You Can Use Perfume As Room Spray (But This Is Better)

You can make your house smell like your favorite fragrance. But fragrance mists smell almost as good—without breaking the bank.

Published Categorized as Fragrance
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That moment when you walk into a room and become enamored with the way it smells, only to realize that it’s your own fragrance, which you’ve grown anosmic to?

Surely, since you’re here, you just experienced that, and came up with the crazy (or not?!) idea of turning a bottle of perfume into room spray.

Ask any fraghead about how to wear perfume, and they’ll reply to you, quickly and without hesitation, that it’s meant to be worn first and foremost on the skin.

But what if you want the room to smell as good as you do? Can you use perfume as a room spray?

You can use your favorite fragrance as a room spray, though fragrance mist is cheaper. Spritz the scent in the air—not on furniture or textiles—a good 2-3 times, then let it settle in the room for a few minutes.

Don’t be surprised if the fragrance smells differently in the air than it does on your skin. In its simplest form, perfume is a mixture of aromatic oils, natural or synthetic, dissolved in a certain amount of alcohol.

These oils contain fragrant molecules that trigger certain olfactory sensations when they mix with our skin and eventually reach our noses. Think of the smell of vanilla, for example, which can be extracted naturally or just as well be made up in a lab.

The same fragrance can smell differently on you and me, as the scent that it gives off once it settles on the skin will depend on the wearer’s pH levels and the hormonal balance. For the same reasons, a scent smells one way when sprayed in the air and another on the skin.

In other words, even if you intend to turn a perfume into a room spray, spray it in the air a few times and give it a couple of minutes to settle to determine if you like the way that the scent unravels in the first place.

We can tell you one thing for sure: you’ll end up dazzled, pleasantly or not, by the outcome.

Reasons to Turn Perfume Into Room Spray

Why would you want to turn a bottle of perfume into room spray in the first place?

For starters, you may be filthy rich, and you want your home to smell better than the room sprays on display at Bed Bath & Beyond or Zara Home. If that’s the case, we respect and salute your decision.

Or you may have gotten a bottle of perfume that you can’t return—and whose scent you don’t particularly like on you—as a gift. Instead of leaving it to catch dust on your dresser drawers or throwing it in the bin, you might as well turn it into room spray to make your home smell nice.

Perhaps you want your living room, bedroom, home office, and bathroom to smell nice, and, like the members of the Sterlish editorial team, you’ve noticed that a great fragrance mist often costs less than a good room spray.

So here comes the cherry on the cake when it comes to our advice-giving in this article…

If you don’t like the way room sprays smell, and you want to substitute them with a fragrance instead, fragrance mist offers the best balance between getting your home to smell like a Prada store without having to break the bank for it.

The unrivaled, all-time favorites among the members of our editorial team, should you be wondering, are Bare Vanilla Noir and Coconut Passion by Victoria’s Secret.

In case you’re wondering, fragrance mist is the same thing as body mist, a fragrance with an aromatic oils concentration of 1.5 to 3% (the rest is usually alcohol).

There’s a caveat to this technique, and it can’t be left unsaid. The ingredients used in perfume tend to be more volatile than those used in room sprays. So, as much as you adore a scent, and no matter how heavily you spray it, the one will not linger as long as the other.

Reasons Not to Turn Perfume Into Room Spray

Perfumes contain chemicals that are meant to settle on your skin and create a sensation of scent as you wear them throughout the day. They are not meant or formulated for being safely inhaled by pets.

If you have a bird, hamster, cat, or dog, or any other kind of pet at home, we would advise against spraying perfume in the air they breathe. At a minimum, doing so can irritate them. At worst, it can harm them.

We’d give the same piece of advice to anyone with a baby or small children at home. Perfume smells splendid, there’s no doubt about it, but the typical scent can have anywhere between 150 to 300 molecules in it, some of which can be harmful when inhaled in large quantities.

Spray Into the Air, Not on Furniture

Before you go and excitedly start spraying perfume all over your household, we’ve got one piece of advice that can save you from having to do hours of clean-up (or replace the covers on your cushions and couch).

Most fragrances contain essential, plant-extracted oils and artificial, lab-concocted pigments. Though they give color to the juice, making it unique and more appealing to the eye, these oils and pigments can also badly stain your furniture and home textiles.

The general rule of thumb that’s at play here is that more viscous, intensely colored juices are prone to staining textiles more than their watery, colorless counterparts.

So, if you want to use perfume or fragrance mist as a room spray, remember to spritz the juice into the air—and not on your furniture, curtains, or any other textile surfaces in your home.

Don’t Inhale the Fragrance

It’s an age-old trick to use your favorite fragrance as a room spray. But keep in mind that most perfumes are designed to be sprayed and to settle onto your skin—and not for being directly inhaled from the air.

Walking through a perfume cloud and inhaling the scent, especially if you’re doing so immediately after spraying it into the air, can irritate your nose or throat.

So, if you want to make your room smell better, spray it two or three times in diverse directions, then leave the room for 2-3 minutes, letting the air currents in your home do their job.

Simona S, Editor, Fragrances, at Sterlish, has found that spraying fragrances 10 inches above her air purifier helps to distribute the scent quickly and evenly throughout the room.

“Just don’t spritz directly onto (or into) the purifier,” she says. “These appliances, especially lesser-expensive ones, are designed to circulate air. They can easily sustain damage if that air is too humid.”

“The same trick applies to your bathroom,” adds Simona. “Spray some fragrance mist, close the door, and switch on the exhaust fan. By the time for your next visit, it’s going to smell like the bathroom at that fancy, upscale restaurant you oh-so-much enjoy eating out at.”

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