Longevity is the most contested word in fragrance marketing. It is the most contested because it is the most measurable. There is a number — hours on skin, hours on a blotter, hours until the drydown. There is a metric — silage, projection, sillage, trail. There is a lab test. And yet, when we asked six practitioners — perfumers, evaluators, a nose, a fragrance writer, and a chemist — to name the fragrance they had recently smelled that did what its marketing said it would, we got six answers, and six different definitions of longevity.
What follows is a transcription of those conversations, edited for length and ordered by clinical convention rather than chronology.
1. Bertrand Duchesne — Perfumer, Grasse
What does longevity mean to you?
Longevity, in my practice, is not about hours. It is about what the hours contain. A fragrance that smells the same at hour eight as it did at hour one has, in my opinion, a problem — it means the fragrance has not evolved. The longevity I am interested in is a fragrance that, at hour one, smells like the top; at hour three, smells like the heart; and at hour eight, smells like the base, in a way that still makes sense as a single idea.
What fragrance, recently, did that for you?
A small line out of a Swiss house I will not name. The fragrance is an eau de parfum concentration, 22%, and the base is a heavy sandalwood from a sustainable plantation in New Caledonia. The top is a green mandarin. The heart is an iris pallida. At hour one, it is a mandarin. At hour three, it is an iris. At hour eight, it is a sandalwood. But the sandalwood at hour eight still carries, in a way I cannot name, the memory of the mandarin from hour one. That is longevity.
What is the industry’s mistake?
The industry’s mistake is to equate longevity with concentration. Eau de parfum at 22% does not necessarily last longer than an eau de toilette at 12%, if the eau de toilette has been built with better base materials. Concentration is a number. Longevity is a chemistry.
2. Hélène Voss — Fragrance evaluator, Paris
What does longevity mean to you?
I evaluate maybe eight hundred fragrances a year. I evaluate them on a blotter, which is the way the industry has evaluated for a hundred years. The blotter does not lie. A blotter, in a temperature-controlled room, will tell you, at hour one, hour three, hour six, and hour twenty-four, what is still there.
What fragrance, recently, did that for you?
A new oud out of a Qatari house. I will not name it because the line is not yet launched. The oud is Cambodian, not Laotian — which is, I think, why it lasts. Cambodian oud, in my experience, has a more resinous, less animalic profile than Laotian oud, and the resinous notes hold in the base longer. On my blotter, at hour twenty-four, the oud is still visible. On most ouds, at hour twenty-four, what is left is the synthetic musk, and the oud is gone.
What do you make of the marketing?
The marketing is too obsessed with projection — the trail the fragrance leaves in a room. Projection is not longevity. A fragrance can project enormously for two hours and be gone by hour three. Or it can project almost not at all and still be on the skin at hour twelve. The industry sells projection because projection is what the customer can smell in the department store. The customer cannot, in the department store, evaluate longevity. So the industry markets projection.
3. Marco Conti — Independent nose, Florence
What does longevity mean to you?
Longevity, in the modern sense, is a problem we have created. We did not have a longevity problem in perfumery until the 1990s, when IFRA restrictions began to limit the use of natural musks, certain animalic bases, and a number of fixative materials that had been used for a hundred years. The fixatives are what made fragrances last. When we removed the fixatives, we removed the longevity. The industry has spent thirty years trying to put the longevity back, with synthetic substitutes.
Some of the substitutes work. Most do not.
What fragrance, recently, did that for you?
A new white-floral out of a French house. The house has used, in the base, a synthetic musk called Habanolide at a high concentration. The musk is doing the work that natural musk, in the 1970s, would have done. On skin, the white floral — tuberose, gardenia, a little orange flower — holds for ten hours. Without the Habanolide, it would have held for four.
Anything you would ban?
The phrase all-day wear. There is no such thing. The industry knows there is no such thing. The customer knows there is no such thing. The marketing knows there is no such thing. The phrase persists because it is the only phrase that converts in the department store.
4. Yuki Tanaka — Fragrance writer, Tokyo
What does longevity mean to you?
In Japan, longevity in fragrance is evaluated differently than in Europe. The Japanese customer is, by European standards, exceptionally tolerant of a fragrance that closes to the skin — that is, a fragrance with low projection, that stays close to the wearer’s body. The Japanese customer is also, by European standards, exceptionally patient. A Japanese customer will wear a fragrance for two years before deciding whether to repurchase it.
What fragrance, recently, did that for you?
A new green-tea fragrance out of a Korean house. The fragrance is built around a synthetic green-tea molecule called Stemone, which has a fresh, slightly bitter, slightly metallic profile. On my skin, the Stemone holds for about six hours, which is unusually long for a green-tea material. The longevity is, I think, because the Stemone has been blended with a small amount of a synthetic amber base that the house developed internally.
What is the industry’s mistake?
The industry’s mistake is to confuse longevity with strength. A strong fragrance, in my opinion, is one that announces itself from across the room. A long-lasting fragrance is one that is still on the skin at hour eight. The two are different. The industry often markets the first as the second.
5. Dr. Sofia Ricci — Cosmetic chemist, Milan
What does longevity mean to you?
In formulation, longevity is a function of three things: the volatility of the top-note materials, the substantivity of the base-note materials to the keratin in the skin, and the partition coefficient of the heart-note materials between the sebum on the skin and the air above the skin. A well-formulated fragrance manages all three. A poorly-formulated fragrance manages none of them.
What fragrance, recently, did that for you?
A reissue of a 1970s chypre out of a heritage French house. The reissue is, in formulation terms, almost identical to the original — same concentration, same materials, same supplier of the oakmoss base. (The oakmoss is now an IFRA-compliant version, but it is close to the original.) The longevity, on my skin, is the same as the original. Which is to say: ten hours of coherent wear, with a clear evolution from the citrus top to the mossy base.
What is the industry’s mistake?
The industry has, since the early 2000s, been quietly reducing the concentration of expensive base materials — the sandalwood, the iris, the oakmoss — in order to manage the cost of goods. The customer does not notice the reduction in any single fragrance. The customer notices, in aggregate, that fragrances do not last as long as they used to. The industry knows this. The industry has decided to live with it.
6. Anya Brennan — Beauty editor (retired), London
What does longevity mean to you?
I wore, for thirty years, a single fragrance. I will not name it. I wore it because it lasted on me, in the London weather, for the entire working day. I have, in retirement, begun to wear a different fragrance, which I will also not name, and which lasts about four hours. I reapply at lunch. I do not, in retirement, mind reapplying.
What fragrance, recently, did that for you?
The first one. The one I wore for thirty years. It is, by current industry standards, unfashionably heavy. It is, by current industry standards, unfashionably long-lasting. It is also, by any standard, an extraordinarily well-built fragrance. The fact that the industry no longer makes fragrances like this is, I think, the answer to your question.
What would you change about the industry?
I would change the incentive structure. Currently, the perfumer is paid per formula. The brand is paid per bottle sold. The customer is paid in compliments. None of these incentives reward longevity. Longevity is a quiet virtue. The industry rewards loud virtues.
What we take from this
The word longevity is overused and underexamined. Six practitioners, in six different professional traditions, gave us six different definitions of it. None of them were wrong. None of them were complete.
What we would gently suggest is that the next time you see a fragrance marketed as all-day wear, you ask: according to whom? The perfumer’s longevity is not the evaluator’s. The chemist’s is not the editor’s. The fragrance, sitting there on your skin at hour six, is doing its work without needing you to measure the work, let alone to believe the marketing.
Be patient. Use less. Reapply if you must.