There’s something we increasingly want from our fragrances: stamina. Long-lasting perfumes is now the one of the most popular queries relating to scent.
Never have the lyrics of Lionel Ritche been so relevant, because many of you want your perfume to keep going all night long - and into the next day too.
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Firstly, let’s look at how we got to now. Before the 20th century, perfume was long-lasting, and that’s partly because it wasn’t really worn on the skin.
Instead, from about the Renaissance scent would be impregnated in items like leather gloves. As leather is porous, there are more nooks and crannies to hold onto scent molecules, and so the fragrance would transmit over long periods.
Wealthy people would also wear solid pomanders of their clothing which were orbs holding scented wax and incorporating scented resins like frankincense. They’d even conceal scented sachets under their clothes or in their homes.
Even up to the 1940s it would be usual to douse a handkerchief in perfume instead of the skin. And in the 1920s and 1930s there were scents specially designed to be sprayed directly onto animal fur coats (partly to mask the fur smell but they were also promoted as boosting your allure).
All these solid or fabric-based scents meant a steady, long-lasting trail with less need for constant replenishment. Scents a hundred years ago could be incredibly intense and powerful, often with high longevity, especially as many of them incorporated powerful materials deriving from the genital glands of animals like Civet cats (materials which come from animals are very rarely used in perfumery now and not in any of Diem’s).
Then as the 20th century progressed we increasingly wanted to wear perfume on our skin, especially as scent became an expression of our identity and increasingly associated with sex and seduction.
So what happens when you spray a scent and how does this relate to longevity? Let’s start with the basics.
Fragrances which don't last a long time are generally more volatile. Everything that has a smell is volatile. This means the odour can escape its liquid state through evaporation and disperse in the air.
Volatility is a good thing. Without it nothing can travel up our nostrils to reach the receptors at the top of our noses, and we wouldn’t smell anything.
As a general rule, heavier and larger molecules are less volatile. They need more energy to get them moving. Think about the effort of trying to lob a sofa over a volleyball net compared to an inflatable ball.
In the smell world, something like olive oil equals low volatility. If you poured some into a bowl and left it on a table you probably wouldn’t be able to smell it from a few steps away. Start to heat it in a pan to give it some thermal or kinetic energy? Than you would.
Citrus peel oil on the other hand has high volatility. Think about how you can smell someone peeling a tangerine from across the room. The reason a lot of flowers have high volatility scents is so the aroma can get into the air to attract pollinators like bees and butterflies. Night blooming flowers like Moonflower emit especially volatile substances because in the dark pollinators have to be guided in other ways to find them.
But too much volatility can mean a perfume that doesn’t last. A scent only containing light molecules wouldn’t perform very well because everything will evaporate far too quickly.
In order to blend a scent that lasts all day, perfumers need to test a couple of things so they can create formulations containing molecules of lots of different sizes and weights. This way you get a beautifully smooth and staggered evaporation journey. This is known in the trade as the evaporation curve. It’s why we often (though not always) smell the buzzy, fizzy top notes in a perfume, first like citrusses or fruity materials, and then later on notice the more resinous, woody materials at the base, which typically stay around for longer.
Many of these long-lasting materials helpfully originate close to the ground which makes it easier to remember them.
Ingredients which come from trees as resins like frankincense, plant roots and bulbs like vetiver root (from a type of grass) and orris (from the bulb of an iris flower) are especially long-lasting.
How do perfumers find out how long something lasts? It’s time to introduce one more fancy term into the mix: substantivity. Essentially how the trade understands and talks about a perfume or ingredient’s lasting power.
When perfumers are trained they not only have to remember what everything smells like on its own, in different levels of dilution, and in combination with hundreds of other materials. They also have to remember a material’s substantivity.
The way they learn is available to all of us. They dip a smelling strip into the material and leave it to dry. Then they go back to it now and then to find out if it still has a scent and if so how strong it is. This is why we provide spray cards with our discovery sets, so you can refer back to your scents while testing them.
