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For years, the advice for making perfume last longer has been quite rudimentary: apply a little Vaseline to your wrists before spraying the fragrance. On TikTok, one video that directly mixed melted Vaseline with perfume garnered over 96 million views, but now the beauty industry has decided to refine the trick. After makeup primer comes perfume primer, a new category that promises to prepare the skin so the scent lasts longer.
The idea is simple. These are fragrance-free products applied before perfume that create a more favorable surface for the aromatic molecules to adhere to and release more slowly. Obart recently launched Fragrance Primer P3 at Sephora; Future Society offers Optimal Habitat, and House of Bö has been selling Nourishing Parfum Primer since 2021. Even Chanel developed fragrance primers in 2025, linked to Coco Mademoiselle and Gabrielle. This isn't exactly a new idea.
"The industry has always focused on longevity from within the bottle: concentration, fixatives, formula. No one had addressed the other half of the equation: the skin," explains Marc-Alexandre Risch, co-founder and CEO of Obart, to BeautyMatter. Their P3 fragrance aims to do just that.
The formula incorporates low molecular weight hyaluronic acid, glycerin, niacinamide, and panthenol to hydrate and strengthen the skin barrier, along with a technology that creates a microscopic film on the stratum corneum. The fragrance is then deposited on top of this film.
It's important to clarify this point because it's where much of the difference between a reasonable explanation and an exaggerated cosmetic promise lies. The first shouldn't "seal" the perfume, because we need its molecules to reach the air to be able to smell them. What it aims to do is provide a surface to which the molecules can attach and from which they are released more gradually. "The mesh acts as a reservoir that regulates the release," explains Risch. In other words, the goal isn't to prevent evaporation, but rather to try to slow it down.