I’m afraid this post is going to be of interest only to serious perfume enthusiasts who know what it means to have an embarrassing amount of chocolate boxes full of samples. Or possibly to other obsessive collectors who experience compulsive periods of organising. Or, maybe, to normal people who just find this kind of behaviour hilarious and want to laugh at my sample agony.

Perfumistas, you see, spend a big part of their lives thinking and talking about fragrance samples. About how companies don’t give them out nearly enough (how is one supposed to try anything properly if samples aren’t available!) or how the exact sample they wanted to wear that day is nowhere to be found/has evaporated/is possibly turned or what is the best place to buy samples online and whether they do spray samples because dab vials simply DON’T LET YOU EXPERIENCE THE PERFUME IN FULL (so true). And they of course talk about the perfect, the ultimate, the ever-elusive system to keep all your samples in check.

This is a completely legitimate issue when you have something like 500 samples and they are everywhere – all my bags had at least a couple of samples in the bottom, as did all my make-up pouches. There were samples in the kitchen cupboard and on the little table in the hallway and I’m sure there were (and still are) some in the attic. Not to mention all these places where I had stored my samples more-or-less intentionally. The final straw was that I could not locate my precious vial of Mohur extrait, so the situation needed to change.

In the end, it was all surprisingly painless. I found these two boxes (pictured) at Zara Home: there are 24 compartments in all, so I assigned one of them to roughly every letter in the alphabet and arranged the samples accordingly, based on the brand names. I threw away everything that was empty or without a label or almost gone and no longer interesting and was left with something like 350 samples – some of them still in their beautiful original packaging like the Strange Invisible Perfumes collection on the cover image, because I’m powerless against beautiful packaging. The alphabetic system is pretty foolproof, although not faultless. Let me just tell you that I own samples by Aedes de Venustas, Aqua di Parma, Aftelier, Agonist, Amouage, Anat Fritz, Andy Tauer, Annick Goutal, Ann Gerard, Arquiste, Atelier Cologne and Atkinsons. There aren’t quite as many perfume brands that begin with a “U”.

While not especially pretty, the containers are practical and I like the transparent lid – it lets me see my stuff. Seeing one’s stuff is key to actually using one’s stuff. The measurements work for me as I don’t own many decants (for the uninitiated: these are usually 5-15 ml vials decanted from bigger bottles that you can order on the Internet or make yourself): if I really like something after using up my sample, I tend to go for a full bottle. Sometimes I go for the full bottle without using up my sample.

The real challenge, however, is not putting your samples neatly into nice boxes, but wearing/testing them and establishing what you think about them. In the end of the day, that’s the raison d’etre of samples. With 350 tiny bottles to go through, one would need to come up with a system for this as well. But I’m going to allow myself to enjoy this moment of perfect structure and organisation for a bit.