushing it on me.
Total contrast from my Ulta (of all places) experiences, where once the SA found out about my habit, he abandoned all pretenses of selling me anything and we chatted about our love of various scents. My NM is pretty good, too – although some of the SAs are pretty stingy until you buy something. If I went there more often, I’d pick just one SA. They’re also really upfront about the company reps – I was looking for Chanel samples and the pointed me to the Chanel rep to try and wheedle some out of her.
The fragrance dept. manager at Saks is awesome, too – sent me a full set of Kilian samples when the one (B2B) that I was looking for came in. Nordstroms is hopeless.
FWIW…several months ago at Saks in the beauty department, on a counter I saw a fax promising bonuses for every bottle of Coco Mademoiselle sold within a given time period. I can’t imagine this was an isolated incident.
I have to say I seen both the new D&G’s and Lola on sale immediately after they have been released.I think they were not big sellers.I must say that both the ads were so off in Lola and in the D&G’s it may not of created a buzz and could not compete will all the new fragrances out there.
Yeah, I got perfume as a Valentine’s Day present once…. ONCE. It was Eliz. Arden True Love – and while I deeply appreciated the sentiment on the part of The CEO (all together now, awwwwwww, wasn’t that sweet?), I didn’t care much for the scent.
I’ve been picking out my own presents for about ten years now, and I like it that way.
I’m lucky in that my fiance’ asks me what I like. He goes with me when I sample perfumes, listens to my comments, sees the comments I leave on Twitter about samples I’ve tried, knows that when in doubt Chanel is always an option.
My experience with sales associates has never been a very positive one — aside from one lovely Turkish lady at Nordstrom’s. I usually have my perfumes insulted by uneducated women who think that vintage perfume is nasty & musty & should be tossed. I’ve had light florals suggested after I mentioned that I enjoyed Shalimar — the comment I got after that was, ‘Oh no, please tell me you don’t wear that musty Opium.’ She then went on to blast Chanel No 5 — I understand if you don’t personally like it, but as someone working in fragrance at least have a little tact — and after I told her that I didn’t want her gender neutral Dolce & Gabbana perfumes or Lola she began giving me testers of perfumes that she stated she ‘hated’. Mainly, Hermes Elixer de Merveilles which I find to be delightful, though way to sell perfumes by announcing that you hate the fragrance.
Wow — not a good SA!
Indeed. It was a little appalling. If you’re working with fragrances one thing you should always understand is that people have different preferences. What one person might find dreadful another loves, so when you do learn they like a certain type of scents it’s best to not go about insulting them.
Though, I will say the worst part was hearing her talk about how her father had gifted her with Chanel No 5 for years and she had a closet full of unopened bottles that she said were, ‘old and need to be thrown away’.
Do they even train these girls to know anything at all about perfume when they hire them?
I would have been tempted to ask her if she wanted to throw them away in my bag. 🙂
Actually, when she said that and I explained to her that perfume actually was like fine wine and if kept in a cool dark place aged nicely, she said wished she had them with her because she’d give them to me.
I wouldn’t have minded taking them off her hands one bit.
K, that’s when I would have been getting an address and setting up a date to come pick them up.
Can I just say I’m going to now have nightmares about people out there hoarding unwanted bottles of Chanel? That is so disturbing to me. Right up there with finding out someone threw out my grandmother’s “old” bottles of perfume after she died. Noooooo!!!
K: Seriously, I would have bought two bottles of that D&G crap AND a Lola gift set on the spot and made a concrete appointment for her to give me all the No. 5.
J, I see her all the time in Sephora. So perhaps one of these days I’ll drop her my number and tell her I’ll take all that ‘musty’ Chanel off her hands.
It’s too bad she didn’t inherit her father’s good taste
Equally horrifying story: a friend’s neighbour mentioned she hated champagne. Someone had given her a bottle, and she threw it away, “because it got all dusty”! Ack!
Oh these poor uneducated people.
What a bad SA.Why put down the classics like that.Her job was to sell perfume not to push you to buy what she likes.And I would perfer the Hermes over whatever she recommeds any day.
I prefer to shop with my usual SA. It’s frustrating to enter a store and the SA pushes the latest hot frag that everyone wears. I had that happen with this very sweet SA who kept recommending ozone transparent or heady sweet florals every time I asked for dark/patch earthy/moss & woods or leather chypres. I left shaking my head….
I’m lucky re: to frag gifts, I give the CEO the names and business cards of the SA’s I shop with and he only shops with them. He also loves the same scents I do so he wouldn’t go too far in the wrong direction.
And first of all, shouldn’t a “Guy’s Guide” be running in GQ or Esquire or something? Huh???
Uh, yeah! But they probably don’t care over at GQ or Esquire, LOL…
Maybe they are counting on the girlfriend or wife showing their boyfriend/hubby the article?
I thought about that, but then I thought, “talk about passive-aggressive.” If you’re going to clip an article to give to your man about “how to buy fragrance” just go a micro-step further and give him a damn list of exactly what you want! 😀
Exactly. At least a wishlist with some options, that’s not so hard.