Some materials have very low substantivity, and have buzzed off after just an hour on a strip. Other materials have high substantivity. Some of the longest-performing are naturals like cedar wood, together with Evernyl which has a mossy smell, Ambrox, which is an amber-smelling material, and Iso E Super, which features heavily in modern perfumery and which millions of us have come across countless times without having ever known what it’s called.
So part of the equation is that it’s all about that base. As with music, base underpins a structure and gives it support.
But there’s a tradeoff: a song with too much base means you can’t as easily hear the melody. There’s no point having a scent that lasts for a week if nobody can detect it. In fragrance there is a constant balancing act between aiming for longevity and something you can smell.
Sandalwood for example is composed of huge molecules that don’t really want to come off your skin. So perfumers have to find top note materials that have the right odour to help the sandalwood get moving and be more effervescent - a bit like cheerleaders holding up the star dancer, and hoping to God they don’t all fall over.
Perfume, it turns out, is all about support structures and networks.
Fragrance with great lasting power have a formulation in which the lighter molecules are fixed into place so they don’t evaporate too quickly.
To picture how this works, let’s imagine we're at a ballroom dancing competition. The dancers are in pairs, all moving around the stage at the same time. You’re in the crowd, watching. Nobody’s moving well and some contestants are starting to leave (i.e. evaporating).
Then, magically, Beyonce walks in. She heads to the middle of the floor, starts dancing alone and owns it. As you wonder what this has to do with perfume, the only thing you need to know so far is that Beyonce is the anchor ‘fixative’ material and all the dance pairs are the lighter perfume molecules.
Beyonce gets everyone extremely inspired and fired up. One person in each pair becomes positively charged and the other negatively charged. This split in charge means they can separate and whirl around each other with unrelenting energy, held in place in opposition to each other on the dance floor. They keep going on and on. It’s the best dance show you’ve ever seen.
To put this back into reality, fixative molecules work because they’ve got a charged area that links with the charges of smaller molecules and binds them, to slow down their evaporation.
Natural materials like patchouli, an earthy, rooty smell from a mint-like plant, can be sensational fixatives, but perfumers also use synthetic materials, or aroma chemicals. Patchouli, for example, is already a complex mixture in its own right, with lots of nuance, because it derives from a plant with dozens of aromatic compounds.
In contrast, a synthetic with one type of molecule, like Iso E Super or Ambrox, can more easily be added to a fragrance and not harm the overall odour the perfumer’s creating, or add a totally different dimension. It’s not that synthetics don’t smell of anything or are bland, but that these fixatives don’t have to bring all the other things to the party that some naturals would.
Even if you don’t have lots of heavy molecules, by mixing a cocktail of several different more volatile molecules they share the surface area between them, resulting in less evaporation.
However: there’s a lot we still don’t know about scent longevity. For example in perfumery some chemical reactions between materials happen before you put them into the final formula. One of the most famous is the creation of a Schiff Base. This is where you combine two particular ingredients which will react together, heat them, and some condensation forms. There is then a chemical reaction that creates a new fragrance ingredient. It smells different to the original two materials.
A Schiff Base is really powerful and helps to create a long-lasting fragrance. However, in some cases, once the perfumer has made the final perfume, all is not what it seems. In some cases, chemists have analysed the fragrance, and have been surprised to see the base has gone and is back as two individual chemicals.
At some point we have to do a massive shrug. There are more than a few mysteries remaining when it comes to scent longevity, which hopefully we’ll uncover in the years ahead.
A tool within a perfumer’s box for boosting a scent’s longevity is the final concentration of fragrance.
Perfumes are typically blended at anything from 5% up to 25% scent within a base that includes a form of alcohol and typically water.
It makes sense that the more of the volatile compounds there, the longer they take to evaporate - a bottle at 20% performs better than ten percent. Generally, the lightest concentrations from 5% would be labelled as an Eau de Cologne or Eau de Toilette, while anything up to 20% cent is an Eau de Parfum or Parfum.
