Lucky Scent: How I learned to stop worrying and love the sample. 

Some of my biggest expenditures are made in the fragrance department of Seattle’s downtown Nordstrom. I have a very powerful sense of smell, and I get a real kick out of finding a great perfume that can lift my mood. Large department stores will often provide free samples of their perfume if you request, so you can try them out over the course of a few days and see how they age on your skin, how quickly the top notes wear off, etc.

However, I’m really in olfactory heaven when I happen upon true boutiques that carry hard-to-find perfume and perfume oils from all over the world. I love independent perfumers, and I will go out of my way to find them when I travel.

However, I don’t have the time or money to travel as much as I’d like. And even with a large selection at Nordstrom, sometimes I get a little tired of Victor & Rolf or Lancome’s latest offering. So, sometimes, I buy online.

Now, of all the things to buy online, perfume might be among the riskiest. It’s generally pretty expensive, and you can’t return it if you don’t like it.

That’s why I was so delighted to stumble upon Lucky Scent. Lucky Scent is an online store that not only carries the best and most exotic scents available, and describes said scents with such imaginative wording that they make reading a sexy experience, but Lucky Scent also sells samples of almost all of its offered scents.

For as little as $3 (or sometimes, as much as $8), you can get a little vial of a stunning scent mailed right to your home. Peruse through the site to find the perfect scent, then select the Order a Sample option. Or you can just go straight to the samples page and pick them out at random – I don’t recommend this method.

Now, it’s easy to go crazy and order 20 different samples, but even $80 spent sampling, and finding a great perfume or two, is better than wasting $130 on a perfume smells awful with your body’s chemistry. When it comes time to buy, I will sometimes make my purchase at Lucky Scent, or I will occasionally look on eBay or even craigslist.org to see if anyone is selling the scent. Since I buy so many perfumes, it can be hard to finish a bottle, and so it can e worth it to find someone who has a half-used bottle of a good perfume, as long as it's not too old.