Frequently asked questions

Start with a 10ml. It is the whole reason we sell that size. A small bottle worn for a week tells you more than any description we could write, including ours, because fragrance changes on skin and changes again with the season.

If you want narrowing down first, work by family rather than by name: browse the range and pick the two or three that describe something you already like the smell of. Then buy small.

Do not guess a full bottle. It is the single most common way a good gift goes wrong, and an opened fragrance cannot be returned.

A bundle of small bottles lets them find their own, which is a better gift than being right. If you know one fragrance they already wear and love, tell us what it is and we will point you at the closest thing we make, or tell you honestly that we do not make one.

Merchandising, not chemistry. The collections exist because people shop that way, and the fragrance does not know which one it was filed under.

Wear whichever one smells right on you. Plenty of people do exactly that.

Not as a separate product, no. The 10ml is the smallest size we make, and it is small enough to be a low-risk way in: shop the 10ml sizes.

If a proper discovery set is what you want, say so by email. Demand is how it would get made.

We do not publish sales rankings, and we would rather not invent one to make a sale. What we do publish is every verified review we have, filterable by family, format and rating: read the reviews.

That is a more useful answer anyway. What sells most is not what will suit you.

The eau de parfum is alcohol based. It sprays, diffuses and leaves a trail, and it typically wears for most of a day on skin. Take this one if you want people to notice.

The perfume oil goes onto the pulse points and is warmed by your own skin. It sits closer and can hold longer, but it will not project across a room. Take this one for the office, or for skin.

Every fragrance scent we make is built as both, so the choice is about how you want to be noticed rather than which scent you get.

Eau de parfum comes in 10ml, 50ml and 100ml.

The perfume oils come in a single size. If you are new to a scent, the smallest bottle is always the right first purchase.

Same composition, different behaviour. The oil sits lower and reads warmer, closer to the base of the fragrance, because there is no alcohol lifting the top off it. The spray gives you more of the opening and throws further.

Most people who own both wear the oil to work and the spray at night. Worn together they layer well, which is the other reason to have both.

Room sprays and essential oils, built from the same families as the wearable range, so a room can agree with what you are wearing rather than argue with it: shop home fragrance.

An eau de parfum typically wears for most of a day on skin. A perfume oil sits closer and can hold longer, but projects less.

We will not give you a number in hours, because it would be a made-up one. Skin chemistry, the weather, how moisturised your skin is and how much you applied all move the result, and any brand quoting you a precise figure is quoting an average of someone else's skin.

What genuinely helps: moisturise first, apply to warm pulse points, and do not rub it in. The full guide is here.

Wrists, the neck and behind the ears, the collarbones, the inner elbows, and behind the knees in warm weather. Those places run warm, and heat is what moves a fragrance.

Spray from about 15 to 20cm away and stop at two to four sprays. Roll an oil back and forth two or three times per point. Either way, do not rub: it breaks up the blend.

Your nose adapts to a scent you are wearing and stops reporting it. Everyone else can still smell it, which is why the instinct to add another three sprays is usually wrong.

If it has genuinely gone quiet on you, wear something else for a week. Your nose resets faster than you expect.

Yes, and it is the main reason to own an oil and a spray. Put the oil down first, let it settle a minute, then mist the spray lightly over the same points.

Pick two that share a note, usually a wood, a musk or a vanilla, and let the warmer of the two be the oil. If it is not working, change the ratio before you change the bottle: most failed layers are one spray too many. The full method is here.

Cool, dark and dry, with the cap on. A drawer or the box it arrived in is ideal.

Not the bathroom, and not a windowsill: heat, light and steam age a fragrance faster than anything else you can do to it. More on keeping it well.

Usually the day rather than the bottle. Heat lifts a fragrance and cold holds it down, dry skin releases it faster, and a scent that was perfect in January can read thin in July.

If a bottle has arrived damaged, leaking or genuinely off, that is a different problem and we will sort it out. Email us at support@nextfragrance.com.

Free standard shipping Australia-wide on orders over $150. Under that, standard and express rates are calculated at checkout before you pay.

Everything is packed and dispatched from our studio in Adelaide.

We aim to have your order on its way within 1 business day. During sale periods and the weeks before Christmas, allow up to 2. Orders placed on a weekend or public holiday are processed on the next business day.

