The Sneaky Reason Your Favorite Scent May Change Over Time

Our favorite perfumes are actually connected to our needs at that time in our life. “The reason is because we all have different comfort zones and what we need at that moment,” says Yang. “Your favorite fragrance now may not even be something that you liked three months ago or two years ago. Especially because pre-COVID, we all had very different states of mind and a different lifestyle.”

And as Yang told us, our cravings tell us exactly what our needs are: “Especially the people that are holistic-minded like me would say, ‘If you’re craving something spicy, go eat spicy foods,’ because your body knows what it needs,” says Yang. “This is actually very related to energy and chakras. If someone is really into neroli and ginger at that moment, it’s because your second chakra is thirsty and you’re looking for that energy.”

Additionally, our changing perfumes may come down to the notes and ingredients itself. 

“And when we were working with ingredients—especially with naturals—it’s very much like the food, wine, and spirit world, your harvest from a year, two years, is very, very different,” she says. “The cost is different. The quality is different. The materials that get yielded from batch to batch vary a lot.”

And the changes to the ingredients are so nuanced, it may even come down to the soil: “If you have an oil from one farm in one region of the world, and then all of a sudden—because of climate change, the supplier chain got disrupted, or the farm got bought up or went out of business—you have to buy from another supplier of the oil. It may smell similar to number one, but there will be differences because of the terroir,” says Yang. “It’s basically like wine: You have to think about the variations of regional climate and how they process the materials.”