This great question came up in the Recommend Me a Fragrance thread. I only meant to write a one-paragraph answer. I had more to say so I'm sharing it here.
Please comment on what parts are helpful or not helpful, suggestions to improve the answer,, and your opinion about adding this to the r/fragrance Wiki.
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What's Your "Type"?
Your "Type" is simply what your nose loves on your skin.
During the evolution of perfume on your skin, trust your sense of smell to know what you like about a fragrance and what you don't. Maybe you like the opening but not the ending, or you like that smokey smell but hate the cloying sweetness of the flowers or fruits. Perhaps it's too dry or sharp, too soft, too heavy or irritatingly synthetic. Or you hate smelling like watermelon, mint, cannabis, or booze. The more wears you give a perfume sample, the more you will learn the nature of the smells you like or dislike. If you only like some of a perfume's smells, it means you should try a similar but different perfume.
Fragrance Groups as "Types", and Selecting
You can pigeonhole most fragrances into one or more groups on the fragrance wheel. Within these groups are subcategories, different qualities/calibers of perfume, different formulas and compositions, and fragrances with similar notes that smell nothing like. You pick up one and you love it; you spray another with similar notes and it's immediate dislike. Unlike Bluetooth, USB, etc., perfume notes are not industry standard.
Establishing Your Perfume Benchmarks
Fragrance groups can help to organize your search. Learn the fragrance groups, then choose a readily available perfume from each group ro start the process of identifying a benchmark. A perfume benchmark is simply your personal best: the best example of a perfume your nose loves unconditionally. These differ from nose to nose.
If you choose a vintage or discontinued fragrance, chances are The Perfumed Court stocks samples. They also sell sample packs in different groups. If you're willing to leave the choice of perfumes in a group to them, this can be an easier, faster way to get started.
Sampling and Evaluating
With your samples in hand, spray one at a time on skin and smell it from opening to fade. Note which perfumes from which groups you like, and those you don't. If you like only part of a perfume, it goes in the not like pile. It doesn't mean that you don't like that fragrance group. It just means you don't like that perfume. If you like a perfume but it's not making you compulsively huff your wrist, put it in the like pile, and plan to look for something similar but better. Choose your finalists from your "like" or "love" group. Now It's time for Round Two.
Choose another perfume from each fragrance group. If you chose a designer in round one, try a niche or higher end prestige designer line this round. if you tried an aromatic fougère first, try a floral, oriental, or green fougère in round 2. Use your round two choices to eliminate less loved round one choices. Rinse and repeat.
I Can't Stop Huffing My Wrist. Who Composed This?
Early on, I began to take note of who composed the perfumes I loved. Do you like Davidoff Cool Water by Pierre Bourdon? Try Creed Green Irish Tweed, the original Kouros by Yves Saint Laurent, or Frédéric Malle French Lover. Often, a perfumer's style of composition spans across fragrance groups and is present in distinctly different perfumes. Since talented perfumers compose across many houses in their careers and use hundreds of notes, and thousands of aromachemicals, with this method you can leapfrog over brands, designer/niche/celebrity, accords, and fragrance groups. It's like the HOV or express lane.
At this point in your sampling, you may begin to discern how a fougère differs in smell and traditional structure from a chypre; and what oriental, floral, woody, leather, marine, and gourmands smell like.
Skin Chemistry
Not being an expert, anectdotally I can say that skin pH and chemistry are factors for me. I switched from showers with soap, lotions and deodorants to water-only showers and a post-shower skin biome spray that eliminates BO. I maintain my cleanliness with skin-friendly bacteria. With this switch, my skin went from boosting sweet to boosting spicy. Same skin, different chemistry.
Keeping Track
Some people write notes in a spreadsheet. I do the smell evaluation in my head, and only make two lists: of perfumes to sample, and those I already tried. I don't need to write down what I like or dislike. My brain and nose remember. If I love it, I'll write about it. If I don't, i remember the name and quickly forget the smell.
For those who must document, Basenotes has a handy tool. It's a place to create a personal database of your fragrances: perfumes you own, want, are testing, etc.; note your frequency of wear, and rate them on some criteria. Fragrantica has similar but uses images.
How Helpful Are Perfume Notes?
Notes don't often help me. Looking at perfume notes is like reading the liner notes on a vinyl record or CD. They're colorful, but they don't tell you anything about the music. They're just a back story. You have to listen to the music to get a sense of what you like. And you have to smell perfume. I rarely discuss or analyze the notes in a tune and perfume is no different. Like jazz, EDM, classical or blues, I find fragrance group classifications more helpful.
Looking at perfume notes didn't really help me when I was new to this. Now that I'm a few years into it, I still don't know what I'm smelling half the time. When I do recognize a note, it's because I smelt a crap ton of perfumes. Through blunt force smell repetition, I can recognize a common note or accord from one perfume to another. It's rote memorization 101 for the nose.
Often as not, when I recognize a note, I realize I am identifying it by its place in the pyramid, what role it plays, and its relationship to the notes next to it. The exact same process is used in color field paintings and studies.
Perfume Reviews are Goldmines
More helpful than looking at the perfume notes is reading reviews from trusted sources.. This includes peer reviews in Fragrantica or Basenotes, and expert fragrance review blogs that describe a fragrance in ways you can almost smell. Reading reviews, certain details come into focus. Blog reviewers often mention a similar fragrance or one in the same family.
I don't watch videos because their short format can't accommodate a detailed review. Videos, even the best ones, are more of a summary. Many just rank the perfume to some personal standard or checklist that's at best arbitrary and at worst, woefully incomplete.
Scent of The Day
Another fine place to lift perfume ideas is the daily SOTD thread. I still need to triangulate with other opinions, and go to peer and expert reviews to gain consensus. One person's opinion is not enough.
These are truly the only "methods" I use to select fragrances to try. Classifying by fragrance group and composer helped me to target perfumes I might like among the countless thousands on the market. Everything after that is a process of elimination, trial and error, and smell memory.
Resources:
To find names of fragrances within a fragrance group, Symrise has a genealogy chart that's Fragrance Wheel 2.0.. It was developed as an app, but as far as I know, is only available on the web.
Fragrantica is very helpful. On a perfume's information page, the first thing I look at is not the notes, it's the accords and the group.. Group is a live link that takes you to examples of other fragrances in that group. On Fragrantica, you can learn about different notes and fragrance families, search by note, composer (nose), design house and much more.
On Basenotes, Claire Vukcevic is an award winning fragrance writer whose articles I love to read. She is also a frequent peer reviewer. Here are lists of perfumes she recommends people should sample:
A short list of other blogs I read:
I review at my blog, The Perfume Baby. But you can just search the subreddit by "Review" to find my and many other fine reviews.
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TL;DR
What you love to wear is your "type". The only way to discern which fragrances you enjoy wearing and find your perfume loves is to testwear a lot of fragrances on skin. I know of no quizzes, surveys, checklists, or profiles that can magically tell you what perfume or type is for you. Finding fragrances you love to wear is a numbers game and a continual smell test.
To help organize your search and selection, perfumes can be classified by fragrance family, and subclassified by accords, and composers. I learned of perfumes through this, trusted recommendations, and verifying those recommendations through reviews, and to get a fuller picture.
Of these, I learned which perfumes I loved by smelling them, a lot of them. A growing olfactory/mental database, trial and error, and process of elimination were how I discovered my loves.
Your only type is, ideally, what you love to smell. Most of us have more than one fragrance love, from different fragrance groups.
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