Robin, the creator of this blog, has written many times: “…my perfume collection will outlive me.” Come to find out, she’s probably right; or at least her current collection will see her into grandmother-hood (keep in mind her child is only 9 years old) and the receipt of her first Social Security check. I decided to figure out the “life expectancy” of my own, much smaller, perfume collection and the results are shocking.
To start, I used three empty 50 ml perfume bottles, by three different perfume companies, and filled the bottles with water and sprayed till they were empty. The average number of sprays in a 50 ml bottle is 735 (double that figure for a 100 ml bottle of fragrance). We all know there are 365 days in a year, so a 50 ml bottle of fragrance will provide a person (who wears that fragrance every day and sprays once) TWO years worth of perfume. Of course, most of us wear more than one spray of scent; if you wear two sprays a day, every day, from a 50 ml bottle of perfume, that single bottle will last a year…
In the August 2008 issue of GQ, there is an expensive six-page advertising spread for AXE’s new Proximity fragrance line; these ad pages, showing model-actors wearing not only AXE body fragrance but clothes by Dolce & Gabbana, Paul Smith and Tom Ford, are positioned right before a GQ grooming article by Chandler Burr on nice-smelling deodorants called Give Up the Funk. Interestingly, among Burr’s deodorant picks (Mark Birley, $29, HM by Hanae Mori, $20, Tokyo by Kenzo, $18) is a plug for AXE Dry Sharp Focus — $5. 
