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ORDER PROCESSING IS DELAYED UP TO 1 WEEK AS VIOLET GREY TRANSITIONS TO A NEW WAREHOUSE

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ORDER PROCESSING IS DELAYED UP TO 1 WEEK AS VIOLET GREY TRANSITIONS TO A NEW WAREHOUSE

THE PRO GUIDE TO SCENT LAYERING

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The Violet Files

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Lessons

LESSONS:

THE PRO GUIDE TO

SCENT LAYERING

Perfume fidelity has lately given way to a hyper-personal mix, improvised on skin. Industry experts share their scent-layering tips.

Written by
Jamie Rosen
Photography by
Vicen Akina
VIOLET GREY
VIOLET GREY

Once upon a time, locking in your signature scent was like finding a soulmate. You searched and searched for the one—and once you found it, you didn’t stray. You and that singular perfume entered rooms together and jointly left an impression, each indistinguishable from the other. 

There were always iconoclasts, of course: people whose love of fragrance necessitated a buffet of options for every season and mood. “As Estée Lauder once put it, ‘You wouldn’t wear an evening gown out to lunch,’” says Linda Levy, president of the Fragrance Foundation and a member of VIOLET GREY’s Committee of Industry Experts. The famed beauty entrepreneur understood that fragrance choice was best tailored to the occasion. Today, a new generation is going a step further, leaning into the era’s hyper-personalization by wearing more than one perfume at a time, or scent layering. This, Levy explains, is yet another form of self-expression, an exercise in someone “making things their own.”

 

“There are two schools of thought about layering,” says Daniel Patrick Giles, founder of the Los Angeles–based fragrance brand Perfumehead. One believes a complex composition should stand on its own and not be mixed; the other welcomes experimentation, a chance for fragrances to come into conversation. When Giles launched his line exclusively at VIOLET GREY in 2022, he didn’t imagine layering Perfumehead scents on top of one another, but visitors to the Melrose Place shop started doing it organically. “People would say, ‘I want to create my own custom scent—what can I layer with what?’” he recalls. “It was a lot of trial and error.” He knew he was onto something when he started spraying the goes-with-everything musk Canadian Tuxedo underneath other scents, like the soft and spicy Alone Together, or Moonflower, heady with jasmine and tuberose. The line’s new perfume oil extracts, available in four best-selling scents, offer even more opportunity to play. “There’s something very personal about an oil,” Giles says, describing the tactile quality of a cool rollerball on skin. The shift in format delivers a “scent that is not overpowering but has different dimensions popping up,” he says. “And the next day you can still smell them.” 

 

Here, three experts—Levy, Giles, and master perfumer Rodrigo Flores-Roux—offer a primer on the art of the mix.

 

VIOLET GREY

CONSIDER LIKE-MINDED NOTES

For scent-layering beginners, Giles suggests looking for some commonality, be it in the style of fragrance or a shared ingredient. “Xanaboud is an oud laced with rose, and Reine des Anges has Turkish and Moroccan rose,” he says. When worn together, “the whole rose really starts to blossom, and you get this really interesting combination.” This kind of direct layering works best when you apply heavier scents first, such as those rooted in amber, musk, or woody notes. Lighter fragrances go on top, giving the more ephemeral citruses, florals, and green notes space to show up.

LEAN INTO A FAVORITE

For people who resolutely adore one scent, personalization can follow the vertical approach. “I use the same perfume in different formats—body wash, body butter, oils, eau de parfum—and it is magnificent,” Levy says of this type of scent layering, with a uniformity likely to pass muster with purists. The range of products means that the scent unfolds at different cadences, like an evolving olfactive cloud. “It allows fragrance to permeate throughout your entire day.”

EXPERIMENT WITH PLACEMENT

Another option is spot layering: placing a particular scent on a wrist and another on the neck, say. “I have a friend who will wear one fragrance on his left side, and one on his right side,” Giles says. “Depending on what he wants people to smell, he’ll lean one way or the other when hugging them.” This can reveal two facets of a personality—even a Victor/Victoria sense of play. It’s in keeping with a shift toward maximalist scents. “People expect strength, something long-lasting, diffusion,” says Flores-Roux, a master perfumer and vice president of fine fragrance at Givaudan. It’s little surprise that a more-is-more trend in fragrance might manifest as layering.

In the end, there are no real rules. There is room to cocktail two—maybe even three—scents to suit your taste, all while appreciating a standalone, rigorous eau de parfum. “Each perfume is a world,” says Flores-Roux. He understands how carefully fragrances are constructed, turning to architecture as a metaphor when it comes to layering. “There are things that will be compatible,” he says, calling to mind a seamless second story added onto a house. Other times, stylistic discretion is warranted: “You don’t want to put Notre-Dame de Paris on top of Fallingwater.”

 

VIOLET GREY

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