If you’re reading this, chances are, you’ve got a bottle of perfume somewhere in your house and you might be wondering if you’ve bought the right perfume and if it’s what you think it is. For some reason, the first thing that pops into people’s heads when they’re thinking about perfumes is this incredibly fragrant, oil-based substance that they’re supposed to spray on their person, and that’s not entirely wrong. The less thought about the form of perfume that we often overlook; alcohol. Let me explain.
You see, most perfumes in the modern age are either oil-based, which basically means that they’re made with an oil base that is both colorless and odorless, which makes a lot of sense since you’d want the oil to act like a carrier which helps to deliver the fragrance that you have so painstakingly crafted without it having to affect the fragrance in any kind of way. These oil-based perfumes are commonly called “skin scents” thanks to their ability to intensify their scents when your body heat increases. These scents are also kept very close to the skin, thanks to the nature of the oil itself, which means that it projects the fragrance more subtly and is limited to people in your close proximity. Think about oil-based perfumes as whispering, rather than screaming. This is why oil-based perfumes would normally come in the form of a bottle with something to help you dab it onto your skin instead of a spray bottle.
Alcohol-based perfumes, on the other hand, like it’s namesake suggests, is made with the use of alcohol as a base. In these perfumes, unlike its oil-based brethren, the fragrance itself is mixed directly with the alcohol. The idea behind this type of perfume is that, as alcohol tends to evaporate at room temperature, it will take along the fragrant molecules along with it. Making perfumes this way allows the wearer to experience different facets of the fragrance that they bought. It’s no big secret that alcohol-based perfumes, thanks to how alcohol itself reacts to the compounds, allows the wearer to experience the top, middle, and base notes of a perfume, something that is unique to alcohol-based perfume, and not something that you would find in other forms of perfume. This is why alcohol-based perfumes would normally come in spray bottles as normally, a tiny spritz would be more than enough to give you the scent that you need.
So which one is better? Well, it’s not that cut and dry, you see, fragrance, like clothes and music, is a matter of preference. If you enjoy a more subtle, more subdued perfume that allows only those in your immediate proximity to notice, then the oil-based perfumes would be a good fit for you. If you would, however, enjoy a perfume that slowly introduces you to the different facets that make it up, then you’re probably going to want to look at alcohol-based perfumes instead. In either case, however, you should always pick perfumes that you like, perfumes that make you feel like a million bucks, because at the end of the day, the only person who will enjoy it most, is you.