Can You Judge a Fragrance on First Spray?

ABSOLUTELY NOT. If you are smelling a fragrance with depth, you should never judge it only by the opening, and it would not really be fair anyway because the scent will probably change after 5 minutes. Of course, this kind of change does not happen with every perfume, it happens more with layered and evolving fragrances, but no matter what, you can never fully understand a perfume the moment you spray it. Even putting everything else aside, some perfumes can give off a strong alcohol smell at first, so you should always wait a little. Another reason is that a perfume is a whole made up of its opening, middle, and dry-down. If you judge a perfume the moment you spray it, you are basically judging only one third of the fragrance. What's more, the opening of a perfume usually does not last much longer than 5 minutes, while the dry-down lasts much longer and is basically how the fragrance ends. So if you dislike the first 5 minutes of a perfume that you might absolutely love in the dry-down and that, let's say, lasts for 10 hours, you would basically be throwing away the whole fragrance just because you did not like those first 5 minutes.