It’s not a hard and fast rule, and it’s possible to have an Eau de Toilette from one brand which lasts longer than a more concentrated Eau de Parfum from another.
The other confusing factor is that Eau de Cologne can describe a style of scent (usually citrussy and herbal), as well as a concentration. A scent could be a cologne as far as ingredients are concerned, and it could be at a high concentration.
At Diem we blend most of our scents at 20% as we believe this is an optimal concentration for longevity. Some of our fragrances with delicate top notes are boosted to 25% so we can ensure they are as long-lasting as their peers. We don’t talk about individual percentages, as we don’t believe more is always better or higher quality, and we want to make it easier to pick up and enjoy a perfume, not add layers of unnecessary detail.
At Diem our view is that your scent should work hard for you, because our perfumers have prioritised the ingredients and formulations that support long-lasting perfumes.
Skin, with its complex and changeable chemistry, is an amazing carrier for scent. But it’s inconsistent.
People of course have different skin types on their bodies as well as their faces - some dryer, and some oilier - which affects how the scent evaporates and how long it lasts.
Dry or dehydrated skin often will experience scent evaporating more quickly. Skin that's well hydrated means slower evaporation.
A tip for supporting long-lasting scent is to put on an unscented lotion before your perfume which contains ingredients like hyaluronic acid or glycerin.
Vaseline and very gloopy petroleum type ointments are less helpful. These are occlusives, and they can trap perfume so effectively and you might not smell it quite so much.
You could also spray scent on different parts of the body. Lots of us put perfume on our wrists as the have blood vessels close to the surface. This makes them a tiny bit warmer which helps a perfume to bloom. But warmth = faster evaporation.
So try putting some perfume on covered skin as well (for example on your arm underneath your sleeves). This helps to trap the scent as there’s less airflow to give the molecules the kinetic energy they need to escape.
Clothes are usually better than skin at holding onto perfume. For a start we’re not washing our clothes, especially outerwear, every day. To boost scent lasting power you can spray your scent onto something that’s not skin. Try fabric.
Instead of a handkerchief, which may feel a bit too retro, you could try your favourite scarf, coat or jumper. Just make sure you go for a darker-coloured piece of clothing and test first somewhere discreet in case of staining. In any case choose a clear scent rather than a liquid with a strong amber colour.
Porous materials like wool are particularly great at holding onto scent. You may find your perfume lasts on a scarf for a week, even up to a month if you apply liberally. It can be lovely to head out and get a waft of your perfume unexpectedly, a sort of olfactory boomerang effect.
Another great option is hair, which is a more porous structure with cuticles covering the shaft, and lots of nooks in which the perfume can lodge.
The weather affects how long-lasting a perfume is, which is why scents can smell different on hot versus cold days.
This of course isn’t something we can control, but you can try some experiments, especially if you take your Diem perfume on holiday in a different climate.
In a cold temperature, perfume evaporates more slowly, and we also might not smell it in as pronounced a way as there’s less kinetic energy to help the molecules escape.
Hot temperatures support fast evaporation, which is why perfume often seems to bloom beautifully on holiday, and why we suddenly notice lots of aromas when spring time arrives and our streets start to warm up. Odours are being nudged more to stir and escape.
What we ideally want is slightly higher humidity to get our perfume to last. In a humid environment with lots of water in the air, there is a higher vapour pressure. This pressure makes it more challenging for scented molecules to evaporate. Imagine a room packed full of helium balloons. You walk in, holding just one balloon. You’re really keen for your balloon to fly up to the ceiling. But there are so many other balloons bobbing about, yours doesn’t really get anywhere. It hovers. So if we want an amazingly long-lasting perfume it sounds like we need to hang out in a warm, humid rainforest.
At Diem our view is that your scent should work hard for you, because our perfumers have prioritised the ingredients and formulations that support long-lasting perfumes. By all means try out some of these tips but ultimately: relax and we’ll provide scents that we’ve tested for strong lasting power.
