wrist rubbing? Mystery solved

We’ve heard countless times that you shouldn’t rub your wrists together after spritzing them with fragrance.

“You’ll bruise the molecules,” is the popular and provocative wisdom.

And although we’ve encouraged others not to rub in the past, we got to wondering if this was really true or some sort of urban myth.So we did some reading. We landed on this expert advice from Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez in their fragrance bible, Perfumes: The Guide (Viking/Penguin, 2008).

“It is no trouble to lightly spread the fragrance evenly about,” writes Sanchez. “What’s not good is to go grinding away. What you’ll do is heat up the fragrance so much that much of the scent will evaporate away before its time.

“When you smell it, it will probably be a sad shadow of what it is supposed to be, and you certainly will be missing the top notes.”

So there you go. Mystery solved. Spray but don’t rub.