Choosing perfume to wear to work isn’t getting any easier. At my last office job, management sent regular emails warning staff to be sensitive about wearing perfume. Last I heard, they had to bring in a mediator for a woman in one department who couldn’t tolerate the perfumed body lotion of a woman in another department.

People may disagree, but I believe that if you choose the right scent and wear it carefully, you can pull off perfume at work. If a scent isn’t right for you, it will sit on your skin like a smear of frosting and never seem quite natural. If a perfume likes you, it absorbs into your body and reappears as a sort of natural breath from your skin. At work, it’s important not only to make sure that your perfume suits you, but that it communicates the right message. You already know better than to trot out Caron Parfum Sacré or Agent Provocateur for a board meeting. But it’s equally important to keep a lid on the Jessica McClintock or other “pretty” scents.

An effective perfume for work isn’t overly demanding…

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Sometimes, when I’m exhausted by work, or feeling anxious, or the moon is pulling strangely on my brain, I take special measures. I draw a hot bath and dig out an old magazine to keep me company in the tub. For dinner I have a bowl of pasta and maybe a generous glass of wine. And I choose a comfort fragrance to wear as the evening winds down.

A comfort scent is calming and not challenging and generally stays close to the skin. You should be able to go to bed in the scent and not be disturbed by it. With a comfort scent, you don’t feel compelled to sniff your wrists every few minutes to follow the fragrance’s development, you just relax into it and let it boost your sense of wellbeing.

For some reason, a lot of the scents that comfort me smell like food. S-Perfume 100% Love comforts me because it feels like a sheer blanket of cocoa and roses with the slight tingle of mandarin orange…

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O.K., here’s a question: How many perfumes does a woman need?

For me, the answer certainly comes to more than one. As much as I love the idea of having a signature fragrance, I could never be faithful to just one scent, no matter how fabulous. After all, I would never want to go through life listening to just one song, or drinking just one wine, or looking at just one painting.

The Fragrance Foundation recommends that women have four perfumes: a floral, an oriental, a green, and a chypre. While this recommendation probably makes their member organizations happy by touching on most fragrance categories, I have a harder time with it. A chypre, for instance, can be herbal and zingy, like Guerlain Sous le Vent or Patou Cocktail, or lush and viscous like Rochas Femme or Cartier Baiser du Dragon. (In fact, I think I could make a fragrance wardrobe of chypres alone.) I don’t see how fragrance family alone can determine how many perfumes to have.

So, how many perfumes are enough? After a great deal of thought, I’ve determined that for me the magic number is twelve…

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