If you are an avid perfume user, you are guaranteed to have a favorite scent. A kind of signature scent that you really can’t live without. At least until you get your period… But why do we find our perfume so disgusting during the menstrual period? We’ll explain it to you.
Also read: These are the nicest scents for spring
Favorite perfume
Chances are that – no matter how many perfume bottles you have – you will always pick up that one favorite perfume from the shelf. Without a nice scent you just feel bare and naked. Especially during your period, it’s nice to feel confident, but you have to do that without your favorite perfume. You really can’t stand that smell during your period. But how does this actually happen?
Menstrual cycle and perfume
The fact that your favorite perfume cannot be hardened during your period has everything to do with the fact that your hormones have a major influence on your sense of smell. Your cycle influences how you smell scents and that means that at certain times in your cycle some scents may work, but some absolutely cannot! So what you enjoy one week can be overwhelming the next. Our hormones not only influence our mood and brain, but also how we smell. Is that fun?
Ovulation
When your estrogen is at its highest, any smell can affect you (negatively). Even a subtle scent can have an effect – let alone your favorite perfume. In addition, your emotions are also more accessible during this period and scent can also ‘help’ with that. Different scents can give off different emotions, making you feel nauseous more quickly, for example.
Scent cycling
How can we best deal with this? Stop wearing perfume at all during your period? That is of course an option, but you can also approach it completely differently. Have you ever heard of scent cycling? It is a method that helps in choosing the right perfumes in the right cycle week. That is how it works:
Days 1 to 5 (beginning of your period) – a fresh scent with citrus notes
Day 6 to 12 – a powdery scent with more feminine notes such as Iso-E-Super, rose and musk
Day 13 to 18 – a scent with vanilla, caramel and fruit (sweet, sweet, sweet)
Final phase – a scent with green and earthy feelings such as vetiver, papyrus, bergamot, lavender and marine scents
