Decants · Layering sets · Custom blends
A bottle is a thousand sprays. At three a day that is eleven months of one decision, usually made on the strength of one wearing. Two milliliters is $5.50, about twenty sprays, poured by hand the day you order. Enough to live with something for two weeks and find out whether it is yours.
Reading a fragrance
The light materials evaporate first and the heavy ones stay behind, so what you smell at ten minutes, at an hour, and at hour six are three different things. A sniff at a counter only ever shows you the first one.
Top
Small, volatile, and gone before you have made up your mind. Almost always citrus or a light spice. It is the part that sells a bottle and the part you will never smell again after the first half hour.
Heart
The body of the thing, and what most people mean when they say what a fragrance smells like. Florals and spice sit here, held up by whatever is underneath.
Base
Heavy, slow, and the part that decides whether you can live with something. Two fragrances that open differently often turn out to have the same floor.
Two milliliters is about twenty sprays, which is enough to wear something from opening to base a dozen times before deciding.
Prices
Two milliliters is $5.50 whatever the bottle cost. Price here tracks volume, and nothing else. Nothing is pre-poured either: vials are filled the day the order comes in, because an opened decant loses its top notes first and those are the part you paid for.
2 mL
$5.50
About 20 sprays
$2.75 per mL
5 mL
$9
About 50 sprays
$1.80 per mL
10 mL
$13
About 100 sprays
$1.30 per mL
Shipping $6.50, free over $60. Ground only, US only: fragrance is a flammable liquid and cannot legally fly.
Layering sets
Layering means wearing two at once, which normally means owning both bottles. Three vials are $15, and the card says which one goes down first and how much of the second to use. Layering usually fails because both get sprayed the same amount, and what you end up wearing is neither of them.
$15 3 × 2 mL
Custom blends
Pick two or three off the shelf. They are blended to order, rested seven days so the seams close, and shipped under whatever name you give them. Same price as a straight decant, $9 for five milliliters, because the liquid is the same either way. The formula card stays on file, so the second one matches the first.
$9 5 mL · ships in 7 to 10 days
The archive
Lattafa accounts for forty. Every bottle on the shelf is listed, not the six that sell.
Plainly
Not open yet
One email the day it opens, listing the first twenty. Nothing after that until there is something to report.