How to sample an indie house for under $30 before Black Friday

A first order from an independent house can cost $4.75 or $600, and the gap is mostly about format rather than quality. Perfume oils and solid perfumes tend to be sold as whole small bottles at a flat price; natural parfums and attars are often priced close to the millilitre, so a 1 ml sample from one house can cost more than a finished 10 ml roll-on from another.

Black Friday falls on 27 November, and that is when discovery sets and bundles turn up. The useful preparation is knowing what the ordinary prices already are, so that a November offer can be measured against something. The library currently lists 2,225 fragrances whose cheapest size comes in under $30.

The format sets the floor

AOE Perfumery is run by a perfumer named Allie, who builds scents around characters, places and items from video games and board games. Its listed prices run $10 to $18 across 118 fragrances, and a large part of the catalogue sits at the bottom of that. Syndicate is $10 for a perfume oil of oil, petrichor, stone, leather, gasoline, benzoin, amber, frankincense, ginger, bergamot and black tea. Garden Warfare is also $10, and goes in the opposite direction: tomato leaf, lemongrass, basil, banana leaf, lavender, dirt, cedar and honeysuckle. At that price the question of whether to buy a sample does not really arise.

Nui Cobalt Designs, founded in 2012 by Forest Nui Cobalt in Columbus, Ohio, does offer a sample size, and it is the cheapest entry point in this group. The Conjure Man's Cabin lists a 1 ml at $4.75 and a 5 ml at $19.95, for pinyon in the fireplace, ancient leather, copal, vetiver, mud, hay, pipe tobacco and top shelf hooch.

Simons Nest is the shop of illustrator Autumn Simons in South Devon, which makes roll-on oils and wax melts alongside prints and cards. Prices run $10 to $18. Bewitching Hour shows the trade-off plainly: 5 ml of oil is $10, 10 ml is $18, and the solid perfume is $18. The solid costs the same as the largest oil, so the choice there is about how a person wants to carry it rather than what they want to spend.

Where 1 ml costs $59

Wild Veil works differently. Abby Hinsman has run it from Orange, Vermont since 2013, describing herself as a grower-perfumer composing from her own enfleurage, absolutes, resinoids and tinctures. The 336 fragrances in the library run $15 to $1200, and samples are priced accordingly. Unicorn lists a liquid 1 ml sample at $25 and Lovers the same; Dreams asks $59 for a 1 ml, and the Ylang Ylang Soliflore lists a 1 ml solid sample at $60.

Teone Reinthal Natural Perfume in Brisbane sits in similar territory, with 87 fragrances between 65 AUD and 1000 AUD. The attar KAFKA lists from 350 AUD to 575 AUD, and the note list explains some of it: six or seven distinct sandalwoods, seven frankincenses, two myrrhs and an oud.

Neither house is overpriced for what it is. They are simply a different kind of purchase, and treating a $59 sample as a casual try is how a sampling budget disappears in two clicks.

Work out the price per millilitre first

This is the part most sampling advice skips, and it changes which order to place.

• Nui Cobalt Designs: $4.75 for 1 ml is $4.75 per ml; $19.95 for 5 ml is $3.99 per ml. The sample carries roughly a 19 per cent penalty, which is small enough to be worth paying for an unknown.
• Simons Nest: $10 for 5 ml is $2.00 per ml; $18 for 10 ml is $1.80 per ml. Again a modest discount for size.
• Wild Veil: Unicorn is $25 for 1 ml, $124 for 5 ml and $242 for 10 ml, or $25.00, $24.80 and $24.20 per ml. The house prices almost flat across sizes, which means buying the sample costs essentially nothing extra per millilitre. For a $25-per-ml perfume, that is the whole argument for sampling first.

The general rule falls out of the arithmetic. At oil houses, skip the sample and buy the smallest real bottle, because the discount for volume is small and the whole thing is cheap anyway. At per-millilitre houses, always take the sample, because there is no volume discount to lose.

Order the queue by family, then by one note

Buying five things at once from five houses produces five impressions and no comparisons. A more useful first order runs one thread through different price tiers.

Lavender works well for this, because it appears in 176 fragrances in the library and behaves completely differently depending on what surrounds it. At $10, The Fade sets it against tonka bean, hay, honey, lilac, pine, amber, musk and cashmere, which is lavender as a soft amber. Also at $10 for 5 ml, Nectar & Dew buries it in nectarine blossom, grapefruit, dewberry and freshly mown grass, and Ethereal Flight puts it under candyfloss, strawberry and rhubarb. Then Lovers, at $25 for 1 ml, runs it through anise, violet, myrrh, hay and oud.

That is four very different readings of one material for $45, spread across three houses and three families. Anyone who already knows they like gourmands can run the same exercise on vanilla, which 600 fragrances in the library carry, or filter straight to everything with lavender under $30.

One last practical point: keep a repeat purchase in the order. A bottle of something already known is what tells a person whether a new house smells odd or whether it is simply a Tuesday.

---

Where to start

• The Conjure Man's Cabin, Nui Cobalt Designs, 1 ml $4.75. The cheapest serious sample here, and a woody, earthy, boozy one. For a reader who wants to find out whether oil perfume suits them at all before spending more.
• Syndicate, AOE Perfumery, $10. A finished perfume oil for sample money, amber and animalic with gasoline and wet stone in it. For anyone drawn to the strange end of autumn.
• Unicorn, Wild Veil, liquid 1 ml sample $25. Lotus, rose, osmanthus, tuberose and oakmoss from a grower-perfumer. For the reader ready to test what a natural white floral costs and whether it is worth it.