Many of us have probably experienced this before. You smell a perfume in a store and it feels better, more mature, fuller, and the performance is also quite good. Then you buy the perfume, open the box, and from the very first spray you realize that it does not smell the same as the one you tried in the store. It feels like something is off. On top of that, when you spray it on yourself and go outside, you may also notice something strange about the performance. So is this real? Yes, this is 100% real and normal. Perfumes have their own maturation (same as resting). The bottles we smell in stores are sprayed every day, so they have already had time to rest, and both their scent maturity and performance have largely settled. If you want to learn more about resting a perfume, you can check my Maceration & Resting a Bottle entry in the Wearing Fragrance section. Long story short, if your perfume does not have a batch issue, there is probably nothing wrong with it. It will open up over time.