Olfactif Review: Perfume Subscriptions

Olfactif has a question for you: "Why smell like everyone else?" Why, indeed. This perfume subscription isn't for the faint of heart (or nose?) or for anyone who loves buying everyday fragrances from the drugstore shelves. Instead, Olfactif focuses on indie, niche, and luxury scents from around the world, never including the same fragrance twice so that you can always be learning and experimenting. Some of their scents could help you "feel tranquil on a Sunday morning", while others could "build up your swagger for an important meeting". If you're adventurous, curious, and open to new experiences, Olfactif will be the perfect perfume subscription.

Curated selection of 3-6 themed monthly scents

When you set up your subscription at Olfactif, you really don't have to make too many decisions: this isn't the kind of perfume plan that makes you guess at what you'll like (or take a profile quiz), rearranging your queue all the time, and hoping you pick a winner. In fact, Olfactif knows that sometimes what they send you will be an absolute "no way" to your nose - and that's part of the experience. What this company does to perfection is scenter-ing (see what we did there?) every month's fragrances around a theme, often seasonal, so you might get citrusy bliss in the summer and woodsy, smoky musk in the late fall. If you've ever done any kind of tasting party - wine, chocolate, cheese, you name it - you'll be familiar with how Olfactif leads you on a journey, complete with cards describing each fragrance and a place for you to take notes on what you notice, like, or dislike. (Those cards also have a place for you to spray just a bit, so you can smell each one independently from the next - instead of trying to keep them separate on your forearms.)

Choose between men's and women's fragrances

So, the only input that Olfactif needs from you is whether you want three 2mL fragrances that are more traditionally for women, three for men, or the deluxe package that comes with all six monthly samples. We noticed that Olfactif regularly includes scents that are more unisex, both in the women's selections and the men's, so you really can't go wrong either way. (But we recommend the deluxe, from our own personal experience.)

$22 to $40 per month

And price? It's $22 for either of the 3-vial collections, and $40 for the combination set. Shipping is included in the price, but you'll need to add the extra Route Shipping Protection if you want more options if something is broken when it arrives or there's another delivery problem. We're not the biggest fans of that structure, but we're seeing it pop up all over the place, especially with smaller businesses who need to help manage their costs too.

Frequent discounts on offer

Over the years we've been customers of Olfactif, we've seen tons of opportunities to save. Usually around major holidays (like Christmas, Hanukkah, Mother's Day, and even Amazon Prime Days), you'll see offers for discounts - sometimes on full-size bottles of your latest Olfactif favorites, sometimes on samplers, and even occasionally on subscriptions. At the time of our most recent visit to the website, Olfactif was discounting literally everything, including subscriptions, by 25%. And, when you're a subscription member at Olfactif, there's an ongoing discount of 20% on any of the featured monthly scents and 10% on ones from previous months, so you can always save a bit on the perfumes and colognes that make people keep telling you how amazing you smell. Or, if you want to give someone their own sample to try, you can add the small vials a la carte at a 10% discount as well.

Prepay and save

Another way to save is by prepaying for 3, 6, or 12 months. You'll get a discount ranging from 2%-5% that way. However, we'd suggest trying this perfume subscription for a month or two (maybe with a juicy seasonal promo discount) before taking the full plunge: these scents are super-niche and will provide a very different experience from sampling the Burberrys and Bvlgaris at the department store counter.

Subscribers love this perfume plan

Olfactif has earned the respect of the Better Business Bureau, demonstrated by the "A+" rating there. Better yet, there hasn't been a single complaint filed with the BBB. You can also see lots of happy reviews scattered throughout the Olfactif site, and none of the negative ones are filtered out - but we're happy to say that even so, this perfume subscription still earns an average of 4.6 out of 5 stars, as verified by Yotpo. While we didn't find a ton of reviews for Olfactif on third-party sites, their social media channels are full of posts with mentions and likes. And, during the course of our subscription, we had zero issues with any aspect of this perfume membership: everything was well-packaged and delivered on time, and it was no problem to pause, skip, or cancel whenever we needed. If it weren't for the fact that we needed to use our "fun money" on other things for a while, we would have stayed subscribed to Olfactif indefinitely.

Full bottles will be spendy

If we had to pick any kind of downside for Olfactif, it's this: you're going to fall in love with some really top-shelf scents here, and you might flinch when you see that they're often $100 to $200 for a full-size bottle. This is where we discovered Ego Stratis by Juliette Has a Gun ($150), Fruits of the Tree of Knowledge by 4160 Tuesdays ($110), and Honey Aoud by Montale ($180), and it was a good little while before we could afford to put those into our regular rotation.

Top perfume subscription for the adventurous

When you're ready to "graduate" from basic, boring perfumes that everyone wears and move into something a little more risky (and rewarding), Olfactif is ready to take you to the next fragrance level. We can't say enough good things about this perfume subscription, especially as a gift for adventurous types (like foodies, travelers, you know who we're talking about).

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On the Olfactif website