Going through samples

[clayr]

I recently got a sample pack from BPAL and am trying them out. How do people here sample and how do you clean your sample area so you can try out a new sample without it being affected by the old sample?

Comments

[momijizukamori]

For BPAL, if you want to seriously sample it, you'll have to leave it on for a bit - they usually change within a few minutes as it dries, and then have some slower changes over a few hours. I usually use the wand tip on the cap, swipe it on the inside of one wrist, rub my wrists together, and then rub them on the sides of my neck.

If you're doing shorter sample tests (ie, through drydown but not really any longer) I tend to do little swipes on the inside of my arm or back of my hand. Soap and water will clear most of the oil's smell away, and having some fresh coffee beans to sniff inbetween samples helps clear your sense of smell some (and I say this as someone who hates coffee)

[clayr]

Thanks for your response. I tried Queen Alice and was impressed at how in the imp it smelt too floral* for me but when dried on my wrist, it smelt much sweeter and way less floral. Sadly the second one I tried, Two, Five & Seven, remained floral throughout. I had Queen Alice on for a couple of hours and Two, Five & Seven for something like a hour.

Heh, I work for Sbux, I always have coffee lying around.

*A scent that is irritating to me.

[momijizukamori]

Yeah, it's really interesting how some change! I like a lot of resin/musk heavy stuff and they frequently have a really sharp, acrid note in the imp which dries away in the first few minutes.

I have heard (repeatedly) that coffee is especially good for clearing nostrils beyond just the 'it has a strong scent itself' aspect, but I have no idea if there's truth to that.

[cyprinella]

I pretty much just do one a night. Dab on wrists and let it mature for a while. Gives me a better sense of it, I feel.

[white_aster]

I'm impatient, so I often will test 6 smellies at once. I just swipe increasingly further up my arms. One to the back of the hand, one to the back of the forearm, one further up on the forearm. And I agree with everyone else: I let them sit and sniffy them wet, just-dried, and then after about two hours and longer if I can. BPAL and a lot of the other perfume oil-tailers usually are layered like that, where there's multiple stages that may smell different.

And I can never get enough off to re-apply once I'm wearing something, so I just go until I run out of skin. :D Then I'll usually give things a second smell all by their own, swiped on one wrist and then rubbed together, so I can tell what two different amounts will smell like.

[synecdochic]

In addition to what everyone else has said, if you run into a scent you absolutely hate auuugh get it off get it off get it off, and it proves to be non-water-and-soap-soluable: try a rubbing alcohol wipe, or if you don't have any, try pouring a small amount of an oil (olive oil, vegetable oil, etc) over the skin area and then rinsing the oil off. (The alcohol wipe will work better, the oil is more likely to be on hand if you're not the sort of person who has alcohol wipes in your medicine cabinet.) A lot of the compounds involved are not water-soluable and if the soap doesn't get 'em, the alcohol is more likely to.

(Using cheap vodka is also possible, but then you will smell like cheap vodka, so.)

[rydra_wong]

I generally don't expect skin to be completely clean of a particular scent until I've had a bath/shower (and scents can go on evolving and changing for hours and hours anyway).

So if I want to test multiple things at once, I'll use different patches of skin on my hands/wrists/forearms, trying to keep the patches for different scents as distant from each other as possible.

Generally I'll only test two or three new scents on skin at the same time; too many and my sense of smell gets confused/fatigued.

The exception is when I already know the individual scents and I just want to remind myself of what they're like -- e.g. when I'm writing up a perfume post. *g*

[cadenzamuse]

When I am just testing samples for "try" vs. "nope nope nope," I will do 6-8 at a time and use the following spots on my arms: pulse point of wrist, crook of elbow, back of hand, halfway between crook of elbow and pulse point of wrist on my forearm. That's four spots for each arm, although I definitely smell like a mish-mash of things!

When I am testing for a longer period of time, I usually do two at a time--one on each wrist.