Beauty & Style | Sunday 5 April, 2015 3:10 pm |

We’ve all been there: You fall in love with a fragrance your friend is wearing and you instantly buy the same. Only to discover that it smells different on you and doesn’t quite have that charm that captivated you in the first place.

It’s all about science and body chemistry. Everything, from your diet, your body temperature, to what you bathe with, affect the way a fragrance is going to work for you. Even something vastly unrelated, like that hangover you've been nursing, can totally alter how a perfume works for you.

“When we apply a perfume, our natural body odour and the fragrance blend together and produce a unique concoction. Some of them even smell nothing like their creator planned” said Mr. Mohammed Obaid, CEO of Bramble Perfumes. “But it is always to our endeavour to keep these factors in mind while designing our products. Our fragrances are conjured in a way that they work well with all skin and body types.”

Skin is made from a very complex mixture of chemicals – and not everyone’s has the same proportion. For starters, skin is made up of water, fat, acids, salts, sugars, proteins, fibres and hairs. Each of these components will bind the perfume chemicals differently and also, release them differently. Individual skin naturally contains a particular cocktail of chemicals that, rather like a fingerprint, leaves a unique aroma. When perfume blends with a person’s body odour, it takes on a life of its own and creates a unique mark of identity.

It’s not as simple as saying that fragrances react differently on different people because of their ‘body chemistry’. The warmth of our skin is critical. Some people have more pores per centimetre than others, or more layers of fat in their skin. These and other factors affect the warmth of skin, which in turn influences the scent of a fragrance.

When fragrances are mixed with the cocktail of skin molecules, they activate a series of chemical responses that produce a unique smell. The quality and intensity of the smell depends on the amount of fragrance the skin absorbs and how much evaporates. By placing clothes on perfumed skin, we ensure product absorption and less evaporation. The degree of moisture emitted by the pores of the skin can also influence the amount of fragrance that evaporates. Perfume applied to well-hydrated skin that produces a lot of moisture in a dry room at a high temperature will evaporate more quickly. Covered skin is also hotter and probably the stratum corneum stays well hydrated. All these factors determine our body odour when we use perfume.