Attention perfume nerds, this one is for you. The perfume guru Roja Dove has come out with a clever app to help you when you get to the Duty Free beauty hall, get overwhelmed and everything you’ve ever read about which smells to buy evades you (see previous post on ‘airport brain syndrome‘).
Mr Dove has loaded reviews of over 1000 perfumes into the app (and counting, it’s being updated all the time) with additional ‘if you like the sound of that, look for this’ info too. You access the reviews by either scanning the bar code on the packaging or tapping in the name.
Now I have been in duty free/perfume halls and tried to get perfume reviews on my phone via some of the excellent perfume blogs out there, but often they take time to open (many of them aren’t mobile sites) and often offer up wonderfully considered but wordy reviews, not what you need when you are being threatened with your baggage being removed from the flight if you don’t get to the departure gate NOW. Also, Mr Dove knows his stuff.
My only criticisms are that the app doesn’t have many artisan perfumers up yet (no Ormonde Jayne, no CB I Hate Perfume and my recent purchase, Chanel’s Jersey, is missing), but they are coming soon according to Roja’s team, who explained that top sellers and popular perfumes have been uploaded first. Also, it doesn’t offer any sort of rating system as to what is good or not, I would dearly love to hear Mr Dove’s opinion on a few celebrity perfumes, but I guess he’s just too polite.
Buy it for £2.99 from the App store.
