Complimentary Samples & Review Requests

Spiritus Florum is a tiny independent perfume house. I make every fragrance by hand in small batches, so only a handful of complimentary samples are set aside from each one.

Perfumery is an economy of scale. Big brands can buy materials by the kilo and bottles by the thousand, then mix and fill perfume on production lines where the bottles whizz around like a giant sniffy ballet. I don't, so many of my materials, bottles and boxes cost far more per unit.

For example, the white rose absolute I use for Magdalene costs £56 per gram at the quantity I can realistically buy. At 100 g, it falls to about £17 per gram — nearly 70% less — but that quantity costs more than £1,700 upfront. I've also been quoted more than £5 for a single printed box, before the bottle, cap, label or perfume goes anywhere near it.

So when you see videos claiming that a perfume costs £5 to make, that may sometimes be possible at industrial scale, but it isn't true here. I'm not a grand French maison 😊, and I don't have counter drawers full of free samples. That would be fab — I'd really love to do that one day. But alas, 'tis not this day.

I'm old enough to remember when department stores handed out perfume samples with a bit of abandon, so I understand why a brand that doesn't send one free on request can seem a little stingy. And I know some of you are big collectors who love your scent mail. 😊 But I'm simply too small to absorb the product, postage and packaging costs of general free sampling.

That's why the sample-credit programme exists instead: if you try Rhapsody in Violet and decide you want the full bottle, your sample purchase can be credited towards it.

The small number of review samples I have are reserved for active UK-based creators with an established history of fragrance-focused content. If that's you, please include links to your fragrance content when you get in touch. I may ask you to message me from that account so I can verify the request.

If I've run out, I may ask — with your permission — to keep your details on file so I can send one from a future batch.

Review samples are 2 ml retail sprays. There's never any expectation of a positive review, and gifted products should be disclosed as such.