I ran the numbers last week. Not because I wanted to, but because a thought that had been circling for months finally landed and demanded arithmetic. The question was simple: how much did I spend on fragrance in 2025?

The answer was £2,573.

I sat with that figure for a while. Individual purchases had felt modest — a bottle here, a sample set there, the occasional limited release that seemed unreasonable to miss. Each transaction was small enough to file under "affordable pleasure." Collectively, over twelve months, they added up to something I hadn't authorised in any conscious way. Roughly £215 a month, distributed so evenly across the year that no single month looked alarming.

Here is what made the number sting. The Exposure 2510 integrated amplifier I wrote about recently retails for approximately £2,100. A Chord ClearwayX ARAY speaker cable to connect it properly costs £155. Together: £2,255. I spent £318 more than that on fragrance — a collection of volatile compounds designed, by definition, to evaporate.

The contrast isn't about one category being more worthy than the other. I've written about fragrance with genuine enthusiasm and I stand by most of those purchases as individual decisions. The problem is the pattern. Diffuse spending, distributed across months in amounts too small to trigger scrutiny, accumulating into a total that could have funded something durable and transformative. The amplifier would sit on my shelf for a decade or more, improving every listening session. The fragrances are half- used bottles in a drawer, some of which I've already forgotten I own.

Behavioural economists have a term for this: the aggregation problem. The tendency to evaluate purchases individually rather than as a portfolio. Each £40 bottle passes the "can I afford this?" test. The aggregate fails the "is this how I want to allocate resources?" test. I never asked the second question because I never saw the total. The spending was incremental, and incrementalism is invisible by design.

What makes this particularly pointed is that I don't regret the Cambridge Audio CXN I bought the year before. That purchase was deliberate, researched, and has delivered daily utility ever since. It was a focused allocation toward a defined goal. The fragrance spending was the opposite — undirected, reactive, driven by novelty rather than need. One approach left me with something I use every day. The other left me with a number that made me wince.

So I'm making a correction. No fragrance purchases until November. No full bottles, no samples, no limited edition exceptions. The money that would have gone there gets redirected into a dedicated fund. Nine months at £215 gives me roughly £1,935. Ten months reaches £2,150. Enough for the amplifier without strain, without borrowing, without the quiet self-reproach that follows impulsive spending.

The environmental controls matter as much as the rule itself. I've unsubscribed from fragrance marketing emails. I've stopped browsing retailer sites during idle moments. Saved carts and wishlists have been cleared. These aren't dramatic gestures — they're the removal of triggers. Most discretionary spending doesn't begin with a decision. It begins with exposure. An email lands, a page loads, a new release appears in a feed. The desire follows the stimulus, not the other way around. Cutting the stimulus is easier than resisting the desire.

I'm aware this reads like a resolution, and resolutions have a poor track record. But I think the difference here is specificity. I'm not vowing to "spend less" or "be more mindful." I'm redirecting a quantified amount toward a defined object on a fixed timeline. The success metric isn't discipline in the abstract — it's whether, come November, I can make a purchase decision calmly, from a position of having already funded it, without urgency or compensation psychology.

The shift I'm after is structural. From impulse accumulation to deliberate, single-track funding of something that will last. From a drawer of diminishing bottles to a piece of engineering that will outlive everything in it.

Some things are meant to evaporate. Budgets shouldn't be one of them.