What could be the advantage to buying expensive branded perfume?

More expensive perfumes and colognes have higher quality ingredients and tend to last longer. They also tend to have a scent story, where they go through different notes as they age on your skin. This both keeps them more interesting and helps prevent you from becoming scent blind to your own fragrance.

You don't have to get something wildly expensive to have a decent fragrance but in general if you get a product from a house like Guerlain, it's going to be markedly better than some random product manufactured in China that you pick up in a drugstore.

Trying samples and reading reviews before you lay down a good amount of money on a fragrance is recommended, though. It's important to experience what a scent smells like on your skin because it may smell good spritzed on a sample card but terrible on your skin after encountering your particular chemistry. And by reading reviews you may learn that a fragrance has an unfortunately strong sillage or that after a few hours it dies down to a note that smells like bug spray.

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