Depending upon your personality and preference, perfume tones range from deep, dark, and mysterious (vanillas, sandalwood, and patchoulli), to light, outgoing, airy, and romantic (citrus, rose, gardenia and jasmine). What part of your personality do you want to express and accentuate? What would you like to bring out that isn’t apparent to others most of the time?

It may be that brunettes choose deeper, darker fragrances and most blondes and redheads choose the lighter and fresher tones. But, you may be a person who just loves the deepness of sandalwood with musk and happen to be a blonde! Fragrances are fun to experiment with this way. 

Remember that perfumes have three layers:
Top note: This is what you smell immediately after applying the perfume.  It is your first impression, but is also very volatile. It fades quickly.
Middle note:  For several minutes to an hour after applying perfume, you can smell the middle note. The smell of the perfume mellows.
Base note: After thirty minutes, you smell the base note. It blends with the middle note to provide the main theme of the perfume. The base note is the richer smell.

Fragrance Dos:

•  Do allow the fragrance to come out of itself, remember, a fragrance has three layers. Be patient!
• Do change your perfume with the change of the season. In winter you may need a stronger scent as the cold may reduce the scent’s power.
• Do shop for perfume in the afternoon when your sense of smell is at its peak.
• Do wear more fragrance if you have dry skin; you will need to apply fragrances more often than those who have oily skin.
• Do apply your perfume after you have showered and dried completely. 
• Do apply perfume to your pulse points for maximum effect.

Fragrance Don’ts:

• Don’t wear another fragrance the day you are perfume shopping, it will react and not smell the same.
• Don’t overdo it. Overpowering smells can make the people around you very uncomfortable and may even cause headaches.
• Don’t spray perfume near pearls or costume jewelry. Because perfume is infused with alcohol it can strip these jewels and remove their coating.
• Don’t combine perfume with deodorant or deodorant soap. The combination smell may be unpleasant.
• Don’t buy perfume without testing it on your own skin first. Spray a little on your skin and wear it for a few hours to see how it reacts and also to determine how long it lasts.  
• Don’t rub the fragrance once applied. Rubbing damages the molecules and change the notes.

• Bright Floral: combining the traditional Single Floral & Floral Bouquet categories.
• Green: a lighter and more modern interpretation of the Chypre type, with pronounced cut grass and cucumber-like scents
• Aquatic, Oceanic, or Ozonic: the newest category in perfume history, appearing in 1991 with Christian Dior’s Dune. A very clean, modern smell leading to many of the modern androgynous perfumes. Generally contains calone, a synthetic scent discovered in 1966. Also used to accent floral, oriental, and woody fragrances.
• Citrus: An old fragrance family that until recently consisted mainly of “freshening” eau de colognes, due to the low tenacity of citrus scents. Development of newer fragrance compounds has allowed for the creation of primarily citrus fragrances.
• Fruity: featuring the aromas of fruits other than citrus, such as peach, cassis (black currant), mango, passion fruit, and others.
• Gourmand: scents with “edible” or “dessert”-like qualities. These often contain notes like vanilla, tonka bean and coumarin, as well as synthetic components designed to resemble food flavors. An example is Thierry Mugler‘s Angel.