Sprayed Too Much Perfume? Here’s What to Do! [Quick Guide!]

You love your new perfume and are proud of finding one that stands out. It is understandable to get carried away and end up spraying too much. Whether you’re sure you oversprayed your perfume or have a sneaking suspicion that you’ve put on too much, here’s what to do.

If you have sprayed too much perfume, use alcohol or white vinegar (diluted with water) to release the excessive perfume from the fabric or material it has latched on to. You can also use hot water or hot air (blow dryer) for a few minutes to accelerate the evaporation process.

This brief post tells you in greater detail how to pull off the above process safely and whether you need to do it in the first place. You’ll find out how to discover if you’ve actually oversprayed and three ways to get rid of strong perfume.

Why is Spraying Too Much Perfume Bad?

Spraying too much perfume is bad for your reputation and rapport. From mild annoyance to full-blown migraines, your bad perfume etiquette can cause serious inconvenience to others, who may, in turn, form negative opinions about you.

When you attempt to connect with someone in a social setting, you should aim to bring the emphasis to your personality, achievements, or looks, depending on the reasons you want to build a relationship with the said individual.

When you spray too much perfume, the first impression you make isn’t about your personal qualities but about your bad perfume etiquette.

Let’s suppose you want to be known for looking a certain way when you show up to an acting audition. Since looks are among the first aspects we build our judgment on, you have things going in your favor…until your perfume precedes you. Now, you’re the over-perfumed actor, and that’s what the directors remember. The same holds true for most personal or professional settings.

With the above example, you can see why it is critical to have subtle perfume application and the right spraying discipline, so your professional and social life doesn’t suffer as a consequence of too much perfume.

How to Know if You Put Too Much Perfume?

To know if you have put too much perfume, you need to do the neutral smell test. From a distance, try to smell something with a mild aroma (e.g., butter croissant, salted popcorn). If you’re unable to smell these less-than-subtle aromas, you’re wearing too much perfume.

That said, not everyone has a croissant, fresh bread, or butter popcorn at hand. Usually, when you’re putting on perfume, you’re in your house.

A great way to see if you’ve sprayed too much perfume is to leave the room where you applied your perfume and come back after five minutes. If you can smell it in the room, you’ve applied a lot. Some people rely on an alternative test that can be done outside of one’s home.

If I Can Smell My Own Perfume, Is It Too Much?

If you smell an overwhelming scent of your own perfume even after thirty minutes in an indoor space or after ten minutes outdoors, you’re wearing too much perfume. This is an alternative test to smelling your room to see if it has residual perfume.

That said, it is important to note that some perfumes are designed for personal experience. For instance, Extrait de Parfum (or Pure Perfume) contains the highest concentration of fragrance oils and tends to stick to the skin rather than traveling through the air. Such perfumes are more intimate and personal fragrances.

This means, when you are using such perfumes, only you or people around you will be able to smell your perfume and it won’t be too strong or overwhelming.

So, it is not wrong to be able to smell your own perfume. The important thing to remember here is how subtle is the fragrance that you smell after 30 minutes or so. If the strength of the scent continues to be quite strong, you should know that it is too much.

Best Perfume Routine to Avoid Spraying Too Much

When it comes to applying perfume, we are often victims of inherited etiquette. We either learn to wear perfume by observing our parents, or we mimic what we see in movies. Unfortunately, both sources are unreliable.

You should never point your spray nozzle directly at your body if you have a strong perfume. Instead, you should point it at a right angle and hold the perfume bottle in front of you with an extended arm.

If you hold the bottle in your right hand, make sure the nozzle points towards the left. If you have the bottle in your left hand, the nozzle should face the right. This way, when you spray the perfume, an invisible cloud of scent forms in front of you. Simply walk through the cloud and let the disparately distributed scent latch onto a wider area of your body (mainly chest and torso).

How to Neutralize a Strong Perfume Smell?

If you’ve accidentally oversprayed anything with a strong perfume, do not make the mistake of trying to neutralize it with a different fragrance. Your goal should be to minimize the scent by removing the perfume via contact transfer or evaporation.

How to Neutralize Too Much Perfume on Clothes?

You can wash your clothes with an unscented laundry detergent, a tablespoon of baking soda, and half a cup of distilled white vinegar in a bucket’s worth of water to get rid of residual perfume.

However, it is likely that you want to get rid of perfume from the clothes you’re currently wearing and intend to keep the clothes on for the day. In that case, you can use a blowdryer to help vaporize the perfume faster. About 15 minutes of blow drying can have the same impact on perfume as a whole day of wearing it.

If you do not have a blow dryer, ironing your clothes on low heat can help, though you should make sure they aren’t wet with perfume. It is also advisable to use cotton, which is notorious for absorbing scents, for first getting the perfume off your clothes with contact transfer. 

Once you have rubbed a cotton cloth against your clothes and gotten the wet perfume off, you can safely iron away the rest. Do not re-apply any perfume after this as the clothes will still have a mild scent which you might not be able to smell because of getting used to the concentrated perfume applied earlier.

How to Neutralize When You’ve Sprayed Too Much Perfume in the Room?

If you’ve applied too much perfume in a room, you have to identify the items that have absorbed the perfume. Cotton covers, fabric-covered furniture, and thick rugs and carpets are the greatest culprits. Opening your window or turning on a heater can help vaporize the perfume, but a direct application of neutralizers is much more advisable.

You can make a neutralizer at home by adding hot water and white vinegar in a one-to-one ratio (half of each) to a spray bottle like Tolco Empty Spray Bottle. Tightening the lid and shaking the bottle gets both liquids mixed into the perfect scent remover. 

Lightly spray on the “culprit” pieces in your room like the sofas, carpet, and bed covers. In a few minutes, the perfume will be released from the fabrics it has latched on to. Open your windows and/or door so that it can get carried away with the circulating air.

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