Scent Trunk: $15/month, 3 perfume samples
Promo: sign up for their mailing list and save 20% off your first box
I paid: $7.50 with expired promo
Box value: $9, My value: $9*
Scent Trunk is a Canadian subscription box that sends you three perfume samples a month. It offers versions for both men and women and ships free to America. The samples are mostly from niche brands, many are only sold by the perfume line exclusively. Scent Trunk mails every week, so you will get your first box approximately a week after you subscribe.
When you subscribe they ask you to fill out a questionnaire to determine what type of fragrances you like. If you know what you like, you can skip this part and go to a page that allows you to rate how much you like specific scent families. The Scent Trunk team will chose samples for you based on your scent preferences. When I first filled out the questionnaire, it actually got my preferences backwards (it thought I liked orientals, but didn’t like citrus), fortunately I noticed and was able to change this (go to “update my scent profile” to do this) – so make sure you double check that Scent Trunk gets your preferences right.
The perfume samples come in a little velveteen bag inside a small box. Scent Trunk also includes a card for each perfume with info on the perfume, its notes, longevity, sillage and when to wear it.
Scent Trunk knocked it out of the park with their curation of my first box. I had said I loved green, citrus and water fragrances, followed by fruity, soft floral and floral. I rated all other scent families low. The three samples I got fit my preferences perfeclty and I absolutely love them. The three are very similar in their notes, a combination of citruses and flowers (mostly jasmine, my favorite floral); they are fresh and perfect for summer. But they are utterly distinct from each other, both in their scents and in the sensations they evoke. If you’ve read my perfume reviews before, you know I’m not usually this romantic about scents, but these ones played with more than my scent buds.
This is what came in my box:
Pink Peony Eau de Parfum by Note, 2 ml, $2.5 value (1 oz, $42/5 ml sample, $6)
I absolutely love this perfume. It’s a sweet, flirty, uncomplicated floral. It smells like sweetened iced flower garden fruit tea. You should wear this perfume with a flowy cotton dress while walking on an esplanade. It’s a very young scent and yet something in it, the bergamot no doubt, makes it appropriate for someone much older.
Darcy by Parfums de Marly, 1.2 ml, $4.5 value (2.5 oz, $200-275)
This is a Nordstroms exclusive and one of the most expensive perfumes I’ve ever worn. It retails for $275 for a 2.5 oz bottle (though it’s available on Amazon
With time, both male and female merge and create something new. On my skin, this new scent smells fresh, clean and natural. It’s the sort of scent that smells like it could be your real scent (at least after eating some sweet oranges). It is both inviting and comforting. This is a perfume that makes me think of summer gatherings in the patio of my grandparents’ country house. Truly, if I could afford a whole bottle I would just wear it all the time, and layer anything else on top of this (though only after it has achieved the latter stage).
Beware of how much you apply, though. I did three sprays (neck and wrists), and it was overwhelming for this perfume. On the plus side, I finally got some sillage out of a perfume (I mostly seem to absorb them lately), on the minus side it gave me a headache.
Falling into the Sea by Imaginary Authors, 1.2 ml?, $2 value (2 oz, $85)
Imaginary authors creates perfumes based on never-written novels by nonexistent authors. Falling into the Sea is supposed to be a romance tragedy that takes place in a Mediterranean island. It smells just like it. Indeed, to me, this scent smelled like a Lawrence Durrell novel, and I have never even read one. It smells like late in the afternoon at the beach, after the crowds have gone and you are left reclining on your beach chair, with your eyes closed behind your sunglasses, relaxing for just a little bit longer while absentmindedly hearing the seagulls battling over scraps. You take a deep breath and smell the sea and the sand, your own sweat mixed with the suntan lotion you applied hours before, the discarded peels, slowly decomposing, from those oranges you ate at lunch and forgot about. The scents don’t quite come together, but they elicit the flavor of an oakey California chardonnay in the back of your mouth. You smell this perfume.
I’m really in awe of this perfumier and would love to try his other scents.
While I loved the perfumes, I was not happy with the size of the samples I got. They were described by Scent Trunk as “generously sized” and “deluxe,” but they were basically the regular size perfume samples you get nowadays. For comparison sake, I posed the 3 Scent Trunk samples with the 8 ml atomizer that Scentbird sends out and a 1.5 ml Harvey Prince Yogini sample that I got in my April Birchbox. While Scent Trunk does say that the samples contain between 1.5 and 3 ml, it assures that put together the samples will be enough to last you for a whole month. The samples I got ranged from 1.2 ml to 2 ml, and added up to about 4.5 ml altogether. They had a combined value of about $9. While that’s great for my first box, as I got it at a discount, the value itself is well below the regular cost of the box ($15).
The real question then is whether the curation is worth the price. For me, right now, it’s not. I don’t want to just sample perfumes, I want to wear them. A 1.2 ml sample doesn’t allow me to do so. But I also don’t want to buy a 30 or 60 ml bottle of expensive perfume, knowing that I’ll never get close to using it.
What I would love is if Scent Trunk and Scentbird could combine their models. If Scent Trunk was able to send larger samples (let’s say, 2.5 ml each) OR have a model that would allow subscribers to buy an 8-10 ml atomizer of a perfume they sampled for something like $5-10, or if Scentbird widened its collection to include scents like the ones reviewed here and fine tuned its recommendation system to work as well as Scent Trunk’s, I’d resubscribe to either.
* The box value is the value of all the products included in the box. My value is the value of the products that my family and I will actually use. I’m happy if my value is at least as high as what I paid for the box.