Perfume can allure or it can overpower. But on your wedding day, your perfume should be as perfect as the rest of the day.
Sarah Horowitz, founder of Sarah Horowitz Parfums in Westlake Village, has worked in the perfume industry for nearly 20 years, and she knows how to select a scent. At her boutique, she creates custom fragrances for clients and develops her own perfume collections. But there’s more to smelling good than meets the eye, Horowitz said.
“Fragrance uses built-in notes, like music,” she said; like a three-part chord, a scent consists of a bottom, middle and top note. “As a perfumer, you’re trying to create harmony.”
That harmony comes from blending different smells while working at what’s called a fragrance organ. With shelves that hold upward of 300 oils and fragrances, a fragrance organ looks like a large desk with tiny bottles in place of papers and files. To develop something new, the perfumer mixes, matches and smells until the scent comes out right.
Oils and fragrances are two different things, Horowitz said. “Fragrance is developed in a lab, and oil is natural,” she explained.
Creating fragrances allows the perfumer to work with scents that are found in nature but don’t yield an essential oil — gardenias are an example.
“Florals are popular,” she said, adding that “fragrance gives you” the ability to work with them.
To create a custom fragrance, Horowitz offers a two-hour Fragrance Journey. When working with a bride, Horowitz begins by asking about her history, her relationship and special memories she may have.
“Everything [the customer says] will trigger a scent, it will trigger notes. As she’s talking, I start pulling oils.”
Horowitz then whittles the oils and fragrances down to about five or 10 and, from there, creates a customized scent.
With or without a professional perfumer on hand, it’s important to focus on the feelings a scent evokes. Perfume may be one of the few things that will help a bride feel grounded and calm. A clean, fresh scent can offer a moment of relaxation, and a scent that is reminiscent of happy times can be centering.
Most importantly, though, the scent should feel personal. “On your wedding day, you want something that will make you feel like you,” Horowitz said.
And as much as perfume can be used to conjure up memories, it can also be used to create new ones.
Smell is the only sense that connects directly to the part of the brain that houses memory, Horowitz said.
“All other senses go through the neocortex,” she said, which means that the sense of smell has the most direct line to the brain. The connection between smell and memory, therefore, happens more immediately than with any of the other four senses.
That said, perfume can be a powerful tool in jogging wedding-day memories for years to come. Horowitz suggests waiting to wear the bridal perfume until the big day, and then wearing it throughout the honeymoon and possibly again on an anniversary.
“You are basically programming yourself to remember,” she said.
To keep the scent fresh over the course of the day, Horowitz suggests bringing along a purse spray. In order to keep the fragrance intact for as long as possible before reapplication becomes necessary, apply it to pulse points: behind the ears, on the wrists, behind the knees, on the small of the back and, most importantly, in the cleavage.
“It’s by your heart,” Horowitz said.
Fragrance should also be applied to your hair. If the perfume is in the form of a pure oil, just a drop worked through the hair will do. If it’s a spray, Horowitz suggests spraying it on the hands, clapping to get rid of the alcohol, then running your hands through your hair.
For brides who want to create a custom scent, Horowitz’s Fragrance Journey runs $350 to $1,000. If that’s out of your price range, Horowitz offers an online Fragrance Journey in which customers fill out a questionnaire and can purchase three samples of the resulting custom scent for $45.
Among her fragrance collections, one of Horowitz’s most popular perfumes is called Perfect Veil, which she describes as “sheer, soft, uncomplicated and unobtrusive.”
The most important piece of advice Horowitz offers for selecting the right perfume is simple: “It should be something that smells really good and makes you happy.”
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.