office perfume

Being pleasant and being tolerable are different tests

A scent met once is judged on whether it is nice. A scent met continuously is judged on whether it becomes tiring, and those two questions produce different winners. Sweet and dense compositions pass the first and fail the second, because sugar and resin build up in the perception of anybody who cannot walk outside. Dry, green and herbal structures do the reverse: unremarkable on introduction and easy to sit beside all day.

• Pleasant and tolerable are separate measurements. A shop assistant meets your fragrance once; a colleague meets it four hundred times.
• Sweetness compounds. What was warm at nine is heavy by three, without anything having changed.
• Dry structures recede. Fading into the background is the entire specification for something worn to work.

Recirculated air has no exit

An open plan floor, a meeting room and a shared car all have the same characteristic: the air comes back around. Whatever went into it at nine is partly still there at eleven, joined by whatever got added at the lunch break. Sealed buildings make this worse and small closed rooms make it worse again, which is why the same bottle can be unremarkable in a corridor and overwhelming in a booth.

• Small rooms concentrate everything. A one to one in an enclosed space is a completely different environment from a busy floor.
• Sealed buildings recycle rather than clear. Modern offices are not designed to flush anything out quickly.
• Meetings hold you at arm's length for an hour. That is the distance and duration to design around.
• How much to apply is a separate question. Dosing is covered in full on the eau de parfum page.

Fabric remembers a week, not a day

Chairs, jackets and lanyards absorb fragrance and release it slowly, so what a colleague notices is rarely one morning's application. It is an accumulation. A wool coat worn every day through winter carries residue from every scent that has been near it, which is the real explanation for a fragrance that seems to grow stronger across a working week while you are certain you have changed nothing.

• Upholstered chairs hold it. The seat you use every day is quietly building a record of the year.
• Wool keeps it longest. Coats and scarves outlast shirts by a wide margin.
• Air a jacket between wears. A night on a hanger somewhere with moving air resets most of it.

The colleagues who never mention it

A share of any workplace has a real reason to prefer no fragrance at all, whether migraine, asthma, pregnancy or plain sensitivity, and most of them will never bring it up because it is an awkward thing to say to somebody you sit next to every day. Some employers have a written policy and many more have an unspoken one. This is better known in advance than discovered later.

• Check whether a policy exists. Healthcare settings, laboratories and some open plan employers have one in writing.
• Light is not the same as absent. These are the low impact end of the range, not a fragrance free option.
• If it can be named from across a desk, it is too much. A free test that settles the question in one morning.
• The lighter families belong here. Dry woods and the citrus group over cedar are the reliable choices.