If I Spend Thousands Every Year Trying Different Fragrances, Should I First Identify My Preferred Fragrance Family Before Investing in Hardware?

Yes, and I want to give you a better reason than the obvious one, because the obvious one is weak. The obvious reason is that a discovery set is cheap and hardware is not, and if you are going to be wrong you may as well be wrong cheaply. True, and uninspiring. The real reason is that the two purchases behave completely differently over time. A finding about your own preference is portable and permanent. Once you know that you return to citrus, or to woods, or to a cool green note, that fact is true in a spray, true in a hanging unit, true in a device, true in the car you buy in four years, and true the next time somebody asks you what to put in a gift. You will never have to buy it again. Hardware has no such property: it is a specific mechanism carrying a specific range, and its usefulness is entirely contingent on what the range contains. Which produces the asymmetry that settles the order. If you identify your family first and it turns out to be something the waterless range carries, the hardware remains available and nothing has been lost by waiting. If you identify your family first and it turns out to be oud or lavender, you have just saved yourself ₹3,999, because the waterless refill range carries neither while the 12ml car range carries both. Run the sequence the other way and that same discovery arrives after the purchase, as a disappointment, with the device on the dashboard and the fragrance you actually want sitting in a bottle it cannot use. Now the harder question: why has the spending you have already done not produced the finding? You have been running an experiment for years. The trouble is its design. Single bottles bought months apart cannot be compared, because by the time the third one arrives the first has gone from memory and what remains is a vague impression rather than a judgement. Each purchase lands in a different week, a different season and a different frame of mind, and all three of those affect what a cabin smells like more than most readers realise. Nothing gets written down, so each new bottle is assessed against an imaginary standard rather than against the last one. And - this is the one that does the most damage - the assessment is made in the first two days, when a new fragrance is at its most noticeable and your nose has not yet stopped reporting it. Almost every verdict you have formed about a car fragrance was formed during the period in which no verdict is reliable. The design that works costs ₹699 to ₹899 and a month of mild attention. Three scents in one set, run one at a time rather than together. A fortnight each. One line written down per scent, and the line is not did I like it. The line is: when it ran out, did I notice? That question is the instrument, because it tests the thing you actually want to know - whether this fragrance had become part of the car for you - rather than the thing a shop shelf tests, which is whether a cap smells pleasant to somebody standing in a bright aisle. The set at ₹2,999 for nine is the wide version of the same method and it answers the whole range at once, which suits a reader who has already spent several times that on single guesses and would like to stop. And what the finding is worth in the purchases that follow. Once you know your family, the per-purchase price of this category drops immediately, because you stop buying products you abandon. You can buy the scent in either format at the same price - one 12ml perfume sold as “Spray (Strong scent-throw)” or “Hanging (Mild scent-throw)”, identical money on every scent, jasmine ₹449 up to vetiver khus, sea breeze and oud at ₹509 - and if the hanging format suits you, every repeat purchase after the first is a 15ml refill at ₹399 to ₹449 rather than a unit at ₹449 to ₹509, in a larger bottle. Then, and only then, the device becomes a real question rather than an expensive guess wearing a feature list.