I agree, that poor girl needs a Snuggie, not Lola.
And according to the Snuggie website, they’re ideal for Night Time Pub Crawls. Or Cold Movie Theaters.
OMG, that is just an event waiting to happen! The Snuggie Pub Crawl! We have Santa Con here in Portland, where everyone does a pub crawl from here to Washington County dressed as Santa, but I think a Snuggie Pub Crawl would be even better. If they color-coordinated everything, it would look like a traveling pack of cult members.
A snuggie pub crawl would be hysterical. Snuggies with crocs — even funnier.
I could see a Snuggie Pub Crawl after a Polyphonic Spree concert – maybe everyone could match their Snuggie to the band members’ robes? lol
There’s actually some very decent suggestions in there though, past the first few pages. I can’t believe that they’ve suggested Noir Epices, from what I remember that’d be a fairly challenging choice for most women, especially the Allure target group.
They also suggest FM Therese, so yeah, there are some interesting choices. Whether or not you ought to buy Therese for your girl friend is another matter — I suppose I object to the whole premise, which is that you can safely buy perfume for someone when you don’t know what you’re doing.
As evidenced by my poor hubby – who looked bewildered that something that he thought smelled “nice” in the bottle wasn’t appealing to me on my skin. Poor guy – he has had many more successful gift purchases since then.
Hold off making the final judgment just yet, R. In my early twenties, my then-boyfriend spent a couple of months (unbeknownst to me) lurking around the fragrance counters at Eaton’s downtown, trying different fragrances on himself to try and track down a new one for me for my birthday. He knew what my fragrances smelled like on my neck, so he used that as his guide to finding something similar. My birthday fragrance? Je Reviens in extrait.
Dear man. Sometimes I think I was crazy not to marry him. 🙂
Wow, your story gave me goose bumps, what a lovely thing to do 🙂
Oh, that is sweet. But rare. And hey, someone like that doesn’t need this article anyway.
and a guy will buy the latest issue of Allure….. because?
Because of the nekkid women in the article?
Okay, so my first thought was, Are you kidding me? Angel=Lola?
Either the author knows not of what he writes or he’s being given samples from a perfume firm. To my mind, Angel would be closer to My Insolence, Wish or Nilang by Lalique.
Re: SA’s and what they push. Certainly some are hired to be just another pretty face giving out blotters and very little information. The more mature in the business have the knowledge and expertise in dealing with difficult customers. Some people that work in stores are employees of the dept. store and have a quota of what they must sell. They sell all lines so they should have a good general working knowledge of all fragrances. The demos are hired by each fragrance firm and go from store to store flogging whatever is new. Obviously some demos will know more than others about their own line and the other brands. While the store employees are on commission, the demos are not but they must account for what they sell in a day. (At least, this is the setup in my neck of the woods.) It can be an extremely frustrating business because a demo, for example, may do a very intelligent song-and-dance for a customer, giving out the right samples,etc., only to have the customer return to buy when the demo is not working. Actually, the same goes for store staff who may be on a break when the customer returns and the commisssion goes to whomever rings it up.
When selling perfumes, someone would always ask me what my favourite was. The flippant answer is, ” Who cares?” I would reply that if she wanted to know what my personal taste was out of plain curiousity, I would tell her, but if she wanted to know because she would buy the same thing, I would be hesitant to reveal it. I would tell her that she should buy what she likes, not what I like. She’s payng for it; she has to live with it. Ultimately, a customer should buy what they decide smells good from their trials. Certainly they can be shown what’s newest, but a good SA will direct him/her to the right fragrance category in any line.
I really think it is not right for some of the people in the stores to be from the brand w/o the customer knowing it. It hurts the store more than it hurts the customers, IMHO…I had a rather comical experience w/ someone in Nordstrom recently who turned out to be there just to flog the (awful) D&G Anthology. If I had not figured that out before I left, I would have thought Nordstrom had gone way downhill in their hiring.
The guy’s in luck as long as he sticks to the categories “sweet” or “trendy”, otherwise I’ve never had any luck with department store SA’s. I once told a SA at Nordstrom that I liked heavy orientals and she handed me Hanae Mori!
LOL…and when you bear in mind that Nordstrom does better than most, it’s not a pretty picture.
Even the knowledgable SA’s I’ve met don’t know half of what the average reader here does. I’ve never met a department store SA who even knew what a chypre was. Sad. But at least Nordstrom gives samples generously! I just have to pick them out.
SAs are 99% hopeless. As for the BF buying me perfume, he knows I have a detailed wish list and will provide it upon request. That way there is no risk of buying the wrong thing!
We make it even simpler: I buy my own 🙂
My husband does pretty well, I give him a list of two or three I really want (and where to get them!), then tell him to buy the one he likes best. At least I’ll be a little surprised and definitely pleased!
And he gets to smell something he likes, which is a bonus.