You get tracking by email as soon as it is scanned. Delivery time after that is the carrier's, not ours.

Perfume oils, yes: to New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union, at a flat $25, free over $250.

Eau de parfum and room sprays, no. They are alcohol based, which makes them a flammable liquid and a dangerous good for air freight. That is a fact about the product rather than a policy we can relax for a good customer, and we would rather say so than take an order we cannot ship.

Faulty, damaged or not as described: contact us within 14 days of delivery and choose a refund, a replacement or an exchange.

Changed your mind: we will exchange or refund a sealed, unopened product returned within 14 days, in its original packaging. Return postage is yours and the original shipping is not refunded.

Opened fragrance cannot come back, unless it is faulty. Once a seal is broken a cosmetic product cannot be resold and there is no hygienic way around it. This is the honest reason to buy the 10ml first. Full policy.

Email us within 7 days of delivery with your order number, a photo of the item and a photo of the box it came in. We take it up with the carrier and arrange a replacement or a refund.

The packaging photo matters more than people expect. It is what settles the claim.

If it has not shipped, usually yes. Email support@nextfragrance.com with your order number as soon as you can, because we try to dispatch within a business day and once it is with the carrier we cannot pull it back.

Cards, the wallets your device offers, PayPal, and Afterpay if you would rather pay in four. The full set of methods is shown in the footer and at checkout.

Checkout is Shopify's, so your card details never touch our site. Prices are in Australian dollars.

On the product page, under Ingredients. Almost everything in the range publishes its complete list rather than a summary, which is unusual enough in fragrance to be worth saying.

Every scent also publishes its real note pyramid, top, heart and base, and most of those notes link through to the ingredient glossary, where there is a page explaining what each one actually smells like.

No fragrance is chemical free, ours included, and we are not going to use those words to sell you something. Fragrance is chemistry. Natural materials and synthetic ones both appear in good perfumery, and a synthetic is often the reason a note is stable, wearable and not stripped out of an endangered plant.

What we will do instead is publish the ingredient list and let you read it. If you are avoiding one specific material, it is on the product page, and if you cannot find it, email us and we will look it up with you.

We cannot tell you how your skin will react to anything, and we will not pretend otherwise.

What we would do: apply a small amount to the inner arm and leave it a day before wearing it properly. If you have reacted to a fragrance before, check the ingredient list on the product page against whatever caused it. If something we have made does not agree with you, stop wearing it and email us.

Top notes are the first ten minutes, and they are the least representative part of a fragrance. Heart notes are what it settles into over the next hour or two. Base notes are the dry-down, the part still there at the end of the day.

This is why smelling something on a card at a counter tells you almost nothing. Give anything an hour on skin before you decide, including something you think you dislike.

You pick five 10ml bottles in one format and pay a flat price for the box, which works out cheaper than five bottles bought separately. Eau de parfum and perfume oil are separate boxes, because they are separate products.

Build a bundle and the builder does the arithmetic in front of you.

A custom blend you brief in your own words: Make your own fragrance.

The important part, and we will keep saying it: the composer selects from formulas Next Fragrance has already blended and tested. It never invents an untested combination and calls it yours. A machine that mixes something nobody has smelled is not a fragrance house, it is a gamble with your money.

The composer preview on that page is a demonstration of how the briefing works, and it is labelled as one. A real order is confirmed with Next Fragrance before anything is blended.

Yes, but talk to us early. A run of one scent is not a run we hold on the shelf, and lead time is the thing that catches people out. Start at become a stockist, which covers gifting as well as retail.

Adelaide, South Australia. Everything is composed, blended, packed and dispatched from here, and we sell direct rather than across a department store counter, which is where the difference in price comes from.

More about Next Fragrance.

Yes. Where and when is on the store locator, with opening hours.

If you are making the trip for one scent in particular, email first and we will check it is on the shelf that day.

Yes, and they are verified through Okendo rather than typed by us. We publish them in the customer's own words, including the ones that are not flattering.

A product with no reviews yet shows no star rating at all, rather than borrowing an average from somewhere else. If you see stars, someone left them.

Please write to us. What to send and what happens next is on become a stockist.

Email support@nextfragrance.com. It is read by the people who blend and pack the fragrance, not by a queue.

Or use the form on the contact page. Either way, telling us your order number, or a fragrance you already wear and like, gets you a better first answer.